Articles & Commentaries

Who wants to kill Benazir?
By Faiz Al-Najdi

First Lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, aged 54 and a mother of two, gets elected to the office of Argentine’s Presidency. Her election marks an unusual and possibly unprecedented transfer of power between spouses in a democracy. Her husband, Nestor Kirchner, earlier had declined to seek a second term and had fielded his wife, a veteran lawmaker and his closest advisor, to run for the office instead. She thus becomes Argentine’s first elected female President. Earlier in the history of Argentina, in 1974 Isabel Peron, though elected as a Vice President, had risen to the top slot of the Presidency as a result of death of her husband and the legendry strongman Juan Peron.

Cristina Fernandez’s election can be seen as the harbinger of women rule ahead. Before her, Michelle Bachelet was elected as the first woman President of Chile in 2006. So, we have at least two incumbent woman Presidents in South America. Amongst the notable sitting women heads of Governments or heads of States, we have at least one in almost all the continents so far. In Africa, we have Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf elected as President of Liberia in 2006. In Asia, we have the recent most elected President of India – Pratibha Patil in 2007, before that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines since 2001. In Europe, Mary McAleese returned to the Presidency of Ireland unopposed in 2004 for her second term in office. Angela Merkel was elected as the women Chancellor of Germany in November 2005. And, after that Sigolene Royal had almost made it to the office of the President of France in 2007 before getting narrowly defeated at the hands of the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. Also, Helen Clark remains the Prime Minister of New Zealand since 1999.

Now, this leaves only one continent – North America – where we haven’t seen any woman rise to the highest office up until now. In USA, Nancy Pelosi recently reached the office of the Speaker of the Congress in 2007. And, that’s the highest point any woman got to so far in USA. However, it is expected Hillary Rodham Clinton might become the first ever woman President of the United States of America in 2008. If she does, it will be the greatest thing ever in favor of women as she would be the woman President of the Super Power; the only one at this point in time.

Well, I think women rule won’t stop after the election of Cristina Fernandez, as in Pakistan Benazir Bhutto is riding high with the supporters and is also expected to get elected as Pakistan’s woman Prime Minister for the third time in 2008. This momentum won’t stop here as either of Khaleda Zia and Hasina Wajed is also expected to return as Prime Minister of Bangladesh in 2008. And, no wonder, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma might as well rise to the highest slot too; sooner than later.

So, in 2008 we are getting to see women rule from North to South and from East to West, a woman President in USA to a Woman Prime Minister in Pakistan. Imagine what waits in store for the war on terror and the terrorists worldwide. The terrorists definitely have a hard time ahead as women are known for their resolve. So, while I am also happy at this I wish good luck to all women of the world. And, bad luck for the terrorists of the world; I am terribly sorry for them, really!!!

Faiz Al-Najdi
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

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Who wants to kill Benazir?
By Amir Mir

Even a week after the October 18 suicide attack on former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's enormous welcome procession in Karachi, which killed over 140 innocent people and wounded more than 500 others, the inevitable question surrounding the worst ever terrorist attack in Pakistani history – who did this and why – remains unanswered.

The gruesome scenes of bomb-induced devastation in Bhutto's rally were exactly what the pessimists at home had feared and the optimists had prayed against. The carnival turned into a carnage when two lethal bomb blasts simultaneously hit her joyous caravan near the Karsaz Bridge on main Shahrah-e-Faisal at 12:09 am – ten hours after she had landed at the Karachi Airport, with her mammoth procession of thousands of vehicles and millions of supporters still inching towards the mausoleum of Mohammad Ali Jinnah where Bhutto was scheduled to address a historic public meeting. The specially prepared bullet-proof truck carrying Bhutto and her associates had its windows shattered and a door blown off because of the second blast that was carried out by a suicide bomber, who actually wanted to creep beneath the truck to cause maximum damage to the fortress-like vehicle. He, however, was intercepted by the Janisar Force of the PPP consisting of Bhutto's private security guards, who had formed the first two inner layers of the exceptional security cordon around the truck and stood their ground even after the first blast, which was meant to break the security cordon.

As the suicide bomber failed to get anywhere near the truck, he blew himself up on its right side after being intercepted. First, there was the deafening sound of the explosion, followed by the light and then the tragedy, causing enormous casualties, mostly among the private guards and policemen who were riding beside the truck, forming the outer layers of the security cordon. Government circles say two security vehicles fitted with jammers, which were moving ahead of and behind Bhutto's truck, could not prevent the explosions because they had not been detonated by a remote-controlled device, but set off by a manual trigger mechanism. However, Bhutto, being the prime target, escaped unhurt and was evacuated from the devastated truck by her private security guards immediately after the attack and taken to her Karachi residence, Bilawal House, in an armoured vehicle.

