The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan yesterday was disturbing, tossing a nation with nuclear weapons into further turmoil. I’m struck by the coverage of the attack on most of the mainstream television and cable outlets, its shallowness and parochialism.
But there are some good posts that remember who Bhutto was and take a dispassionate view of the crisis and its impact on the Middle East, the United States and the war on terror. An interesting post from Harper’s on Bhutto is worth reading as the news media turns her into something she apparently wasn’t. And Robert Fish, in The Independent, gets passionate.
In The Nation, two stories (here and here) consider the role Bhutto has played in raising hope among democrats in Pakistan and how she always seemed to disappoint — and how her assassination makes permanent the disappointment and sets back the cause of a secular, democratic nation.
“Despite her failings,” writes Mona Mohsin, “she will be sorely missed at a time when Pakistan needs unifying, far-sighted national leaders.”
She was a woman of great courage and political shrewdness, with a firm grasp of geopolitical realities and global economic imperatives. Alone among the entire democratic leadership of Pakistan, she understood the grave threat the country faced from religious extremists. And in an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion towards America, she was brave enough to articulate that it was not just America’s war on terror but ours as well. She knew the risks and had already survived one bloody attack on her life. But in continuing to campaign openly, she refused to be cowed by extremists. Despite repeated warnings from military intelligence and her own oft-stated fears of assassination by Islamists, she was determined to confront this genie. In this final confrontation, there was a neat coincidence between her feudal patrimony (“It is my land”) and her democratic values. Flawed, she still represented the best secular option for breaching Pakistan’s multiple provincial, linguistic, ethnic, and social fissures. We will miss her.
Then there is this Salon column from Juan Cole, which sums up the combined failures of General Musharaf and President Bush (“backed military dictator Musharraf to the hilt as a way of dealing with U.S. security and al-Qaida on the cheap while it poured hundreds of billions into Baghdad”):
Pakistan’s future is now murky, and to the extent that this nation of 160 million buttresses the eastern flank of American security in the greater Middle East, its fate is profoundly intertwined with America’s own. The money for the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to Florida from banks in Pakistan, and al-Qaida used the country for transit to Afghanistan. Instability in Pakistan may well spill over into Afghanistan, as well, endangering the some 26,000 U.S. troops and a similar number of NATO troops in that country. And it is not as if Afghanistan were stable to begin with. If Pakistani politics finds its footing, if a successor to Benazir Bhutto is elected in short order by the PPP and the party can remain united, and if elections are held soon, the crisis could pass. If there is substantial and ongoing turmoil, however, Muslim radicals will certainly take advantage of it.
In order to get through this crisis, Bush must insist that the Pakistani Supreme Court, summarily dismissed and placed under house arrest by Musharraf, be reinstated. The PPP must be allowed to elect a successor to Ms. Bhutto without the interference of the military. Early elections must be held, and the country must return to civilian rule. Pakistan’s population is, contrary to the impression of many pundits in the United States, mostly moderate and uninterested in the Taliban form of Islam. But if the United States and “democracy” become associated in their minds with military dictatorship, arbitrary dismissal of judges, and political instability, they may turn to other kinds of politics, far less favorable to the United States. Musharraf may hope that the Pakistani military will stand with him even if the vast majority of people turn against him. It is a forlorn hope, and a dangerous one, as the shah of Iran discovered in 1978-79.
The question is where we go from here and what this assassination will mean for Pakistan and the world. I wish I knew.
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Hank Kalet 