The assassination of Benazir Bhutto demonstrated again how mistaken President Bush and his foreign policy advisors have been in their dealings with Pakistan’s autocratic President, General Pervez Musharraf, and with the opponents to his regime.
After al-Qaida’s attack on the United States, Mr. Bush rightly tried to eradicate the terrorist conspiracy and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan; but he failed to complete the campaign and pacify the region. The hostile groups temporarily either melted into the native population or retreated into Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier, the mountainous territory on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
Mr. Bush seemed so impressed by General Musharraf’s performance and promise that he wanted him as a key ally in the war against the anti-Western Muslim militants. Ironically, the U.S. actively contributed to preserving Musharraf’s one-man rule in Pakistan while ordering. a “shock and awe” assault on Iraq to remove dictator Saddam Hussein.
According to The New York Times, since 2001 the U.S. has given Musharraf’s regime at least $5 billion in military aid to fight al-Qaeda and its allies along the border with Afghanistan. The effort has been lackluster, however, because of the strong popular sympathies in Pakistan for anti-Western militants.
Over 70 percent of Pakistan’s 162 million people--97 percent of them Muslims--are estimated to oppose the U.S. presence in the region. For over 100 years Pakistanis chafed under British colonial rule. They emphatically sided with the mujaheddeen when Russians invaded Afghanistan. Now many Pakistanis, particularly the tribes in the northwest, are either hostile or noncommittal toward American demands for Pakistani support against Muslim militants.
Worse yet, political leaders, such as Musharraf and Bhutto, who developed close ties with Britain and the U.S., encountered popular hostility. In December 2003 General Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1998, was the target of two assassination attempts in eleven days.
On October 19, when Bhutto’s returned to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile, an attack on her motorcade in Karachi killed 136 people. On December 27 she was killed in Rawalpindi's Liaquat Bagh Park, named for Pakistan's first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan who was assassinated in the same location in 1951.
A Shi’ite educated at Ratcliffe College and Oxford University, Mrs. Bhutto was well assimilated to Anglo-American culture. After she joined her father as a political advisor in 1967, her political confrontations led to numerous arrests. She spent nearly six years either in prison or under detention, before in 1988 she was sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan to become the first woman to head the government of an Islamic state.
Her return to Pakistan was strongly promoted by the Bush administration when it grew increasingly uncomfortable with the dictatorial Musharraf regime. As leader of Pakistan’s most popular political party, Bhutto was viewed as the most suitable prime minister under President Musharraf in an “alliance of moderation” that was to be touted as a “democracy.” The two, however, never liked each other. It was a fallacy, moreover, to believe that democratic government could be restored on orders of an autocrat and under military control. Many Pakistanis also resented that this scheme had been scripted in Washington.
After her death, Musharraf’s supporters were quick to blame
the murder on al-Qaeda even though it issued a denial. It is much more likely that the attack was masterminded by anti-democratic opponents of Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party because in the next parliamentary election it was likely to prevail easily over Musharraf’s Pakistan Muslim League.
With Bhutto gone, The Washington Post reported that U.S. special forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan as part of an effort to train indigenous counterinsurgency forces. Such a move, however, is likely to increase terrorist resistance in the region and get more Americans embroiled in the conflict.