Pakistan, 2008: the beckoning abyss

David Seaton's News Links

In common speech, "nightmarish" often means to clearly see what is tragic and dreaded coming and not be able to do anything stop it or to even soften its effects. In nightmares the dreamer sees the unnameable approach, rustling and twittering in the dark of bedroom night and tries to escape, dragging impossibly leaden feet. The relentless pull of gravity toward the object of dread is the stuff of nightmares.

As we enter the inauspicious year of 2008 the situation in Pakistan could be fairly called "nightmarish". We are being daily drawn deeper into a cauldron of molten misery and an abattoir of hemorrhaging violence: a civil war in a country where there are atom bombs and where the men who broke the skyline of New York live and work.

Benazir Bhutto's death, in itself, is not in any way the end of the world. Corrupt and intriguing, she was no Joan of Arc... or the real solution to anything. What is significant about her assassination is the will to chaos that it manifests and the casual ease with which it was carried out. That will to chaos and its clockwork precision of execution is certainly not going to stop at eliminating one politician. In the butchering of Benazir Bhutto we begin to see the tragic and futile waste of lives, political capital and military power of invading and occupying Iraq. Now when they might be needed desperately, that capital, those lives, that power and the will to use them may no longer be at hand.

Because at some point a decision is going to have to be taken... Pakistan with its atomic bombs, home away from home for Osama bin Laden, cannot be allowed to turn into a "failed state"... I use the passive tense "cannot be allowed", but somebody is finally going to have to bell the cat and that cannot be done in the passive tense. If the situation continues to deteriorate, and who imagines it won't, "surgical strikes" and "special forces" are not going to be enough, it would require a multinational force of hundreds of thousands of men to take, occupy and literally smother anarchy and rebuild a collapsed state of many millions of citizens. This would surely require a return to universal military service in both the USA and NATO in order to pull off. At this point I feel I am writing political fiction. After Iraq an effort of such magnitude is unthinkable.

As I write these words, I can feel how even the language necessary to describe the action which may finally be inevitable, may have become impossible to use through the neocon-speak travesty of Iraq. All the sophistries and bad faith used to needlessly invade Iraq and to unjustifiably try to start a war with Iran have emptied the credibility from American speech so that every statement coming from Washington rings with the sinister cynicism of "arbeit macht frei". If someday 9-11 becomes little more than a curious footnote to much greater tragedies, the men and women who gutted the language and credibility of power will be responsible for every drop of blood shed. DS

Al-Qaeda aims at Pakistan's heart - Asia Times
Abstract: Following the killing of Bhutto - considered by her al-Qaeda killers to be an "American asset" - al-Qaeda can be expected to launch more suicide attackers on those considered a part of the United States plan to establish a broad coalition government comprising secular and liberal elements that would change the political and social dynamics of the country and the region. At stake is the very soul of the country and how it should be governed. On the one side are US-backed President Pervez Musharraf and political parties such as Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (now headed by her 19-year-old son Bilawal) and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League. Against them are al-Qaeda ideologues such as Egyptian scholar Sheikh Essa, who are determined to stamp their vision on the country and its neighbor, Afghanistan. Prior to 2003, the entire al-Qaeda camp in the North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan was convinced that its battle should be fought in Afghanistan against the foreign troops there, and not in Pakistan against its Muslim army. That stance was changed by Sheikh Essa, who had taken up residence in the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, where his sermons raised armies of takfiris (those who consider all non-practicing Muslims to be infidels). He was convinced that unless Pakistan became the Taliban's (and al-Qaeda's) strategic depth, the war in Afghanistan could not be won. In a matter of a few years, his ideology has taken hold and all perceived American allies in Pakistan have become prime targets. Local adherents of the takfiri ideology, like Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq, have grown strong and spread the word in North Waziristan. Former members of jihadi outfits such as Jaish-i-Mohammed, Laskhar-i-Toiba and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi have gathered in North Waziristan and declared Sheikh Essa their ideologue. This is the beginning of the new world of takfiriat, reborn in North Waziristan many decades after having first emerged in Egypt in the late 1960s. On the advice of Sheikh Essa, militants have tried several times to assassinate Musharraf, launched attacks on the Pakistani military, and then declared Bhutto a target. This nest of takfiris and their intrigues was on the radar of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the day after Bhutto's killing Sheikh Essa was targeted by CIA Predator drones in his home in North Waziristan. According to Asia Times Online contacts, he survived, but was seriously wounded. Sheikh Essa had only recently recovered from a stroke which had left him bedridden. READ IT ALL

Blown away... a tribute

David Seaton's News Links
There are very few beautiful people in politics... Sarkozy and Bush are about par for the course... Benazir Bhutto was movie star beautiful... till the day she died.

