Benazir Bhutto returned to Karachi today, flying in from Dubai to greet large crowds of supporters.
One is often cynical about Pakistani politics, but it seems to me this is a hopeful event. A lot of things have changed since Bhutto left eight years ago, and I suspect if she ever does return to power she will do things differently than she did earlier. In the short run, of course, she will be an opposition leader, and will have to contend with both President Musharraf and a not-always-sympathetic Supreme Court.
There are, of course, people who doubt this is going anywhere. One such is Adrian Levy, who has a scathing account of the evolution of Bhutto’s power-sharing agreement at Comment is Free (at the Guardian):
The deal-making continued in earnest in early 2007, propelled by Musharraf’s weakening position. Aziz and General Kiani returned to see Bhutto again in March with a dangerous proposal. If she stayed away from Pakistan during the general election, Musharraf would “adjust the vote” to favour her party. He was offering to rig the election. Bhutto refused. Instead, she penned 36 demands, including the freeing of all political workers and a transparent election, but also indemnity from all personal criminal actions, as well as a change to the law preventing anyone from serving as prime minister for three terms.
By the end of September, with her conditions met, Bhutto was presented with Musharraf’s terms. If she won the election, she would agree to support him as a civilian president for his full five-year term and cede all responsibility for foreign affairs, internal and external security, the country’s WMD programme and its armed services to him. Given that the opaque military also fixed its budget, that left Bhutto’s prospective new government with a paltry number of low-octane domestic portfolios that revolved around the gritty municipal functions of government (including education and health). All very worthy, but not where power in Pakistan lies.
For the increasingly difficult-to-read Pakistan military, this deal, which Bhutto’s return today highlights, spells salvation, continuity and prosperity. Since Musharraf came to power in 1999, the armed services have acquired spectacular wealth, investing in everything from the asphalt people drive on, to the petrol they put in their tanks. They also control the equivalent to 12% of the total landmass of Pakistan, of which only 70,000 acres is set aside for military facilities. The other 12m acres have been turned into private farmland and individual estates for Musharraf’s key generals, making them millionaires. Musharraf, too. Although he officially lives for free in Army House, in Rawalpindi, on a salary of $1,400 a month, he has somehow acquired a real-estate portfolio worth $10m. (link)
A cynic could argue that there’s a problem if laws have to be changed in order for “democracy” to return.
A cynic could also argue that Musharraf will still pull all the important strings.
A cynic could argue that the Supreme Court should throw both Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf out of office.
A cynic could argue those things. (But I wouldn’t, not today; I’m trying to be optimistic!)
[Update: A few hours after I posted this, a massive bomb went off near Bhutto’s convoy, killing hundreds of people. Her earlier statement about not being afraid of would-be-terrorists now begins to seem in poor taste: “… Ms Bhutto said before leaving that she was undeterred [by threats of attacks]: “I do not believe that any true Muslim will make an attack on me because Islam forbids attacks on women and Muslims know that if they attack a woman they will burn in hell.”
One wishes, now, that she hadn’t made such an irresponsible statement.]
In Karachi people are robbed routinely out of their mobile phones, cash and jewelry. Few months ago when one’s motor cycle got stolen you just need to go to MQM sector in charge pay him few thousand and violla your motor cycle is back. Half of the educational Institutes are under control of JI student wing. They play a moral police role there doing routine jobs, like avoiding situations where girls and boys don’t sit together, talk, while they congregate in mosque and count their weapons. Police men being mostly out of city or province are still outsiders and we don’t tell our short comings to strangers. BTW even if we do their weapons are from previous century.
Yes, man eating tigers are roaming the streets of Gulshan-E-Iqbal and hobos have taken over Clifton.
The center left PPP is probably the only political party in Pakistan with an actual support base in the masses and a loyal cadre of party workers.
Well, yeah…because we Pakistanis support political parties like people support sports teams. It’s all very tribalisitic and has no basis in any kind of political track record. So the PPP’s popular support says nothing about the quality of the party, instead only underlining how the uneducated masses are manipulated by all the thieving megalomaniacs who “govern” Pakistan.
Yes, man eating tigers are roaming the streets of Gulshan-E-Iqbal and hobos have taken over Clifton.
I would laugh if it wasn’t so true – my parents live in PECHS and one of our neighbor’s definitely had a pet LION. Not in a cage but it just sat on the little lawn outside their boundary wall, attached to a flimsy leash. It also got loose 2-3 times. No one could make them get rid of it until it went after its keeper.
chachaji (#93), thanks. That was a great list.
Oops! Sorry about that. OTOH, the author is called Haqqani. 😉
Indeed – although you will also find a significant web presence for husain huqqani, which also refers to him.