Benazir Bhutto's close associates who were travelling with her at the time of the attack say Bhutto escaped injury only because she had gone downstairs, leaving the upper deck of the truck. Investigators say the attempt on Bhutto was a three-pronged, well-coordinated and sophisticated strike consisting of a hand grenade attack first on the right side of the truck to break the security cordon and to divert the attention of the security staff, followed by a suicide bomber later who came running from the left side to hit the truck hardly two minutes after the first blast, and eventually gunshots by a sniper, targeting the vehicle, leaving several bullet holes in the windscreen.

As soon as she had made public her travel plans, Bhutto had been warned of a possible attempt on her life and was urged by the government to travel by helicopter in order to reduce the risk. She refused, saying she was not scared, being a leader of the masses. Leaving the airport, Bhutto had even refused to use a bullet-proof glass cubicle that had been built on top of the truck. As supporters thronged her vehicle near the Karsaz Bridge, a small explosion occurred in front of the truck on its right side, quickly followed by a bigger blast, destroying two escorting police vans that instantly caught fire. The investigators say they have already recovered the head of the suspected suicide bomber, a 21-year old, having a 48-hour stubble, and he had 15-20 kilogrammes (33-36lbs) of fatal explosives strapped to his body, which was most likely a mix of deadly C4 and Trinitrotoluene (TNT) explosives.

The investigators point out that the not-so-easily-available C4 had earlier been used in the December 2003 assassination attempt on Musharraf in Rawalpindi by two suicide bombers. C4 is considered the best quality military plastic explosive with tremendous velocity. The other explosive simultaneously used by the suicide bomber in the Bhutto rally is believed to be TNT, more rightly known as 2,4,6-trinitromethylbenzene, which is possibly the most widely known explosive in the world. TNT is stable and will not explode by ordinary shocks or mishandling, but requires a detonator to set it off. In addition, this explosive does not react with metals or absorb water and can be stored for a long time. But it is reactive to alkalis and forms unstable compounds that are very sensitive to heat and impact. Due to its properties, TNT is used in military shells, bombs and grenades and has industrial uses as well, mainly for blasting enormous building structures. The explosives contained ball-bearings and pellets, which killed a large number of people and left the nearby vehicles pockmarked.

Significantly, no individual or organisation has so far claimed responsibility for the attack, thus raising the question who wants to see Bhutto dead. She herself talked of the possibility that an attempt would be made upon her life when she returns home. She had expressed fears that some retired army officers are plotting to assassinate her upon her return. In an interview with the British newspaper, The Guardian, she said she felt the real danger came from the jihadi elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment opposed to her return.

Asked about an assassination threat given by a Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, Bhutto said: "I am not worried about Baitullah. I am worried about the threat within the present government. People like Baitullah are mere pawns. It is those forces behind such elements that have presided over the rise of extremism and militancy in my country." Bhutto's close associates say by calling Mehsud a mere pawn, she had shrewdly given broad hints that she fears physical elimination at the hands of al Qaeda and Taliban-linked Islamist extremists who had been a part of the country's military and intelligence establishment since the days of the Afghan jihad under General Zia, who see their opening for control of the country slipping away with the purported power-sharing deal between General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto.

In her post-carnage press conference in Karachi on October 19, Bhutto claimed that three government-related personalities were responsible for the catastrophe, though she did not disclose their names, hoping that Musharraf would proceed against them. She disclosed the names in a confidential letter written to Musharraf on October 16, in which she had informed him that some senior military and intelligence officials were planning to assassinate her upon her return home and appropriate measures should be taken to avert any such happening.

Asked in an interview on NBC whether it was not risky to name a close friend of Musharraf as being someone who's plotting against her, Bhutto said: "Well, at that time I did not know whether there would be an assassination attempt that I would survive. And I wanted to leave on record the suspects. I also did not know that he was a friend of General Musharraf. But I asked myself that even if I knew that he was a friend and I thought of him as a suspect, would I have not written? No, I would have written." In a related development, Asif Ali Zardari blamed the intelligence agencies for the suicide bombing. Talking live on a local television channel, he said: "I do not agree with the official thesis that extremist elements were behind the attack. But I do believe that some extremist elements within the present government were responsible for the blasts. Had the jihadis been the suicide bombers, they should have attacked government personalities and not opposition supporters." While referring to the letter that his wife had sent to the president, he said that certain elements within the government who would have the most to lose if the PPP were to win the next election were complicit in the attack.