People I have known, who knew her personally, have told me that she irradiated energy and intelligence... Beautiful, intelligent and energetic people are in short supply.

And she was bullfighter brave, as tough as a boot, as mean as a snake and, by most reliable reports, as crooked as a dog's hind leg. Oh well, like Joe E. Brown once said to Tony Curtis, "nobody's perfect".

She was a "dead woman walking" from the day she went back home. As far as I can see she was sent back to Pakistan and a sure death by Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush, simply in order to try to save something of their post White House speaking careers.

Certainly as intelligent, energetic, brave and mean as she was she had no chance of ever bringing Pakistan under control. Maybe even the Pakistani Army is losing it. Tragedy is when you know something terrible is going to happen and can do nothing to stop it. Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan are tragic, perhaps America is too.

When the United States imported Wahhabi Islam into South Asia from Saudi Arabia, they sealed the fate of that region... and perhaps the fate of some American city someday, God forbid. DS

Conspiracy theories abound over Benazir Bhutto slaying - Haaretz
Abstract: The most astounding aspect of Thursday's events is the negligence displayed by Bhutto's security detail. According to reports, the assassin managed to approach Bhutto and position himself within a short distance of her, before proceeding to shoot her and detonate the explosives with which he was strapped. Not only did the assassin want to cause maximum casualties, but he also hoped that authorities would later be unable to identify him and thus ascertain which organization he was working for. What makes the security failure all the more startling is the fact that it comes just weeks after the first assassination attempt following Bhutto's return to Pakistan from a lengthy political exile. In the attempt, suicide bombers killed 150 people, although Bhutto escaped unharmed. Under these circumstances, it was chiefly incumbent on her security guards to do all in their power to prevent direct access to her, even during the course of an election campaign in which a candidate seeks to come into contact with the public. One can make the claim - and some already have - that foreign agents of countries in conflict with Pakistan (re: India) orchestrated the assassination so as to create chaos and to create an image of a country that is unstable and unreliable. READ IT ALL

The bad and beautiful Benazir Bhutto

David Seaton's News Links
Benazir Bhutto may very well be the most beautiful politician to have ever lived (not a very beautiful bunch, I'll admit) However, make no mistake, she is a very nasty piece of work.

She is totally corrupt by all reliable accounts and to consider her some sort of democratic alternative to military rule is naive if not purely cynical. As in most of the Muslim world today a truly democratic process would probably produce an outcome unacceptable to the "west", that is to say, to the USA and what the Maoists used to call our "running dogs". (What a useful term "running dogs", much better than "poodle", why did it ever disappear, I wonder?)

The fact is that under intense American pressure there are no "viable alternatives" for Pakistan. Things are bad enough in that misbegotten (in the most literal sense of being defective from birth, thanks to the British) land, without American meddling. DS

Aunt Benazir's false promises - Los Angeles Times
Abstract: Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she's saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she'd like to make a deal with his opponents -- but still, she says, she's the savior of democracy. The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law.(...) It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to bypass the courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face her in Pakistan. He agreed, creating the odiously titled National Reconciliation Ordinance in order to do so. Her collaboration with him was so unsubtle that people on the streets are now calling her party, the Pakistan People's Party, the Pervez People's Party. Now she might like to distance herself, but it's too late. Why did Ms. Bhutto and her party cronies demand that her corruption cases be dropped, but not demand that the cases of activists jailed during the brutal regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq (from 1977 to 1988) not be quashed? What about the sanctity of the law? When her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto -- my father -- returned to Pakistan in 1993, he faced 99 cases against him that had been brought by Zia's military government. The cases all carried the death penalty. Yet even though his sister was serving as prime minister, he did not ask her to drop the cases. He returned, was arrested at the airport and spent the remaining years of his life clearing his name, legally and with confidence, in the courts of Pakistan. Ms. Bhutto's repeated promises to end fundamentalism and terrorism in Pakistan strain credulity because, after all, the Taliban government that ran Afghanistan was recognized by Pakistan under her last government -- making Pakistan one of only three governments in the world to do so. And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets. My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority. READ IT ALL