I would also add – the annotated memoirs of Ayub Khan – edited by Craig Baxter, and his own autobiography – Friends, Not Masters – a memoir of the Zia era by General K.M. Arif, who was his right hand man till 1984, and of course, Musharraf’s own autobiography for a more personal look at three different periods of the Pakistan Army in politics through the eyes of the principal player in each period.
I read Cloughley a few years ago, along with Cohen (Pakistan Army) – but the other Cohen book and all the other books within the last year and half!
To blame Benazir for the incident falls in the category of “blaming the victimâ€. Are we now saying that if a popular leader should gather a large crowd in Pakistan and the nihilists and their manipulators bomb them, then it’s not the nihilists but the victims who are to blame? Whether Benazir was moving too slow or too fast is besides the point. She was back in her own country. Hundreds of thousands of people had come to welcome her…and this was no rent-a-crowd. Certainly, money must have been spent to bring them there, but their enthusiasm and love for the Bhutto name was obvious. People were dancing in the streets and music and songs were being played instead of bullets and bombs and its a terrible travesty to blame them or their leaders for this massacre.
The issue of security is not one of “foolproof†cordons and other such excuses. People forget that in a functional state, the major deterrent to such actions is the fact that no violent organizations can exist, plan and attack without exciting the interest of law-enforcement; if they do attack, they are vigorously pursued and dealt with and finally, they are not being supported and manipulated by elements of the state itself. In Pakistan, such organizations were encouraged and abetted by the “forward thinking†army. For the last 6 years, they have been officially banned, but no doubt has been left about the fact that this “ban†is ambiguous and loaded with exceptions and loopholes. Doubts about the sincerity of senior members of the intelligence agencies are widespread. In this atmosphere, attacks are easily assumed to have the blessings of one or the other faction in the power structure. There is little or no trust and little chance that the whole story will ever be known.
A good start would be to compare the situation in India. The various terrorist groups frequently articulate real grievances and have real support among some people. The intelligence agencies and security services in India are more unwieldy and decrepit than their Pakistani counterparts and are probably equally corrupt in terms of individual corruption. But there is no doubt about the state’s DESIRE to stop terrorists from various jihadi and separatist groups. That simple “unity of purpose†leads to the fact that a significant proportion of outrages is actually investigated and many perpetrators are actually caught. The system is very rickety, almost pre-industrial and highly inefficient and certainly cannot stop all outrages but it still delivers better results than the Pakistani system. In spite of years of terrorism and poor policing, politicians in India can still hold rallies and people can still gather in large numbers without “foolproof securityâ€â€¦â€¦Compare that to Pakistan, where the sitting government (in the form of Sheikh Rashid) is saying it probably cannot afford a true election campaign because large crowds are easy targets? (being a pessimist, I have to add that if things fall apart further in Pakistan, they will no doubt get worse in India as well, so I wouldn’t count my chickens yet if I were Indian).
Benazir is not the issue. The destruction of state authority and legitimacy and its replacement by a shadow military state which is not under the control of even its own chief is the real issue.
Omar, you argue your point extremely well.
Many possibilities about what happened and who was involved are still being weighed by the investigating agencies.
One of the really surprizing things I’ve noticed is that many people believe that state intelligence agencies could have organized the attack on Benazir, instead of, say, Islamic militants.
People are even speculating that it is too much of a coincidence that she happened to be in the interior of the heavily armored truck just when the attacks happened.
Others have pointed out that the attack, whoever organized it, has enhanced her standing among the electorate, because she is seen as having stood up to ‘them’, and if ‘they’ wanted her gone, she must have been planning to go after ‘them’.
Given such speculation about motivations and political gains, the different parties are trying to spin the event to their own advantage, including, of course, Benazir herself.
I agree that the overall political situation in Pakistan, and the existence of various ‘agencies’, the state within a state, etc, takes a lot of the blame. But nobody can be absolved beforehand, and nobody has a monopoly on callousness.
( “Given such speculation about motivations and political gains, the different parties are trying to spin the event ( to their own advantage, including, of course, Benazir herself.”
chachaji, I
d say that the death of Benazir Bhutto has now altered the guessing game of Who spins what & why?. One things for sure…It was extremists who killed her…but what type of extremists remains uncertain. Though it`s said that she was Pro-American…she had few good things, if any, to say of the current U.S. & or Pakistani Administrations. The most tragic part of this event is that the truth of her intent will never have a chance to be proved or disproved.IMHO… Whether the extremists/militants be in Pakistan or in the U.S…the extremists/militants are our leaders. The sad truth of our world situation is all people of the world are left to prey on eachother by its own leaders.