While the PPP chairperson is so far reluctant to make public the names of the three accused who had been mentioned in her letter to Musharraf and against whom she wants a murder FIR to be registered, PPP insiders say the three names are those of Director General Intelligence Bureau (IB) Brigadier (retd) Ejaz Hussain Shah, Chief Minister Punjab Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi and a former official of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), Hassan Waseem Afzal, whose acrimony towards Bhutto is well known. The PPP circles believe that some well-placed ideologically motivated intelligence handlers of al Qaeda and Taliban-linked extremists are desperate to assassinate Bhutto because of the burgeoning moderate coalition between Musharraf and the PPP leader that threatens to further marginalise them in the post-election scenario.

These circles claim that while the president's right hand man and the secretary of the National Security Council Tariq Aziz favoured a power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Bhutto before the general elections, the IB chief was opposed to the General's joining hands with the PPP at the cost of the ruling PML(Q), primarily because of his fundamentalist jihadi worldview, which he shares with the Chaudhries of Gujrat.

Brigadier (retd) Ejaz Shah is the same person who had arranged the surrender of Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed, the killer of American journalist Daniel Pearl on February 5, 2005 in Lahore while he was the Home Secretary of Punjab. The relationship between Ejaz and Omar had been that of handler and agent, while both were working for the ISI. The PPP circles say Ejaz Shah was the person who had created PML(Q) in Punjab before the 2002 elections by breaking 20 members of the National Assembly from the PPP after the polls and he has once again been entrusted with the task of getting favourable results for PML(Q) in the 2008 elections. His personal friendship with Shujaat and Pervaiz is common knowledge and he wants Pervaiz Elahi to be the next prime minister. Therefore, the PPP leadership has problems with Ejaz and it wants him to be removed from his slot before the elections.

The third person believed to be named by Bhutto in her letter to Musharraf is Hassan Waseem Afzal, the former deputy chief of NAB, the accountability tool of the Musharraf regime. In her FIR application to the Karachi police, Bhutto has stated that those three individuals whose names she had earlier given to Musharraf should be considered the primary accused in the October 18 carnage. Afzal is currently serving as secretary to Governor Punjab Lieutenant-General (retd) Khalid Maqbool, after he was removed from the post of deputy chairman NAB by Musharraf on Bhutto's demand as a CBM. The PPP circles say Bhutto got annoyed with Afzal after he took the job of personally pursuing the corruption cases against her in London, Madrid and Switzerland. He had even appeared before a Swiss judge and confronted Bhutto, which greatly annoyed her, particularly when red notices were issued with the signature of Afzal.

However, government circles say Musharraf has not taken seriously Bhutto's accusations, which were discussed at a high level meeting in Islamabad recently and were eventually declared 'childish'. The government circles say Bhutto's act of naming names and implicating Musharraf's close associates in the Karachi carnage threatens her equation with the president if she keeps insisting on her allegations. Senior government officials say the suicide attack on Bhutto bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda and was similar to its attempts to assassinate Musharraf, although few in the PPP agree. The government circles remind that she is the only opposition leader to have supported the military operation against the Red Mosque fanatics in Islamabad in July. They added that Bhutto's emergence on the national political horizon as a potential Musharraf ally had already invited vicious disapproval from the jihadi elements who are literally fuming. Yet the PPP circles insist Bhutto has actually emerged as a genuine threat to a coterie of rightist elements within the present set-up, and some radicals in state agencies as well as the army want to eliminate her before she could stage a comeback to the power corridors in Islamabad.

All this raises the million dollar question: will Musharraf use this opportunity to clean out his military and intelligence services by putting an end to their relationship with extremist Islamic militant groups, besides mounting an all-out offensive to dismantle the al Qaeda and Taliban-linked jihadi infrastructure from Pakistani soil?
Courtesy: October 26, 2007

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In defence of rallies
By I.A. Rehman

MISCHIEF is again afoot. The plan is to drive a large number of people out of politics, to abolish the institution of political rallies. This means nothing less than depriving the Pakistani citizens of an important part of their history.

A hallowed method of identifying the culprits behind any crime is to go for its beneficiaries. The indecent haste with which the establishment came out with a ban-all-rallies project, it signed itself as the primary suspect in the Oct 19 carnage case.

By asking the people to choose between security and rallies the authorities have, quite diabolically, diverted public attention from their own failings and instigated a debate on the justification for political processions/rallies. Next they will ask the people to stop travelling by buses because they are being targeted by terrorists. One wonders whether a warning against joining paramilitary forces is to be issued because their members are being kidnapped, tortured and beheaded.

One might not have suspected the bona fides of the authors of the move if one had not known of military regimes' ingrained hostility to the people's right to take out a procession, to hold a rally. They have been striving to end rallies with a consistency they have not displayed in any campaign against social evils.

