A Study in Chaos in Pakistan
Former Prime Minister Bhutto, a powerful opposition leader, is assassinated
The woman who served as Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister is dead. Benazir Bhutto was shot twice by a man who mixed in with the crowd at a rally. The assassin then blew himself up, killing at least 20 other people. Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan from eight years of political exile only months ago, was shot as she stood up through the sunroof of a car in which she was leaving the rally to respond to cheering supporters in the city of Rawalpindi. She was sped to a hospital and pronounced dead about an hour later
Now, Pakistanis who are not questioning who the authors of the attack were believe they already know: the three main suspects, as the people see it, are either President Pervez Musharraf, or terrorists belonging to al-Qaida or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban. Both groups of Islamic extremists, and others of their ilk, hated Bhutto for her close ties to the United States and support for the war on terrorism. But the violence that erupted in all Pakistan’s major cities at the news of her death seemed to be targeted primarily at Musharraf. Bhutto and other opposition leaders criticized the President’s imposition of emergency rule, which lasted from November third to December 15th. During that time, thousands were arrested, many, it’s alleged, simply for being opponents of Musharraf. Supreme Court justices were fired and Musharraf took over the armed forces, a role he relinquished in December and a key opposition demand.
It was not the first attack on the former Prime Minister. Bhutto was the target of a suicide bombing during her homecoming parade on October 18th. 140 people died in that attack, but Bhutto was not injured and clearly not cowed. Between 1988 and 1996, Benazir Bhutto served twice as Pakistan’s Prime Minister and was expected to do well in crucial parliamentary elections scheduled for a scant 12 days from now. They have been thrown into chaos by Bhutto’s assassination, and President Musharraf has talked about possibly postponing them until his government can meet with opposition leaders to see what should be done. Bhutto was at the top of the Pakistan People’s Party, the nation’s largest.
Earlier in the day, violence between supporters of another opposition leader and those of Musharraf left four dead, and it would be all too easy to deduce, as many Pakistanis have, that the President was behind Bhutto’s assassination. But that is a hasty and thoughtless reaction. Musharraf would certainly have known what to expect when Bhutto was murdered, and it does him no political good that I can see. Quite the opposite. The question becomes the classic qui bono?
A local Taliban leader reportedly was heard talking about suicide bombings aimed at Bhutto. With both al-Qaida and the Taliban holed up in the mountainous no-man’s land of northwest Pakistan, how hard would it be to infiltrate a mass rally? One of the remarkable things about Bhutto’s murder is that the assassin either foresaw that she would rise through the top of her car to respond to supporters, or he got lucky and took his shot. There is no way of knowing, at this point anyway, what the original plan was. But it is one of the aims of terrorists to create chaos and an atmosphere of lawlessness and violence which they can exploit. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto certainly achieved that end. Who knows where it will stop?
The Bush Administration has condemned the assassination; Wall Street, which abhors instability, reacted negatively and oil prices rose on the news. Not so many years agi, I attended a news conference as a reporter in Los Angeles at which then Prime Minister Bhutto spoke. It was shortly after Pakistan became a nuclear-armed nation and the big fear was warfare between India and the Pakistanis over border and other disputes. Daunting as that prospect was, it has a certain air of naivete’ about it now. I remember her as a gentle, soft-spoken woman, whose perfect English was the product of education at Oxford and Harvard Universities. Her death is a blow to Pakistan, the United States and the entire peaceable world. It also is a great tragedy. There will be the devil to pay before the situation is sorted out.