The threat from terrorists is a post-9/11/2001 excuse. But rallies/processions have been disallowed since October 1999. There must have been something prima facie objectionable in the blanket restriction on public gatherings that persuaded the Supreme Court to take note of it (although no relief resulted). The fact is that the Ayub regime disliked public rallies.

The Zia regime could never stomach the sight of rallies, especially after that fateful rally in Lahore in August 1977 that was held as a reception for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after his overthrow; and the Musharraf regime's dark record in this regard is too recent to need recounting. The establishment's intolerance of public rallies has nothing to do with the terrorist threat; it is an essential concomitant of autocracy.

This anti-rally theory can be assailed on several counts. First, on the ground of criminal hypocrisy in banning opposition rallies and not preventing quasi-religious militants from doing so (and, indeed, helping them often). Secondly, suppression of politics and political activity, of which rallies form an essential part, by Ayub created a vacuum that was effortlessly filled by elements operating under the banner of belief. These elements have gained strength throughout the authoritarian regimes in direct proportion to the curtailment of democratic freedoms. And, finally, restrictions on public rallies are one of the most decisive weapons that can be used to deprive the people of their sovereign rights.

Before examining why the people must have a right to rally for their ideas/demands one may refer to the reasons (as far as they can be fathomed) for authoritarian regimes' hostility to public gatherings.

 To begin with, the very idea that the people, especially the poor and illiterate among them, should make demands, instead of obeying their superiors, is alien to the garrison code. Public rallies can give the people a sense of their power which they cannot be trusted with. These rallies can snowball, just as the recent lawyers' agitation emboldened many a docile sheep to join the black jackets.

Above all, big rallies can spark insubordination among law-enforcement personnel, such as the 1977 incident when two officers refused to order firing on a crowd of protesters in Lahore and some other similar incidents.

How is the holding of political rallies so important to citizens that they should resist the present move to ban them? Some of the reasons can be read in the establishment's grounds for opposing such demonstrations. Quite a few other reasons can be advanced.

Politics everywhere depends on the oral communication of ideas. This is necessary to sustain a living link between political leaders and the people. It is not enough for government leaders to issue statements on their decisions and policies; they must speak to the people either through the latter's representatives in parliament or the media. The American president is a notable follower of this principle. (His record in this regard is being threatened by the ambition-driven Punjab chief minister who is obviously exempt from the rally ban.)

In an underdeveloped society, such as Pakistan, a large part of the population does not have access to political leaders through parliaments or media. The press reaches a small part of the population. The electronic media's huge growth notwithstanding, a sizeable segment of society, especially the underprivileged, does not have the means or the time to benefit from its services. For all such people, public gatherings are the only channel of communication with claimants to their allegiance.

For a variety of reasons, everybody cannot go to a public meeting. A procession, a rally, is thus a means of carrying a public meeting to people who cannot get away from their homes or workplaces. If we had not had processions and rallies most Pakistani women could not have directly seen or heard their leaders.

Public gatherings, processions, rallies are important because they enable people to acquire and retain the qualities of social animals, because in Pakistan, where the space for citizen-government interaction has been greatly reduced, they offer the masses the only possibility of exercising their right to participate in governance and public life.

Rallies are the most direct means of announcing a people's will. That is why one admires and respects the young people who face batons while protesting at meetings of the international ruling club or WTO rounds. And one can never forget the rally by the US war veterans against the Vietnam war that clinched matters, nor the recent rallies in many world capitals against the unforgivable rape of Iraq.

Rallies are an all-seasons fruit but they are most welcome and most enjoyable around election time. Although rallies have been considerably vulgarised by autocratic rulers who have been using public money to collect audiences, and the bad exa

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Uproar over the NRO 
By Kaiser Bengali

BENAZIR Bhutto’s return has evoked strong reactions. A section of society has raised a moral uproar over the National Reconciliation Ordinance that was promulgated before her arrival, claiming that she has been allowed to ‘escape justice for her corrupt actions’. However, the millions of people who accorded her a tumultuous welcome have shown that the two-decade long attempt to denigrate her has completely failed to impress them.

The dramatically sharp divide between the two responses raise two important questions: who are the elements that have elevated the campaign against Benazir Bhutto and the PPP to the level of a vitriolic moral crusade and what are their motivations for doing so? The answer perhaps lies in the sharp divide in terms of class interests.

It appears that there is a broad conservative coalition that has been crafted by the military establishment. At one end of the spectrum of this coalition is the religious aristocracy that also enables the militant brigades to supplement the covert operations of the intelligence agencies. This combination represents the ‘muscle’ part of the coalition.

The other end of the spectrum comprises two elements. One is the landed and business elite that keeps the wheels of the economy running and generates the revenue to maintain the state edifice. They represent the ‘money’ part of the coalition. The other is the westernised English-educated professional class that provides the ‘intellectual’ veneer.

This coalition of seemingly strange ‘bedfellows’ constitutes the Pakistani equivalent of the neoconservatives, or neocons, in the US. The people, at large, subsist on the periphery and constitute the labour units that produce the surpluses for the neocon ashraafia.

The neocon ashraafia has aggressively endeavoured to protect its privileged economic, social and political position. To that end, it has resisted the development of popular politics and exploited every opportunity to berate political parties, politicians and politics. It is intrinsically hostile to democracy — except for paying perfunctory lip service to cater to a western or westernised audience — and has tended to welcome military takeovers.

The rationale for their support to non-democratic regimes and opposition to democratic politics is not difficult to fathom. The dominance of non-democratic regimes has enabled the ashraafia to amass property and other forms of wealth largely through dubious means, including questionable official policies designed to benefit it. It is able to spend on one evening of family dining out what millions of families each earn in a whole month.

The intense PPP bashing can be seen in this context. The PPP is the first mass party that has raised the banner of egalitarianism. This is anathema to the neocon ashraafia. Its pathological distaste for the PPP — and the Bhuttos — is rooted in its fear of even a whiff of social equality and it can clearly be seen to be merely using the NRO affair as yet another opportunity to whiplash Benazir Bhutto and the PPP and, in the process, demonise democratic politics. The ‘dispensation of justice’ argument makes for a convenient facade.

The neocon double standards are obvious. The moral indignation regarding the NRO stands in sharp contrast to the fact that it has consistently failed to take moral offence whenever reports surfaced of corruption of the military establishment and its surrogates. Its moral sense also failed to awaken when scores of generals and politicians allied to General Ziaul Haq’s military regime were provided indemnity under the infamous Eighth Amendment for bank loan defaults and write-offs. Needless to say, most of them are now part of the same neocon ashraafia. Ironically, many champions of democracy appear to have been inadvertently shepherded on to the neocon bandwagon.

From a conceptual perspective, the corruption issue vis-à-vis Benazir Bhutto can be seen from the context of two different assumptions. One, it is assumed that Benazir Bhutto is corrupt. Thereby, the moral fury at her ‘unholy deal’ with General Musharraf and her ‘escape from justice’ can be considered valid.

The other is that there is the universally accepted principle of ‘innocence until proven guilty’. And the fact is that Benazir Bhutto or Asif Zardari have not been convicted in a single case among the many that have been filed against them in Pakistan and abroad.

In this context, the corruption issue is rendered questionable from the perspective of the basic principles of law, and any sense of moral ire can be seen to be based on heresy and insinuations. Once the latter premise of ‘innocence until proven guilty’ is accepted, the entire web of corruption charges surrounding Benazir Bhutto can be seen in the light of realpolitik.

The locational distribution of corruption cases is significant. Prior to her departure from Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto had been constrained to spend most of her time commuting between different cities in the country to appear in one court after another. There was one week when Benazir Bhutto had to attend a court hearing in Lahore, fly the next day to Karachi for a court hearing and return to Lahore the day after for another court hearing.

The preoccupation with her cases and the constant travelling that it involved seriously dented the time and attention she could give to party affairs.

That, perhaps, was the precise intention. General Ziaul Haq used every vicious tool in his bag to break the PPP and failed. General Musharraf decided to change tactics and attempt to paralyse the party by tightening the web around Benazir Bhutto, tying her up in legal knots and simply making it impossible for her to run the party.

Clearly, the neocon objective has not been to ensure justice, but to exploit the banner of justice to politically eliminate challenges to their power and privilege that arises from any expression of popular democratic politics. And the PPP’s populist politics is seen to present the biggest threat in this respect.

In the context of the principles of law, the web of corruption charges woven around the PPP can no longer command legitimacy or credibility. After all, no court case can be dragged on indefinitely without any conviction. Incongruity has been added to the farce of ‘dispensing justice’ by the fact that those PPP leaders who agreed to play by the military establishment’s rules had their case hearings pending indefinitely.

Absurdity has been added by the fact that among those filing applications for dismissal of corruption cases against them under the NRO is none other than Gen Musharraf’s minister of interior! His predecessor was also facing corruption charges and his name had to be temporarily removed from the Exit Control List to enable him to attend an official engagement abroad!

The mala fide intentions of the corruption cases against PPP leaders stand out rather clearly. Given the glaring lack of moral legitimacy of the judicial process with respect to the corruption cases, Benazir Bhutto cannot be said to have escaped justice, but can be said to have escaped the politically constricting web that was drawn around her. She has managed to return to the political arena to revive the challenge to the forces that wish to keep the people out of the corridors of power. The vicious and bloody response to her return can be seen in this context.

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Benazir Bhutto's Toughest Mission
By ARYN BAKER/KARACHI

The day Benazir Bhutto returned to Karachi after exile in 1986, Nazir Ahmad Baloch woke up early, pinned a button of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) to his shirt and danced out the door chanting "Long Live Bhutto." "He was crazy," says his aunt, Anipa Banno. "The party never did anything for him, but he believed in their slogan, 'Bread, Shelter and Clothes.' He was a party diehard." Bhutto had fled Pakistan when her father, former President and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was toppled in a military coup and later executed. But she went back to pick up her father's mantle as head of the PPP, and eventually led the party to election victory, becoming the world's first woman to head a modern Muslim nation. Like many in the sprawling slum city of Lyari, Baloch, though only a child, fell in love with the PPP when the elder Bhutto made it the centerpiece of his campaign to empower Pakistan's poor.

"Bhutto came to my house and asked about my problems," says Banno. "Nazir was there with me, waving his little flag." Lyari has been a PPP stronghold ever since.

Last week, Baloch showed he was still devoted to the Bhuttos — even though Benazir had again fled Pakistan in 1999, to escape corruption charges (which she denies) and yet another military coup. Baloch danced out the door once more, leaving his pregnant wife at home, and chantingthe same slogans. But this time Baloch did not come home. His nephew found his body in a Karachi morgue, victim of a devastating suicide attack on Bhutto's homecoming procession that saw 141 dead and hundreds critically injured. More than a third of the dead and injured hailed from Lyari. The following day, Bhutto praised those in the PPP who had lost their lives, saying that their sacrifice proved that the people of Pakistan were behind her. But Banno, a veteran party member, felt differently:

"The leaders are burnishing their politics over the bodies of these dead workers, but we have nothing but a fatherless child. Let's see if Benazir Bhutto can make it worthwhile."

Benazir Bhutto, twice Prime Minister, says she is Pakistan's best hope. The country she has returned to, however, is not the one she once ruled.

Pakistan is altogether more violent than ever. (Both al-Qaeda and local militants are suspected of being behind the attack on Bhutto, but she has accused rogue government and security officials of involvement.)

Moreover, Bhutto can no longer count on unqualified support of party followers who first vaulted her to power in 1988, and again in 1993. And after eight years under President Pervez Musharraf, the general who seized power in that 1999 coup, Pakistan has become increasingly polarized: the civilian population wants democracy back, a fundamentalist religious fringe seeks the establishment of an Islamic state and the  military is bent on holding on to power. How Bhutto, 54, negotiates this minefield will largely determine the fate of this nuclear-armed nation of 165 million.

She is off to a mixed start. Musharraf has allowed her to return to Pakistan without fear of prosecution for the corruption charges relating to her two terms in office. A deal, still being negotiated, may also include the lifting of a constitutional amendment limiting Prime Ministers to two terms. This would allow Bhutto to contest planned general elections in January. But Bhutto's talks with Musharraf have divided the PPP  — some members see it as a betrayal of their cause to end military rule. An increasingly independent Supreme Court will decide in coming days if Musharraf's amnesty for Bhutto is constitutional. At the same time, the court is weighing the legitimacy of Musharraf's own landslide victory in the presidential election in early October. The upshot is that  Pakistan's homecoming queen faces a host of challenges in coming months that will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to surmount.

Campaigning amid Violence

On Sunday Oct. 20, Bhutto, flanked by a small army of armed security guards, made an unannounced stop in Lyari to offer condolences to the families of the deceased. A crowd gathered to hear her speak from the running board of her idling SUV. "I am your sister and the people of Lyari are my own," she told the crowd. "The way you stood behind me, I would stand beside you forever." The crowd erupted in cheers, and an overenthusiastic supporter fired a traditional shot in the air to celebrate. Immediately the object of the crowd's adoration was bundled back into the car, and the motorcade zoomed away.

Bhutto's hit-and-run visit was a radical departure from the PPP's traditional style of massive campaign rallies that are equal parts entertainment and politics. In Pakistan, political strength is often measured by crowd counts, and no other party has been able to match the PPP's draw. "In our part of the world, politicians have to take their campaigns to the street," says political analyst Nusrat Javed. "Bhutto's base doesn't watch TV. They need rallies, cavalcades. Unless you do it this way, you cannot survive as a populist party. Unfortunately, that is no longer possible." Bhutto had planned to launch her election campaign with a procession to her hometown of Larkana, the source of her most fervent support. Now she has been forced to rethink her strategy. "We have to modify our campaign to some extent because of the suicide bombings,"

Bhutto told reporters at her Karachi residence shortly after visiting Lyari. "But we are not going to stop our campaign to reach the public. We will not be deterred." Some PPP workers are not as enthusiastic. "I won't go to rallies anymore," says Banno. "Anything can happen."

A Duet with a Dictator

The broad terms of the alliance between Bhutto and Musharraf may see her become Prime Minister for the third time if the PPP wins a parliamentary majority in January. The general would retain the powerful post of President even as he steps down as army chief. But PPP stalwarts fear such a scheme will alienate many Pakistanis. "Party members are saying that their constituencies are telling them not to ask for votes because the educated voter sees the deal as absolving [accused] politicians," says Ayesha Tammy Haq, a talk-show host.

Even if her party sweeps the elections, Bhutto faces an awkward power-sharing arrangement with a long time political foe. Musharraf, as President, has the ability to dissolve Parliament. Removing that constitutional amendment, which Musharraf has already used once to oust Bhutto, will require a two-thirds majority in Parliament, a majority that many PPP  members think is beyond them. Bhutto says Musharraf was not involved in last week's attack, but she suspects fundamentalist Islamic groups historically affiliated with his military regime. "I am not blaming the government," she says. "But I am saying there are elements within the administration and the security apparatus that sympathize with those groups."

Bhutto has defended her negotiations with Musharraf, saying that the current situation calls for extreme measures.

"This is a battle for democracy, and we wish it to be peaceful," she says. "He's been the victim of assassination attacks and [now] so have we. I think certainly it will unite all those who are against extremism."

A Freer Press

One of the positive — and popular — changes under Musharraf is the rise of independent media. Scores of privately owned television and radio stations have helped create a media landscape new to Bhutto. "The media have become quite feisty," says Haq. "Bhutto is going to have to learn how to deal with them. They will be gentle at first, but that won't last long. She will have to learn how to answer difficult questions.

Reciting rhetoric and party lines won't be enough."

January's will be the first parliamentary election that will be televised; that disadvantages Bhutto, who is at her best when she is out in the streets pressing the flesh. Many party supporters, such as Amida Manzoor from Lyari, stayed home to watch the events unfold on TV instead. Manzoor stayed up all night watching the footage of Bhutto's rescue from the terrorist attack, and says because of that, she no longer believes  the party line about caring for the people. "The leaders all fled in their special cars after the bombs. They did not care about the workers who came to support her. They should have rushed them to the hospital in their nice cars; instead, everyone had to wait for ambulances and volunteers to be rescued."

Great Expectations

On at least one local front, Bhutto has had a hard act to follow.

Musharraf's tenure has seen the economy grow by an average 7% a year. While some of that growth stems from the lifting in 2001 of U.S. sanctions put in place when Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapon nine years ago, Pakistan's business classes will expect Bhutto to maintain the momentum. At the same time, the urban and rural poor that make up her base  want work. "Bhutto has promised us jobs," says Asif Ali, an unemployed Lyari resident. "She has said that she will give us clean drinking water.

If she does not do this, she will see how the residents of Lyari can resist against her."

The War on Terror

Even more difficult to manage will be Washington's expectations that Bhutto take strong action against militants. Bhutto has suggested that Musharraf has not done enough to tackle extremism, but she has offered no concrete solutions of her own, other than promoting democracy as the panacea for Pakistan's ills. "It has become clear that dictatorship doesn't work, that it is actually making the situation more chaotic and anarchic," she says. "And it is chaos and anarchy that actually suits the militants."

More than two dozen militant attacks have taken place in the past two months alone, and every major international terror plot since the toppling of the twin World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, has been traced, in some way, back to Pakistan. In July a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate report said that the tribal districts of North and South Waziristan, on the lawless border with Afghanistan, are a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda.

It's the hope of the Bush Administration that a power-sharing agreement between Bhutto and Musharraf would lend the military leader the democratic credentials necessary to pursue his war on terror, but many analysts say it is already too late. "The situation in Waziristan is deteriorating rapidly," says Zafar Iqbal Cheema, chair of the Defense and Strategic Studies Department at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University.

"The military has become so demoralized that forces are surrendering.

It's a very grim situation."

What started as the U.S.'s war on terror has become Pakistan's own war, but it still carries an American connotation that sits uneasily on the Pakistani consciousness. Bhutto, as leader of the country, could do little to inspire an unpopular war against fellow Muslims that islargely seen to be at Washington's behest. "Benazir's problem is that she is talking against the wind," says Moonis Ahmar, chair of the  nternational  Relations Department at Karachi University. "The windhere, right or wrong, is anti-West. Whatever the reasons —  Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine or the war on terror, which is seen as war on Islam — the mood is anti-American. And in that environment, to go in and say, 'I will take strong action against the people in the tribal areas' will backfire.

Even Musharraf, with his military, has not been able to do this. As long as she has this pro-American posture she will continue to be targeted."

For Bhutto, balancing the demands of her country with those of other nations depending on her to solve the scourge of radicalism will be her greatest challenge yet. "We are prepared to risk our lives and we are prepared to risk our liberty, but we are not prepared to surrender our great nation to the militants," says Bhutto. Extremists have already put her to the test once. No doubt they will do so again.

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Comment: Parasites, Pygmies, and Puppets 
By Admin

Last night, I was talking to a group of friends about the revolt in Swat, the bombings on our villages and towns, beheading of soldiers and the history of how the military establishment supported and used the fascist groups for its own purposes, brutalised and criminalised the society, and is now reaping the harvest. This morning, I opened DAWN and read the column written by former shipping tycoon-turned Z.A. Bhutto’s enemy for life - who is considered a ‘distinguished’ columnist in the elitist circles of this banana republic. 
 
Pakistan’s ruling elites are ‘distinguished’ in that they are famously corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, politically inept, historically incompetent, notoriously callous, and fatally shortsighted. I have no personal reason to write about Cowasjee. I have never met him but I have chosen to write about this ‘hidden lackey’ of the successive military dictators in Pakistan because he is a microcosm of a lot what is wrong with the ruling elites of Pakistan. One of the characteristics is to accept jobs and favours from the government, enjoy the perks and good life while in the office, and build connections but when out of favour, start preaching the highest standards of moral conduct. Cowasjee’s shipping company was nationalized in 1972 , as were others, and Bhutto gave him a job in Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation in 1973 to make a gesture that the nationalization was not personal. Bhutto jailed Cowasjee very briefly in 1976. When Pakistan’s greatest Frankenstein, Zia-ul-Haq staged a coup in July 1977 and imposed martial law, Cowasjee went to see Zia in July 1977 and readily agreed to become his adviser for shipping. So much for the love of democratic principles. Even today, a police van (does he pay for that?) is deputed for his security. But why am I giving so much importance to him; rather a small fry in the grand scheme of things.  
 
The main reason is that a generation of journalists/columnists (e.g. Z.A. Suleri, Altaf Hasan Qureshi, Cowasjee, etc.) has been patronized, supported, and encouraged by the successive military establishments and their agencies to distort Pakistan’s history, hide the ugly face of the military rulers, mislead people, and harm democratic process in the country. It is not possible to get an objective view of the history through the eyes of the ‘establishment’s media’ because it has systematically and institutionally, presented and highlighted what has suited its interests.
The “establishment’s media men” rarely mention the fact that high-level political corruption was started by General Ayub Khan and his family. They do not discuss issues like why Pakistan has purchased nearly $10 billion worth of arms during the past five years and why doesn’t the government properly account for $100 million of cash payments it receives from the US government every month.
These relate to the present. In the context of history, they have never done justice to the findings of the Hamood-ur-Rehman Commission report. A couple of paragraphs from the report are worth quoting:  

“After analysing the evidence brought before the Commission, we came to the conclusion that the process of moral degeneration among the senior ranks of the Armed Forces was set in motion by their involvement in Martial Law duties in 1958, that these tendencies reappeared and were, in fact, intensified when Martial Law was imposed in the country once again in March 1969 by General Yahya Khan, and that there was indeed substance in the allegations that a considerable number of senior Army Officers had not only indulged in large scale acquisition of lands and houses and other commercial activities, but had also adopted highly immoral and licentious ways of life which seriously affected their professional capabilities and their qualities of leadership.”

Another quote from the report:  

“The excesses committed by the Pakistani Army fall into the following categories:-
a) Excessive use of force and fire power in Dacca during the night of the 25th and 26th of March 1971 when the military operation was launched. b) Senseless and wanton arson and killings in the countryside during the course of the “sweeping operations” following the military action. c) Killing of intellectuals and professionals like doctors, engineers, etc and burying them in mass graves not only during early phases of the military action but also during the critical days of the war in December 1971. d) Killing of Bengali Officers and men of the units of the East Bengal Regiment, East Pakistan Rifles and the East Pakistan Police Force in the process of disarming them, or on pretence of quelling their rebellion. e) Killing of East Pakistani civilian officers, businessmen and industrialists, or their mysterious disappearance from their homes by or at the instance of Army Officers performing Martial Law duties. f) Raping of a large number of East Pakistani women by the officers and men of the Pakistan army as a deliberate act of revenge, retaliation and torture. g) Deliberate killing of members of the Hindu minority.” Unquote.  

Mr. Bhutto never published the report because he was under huge pressure from the Generals not to. But any journalist or political analyst worth his salt knows and knew what really went on in former East Pakistan. The establishment forces, under a deliberate policy started by Yahya Khan’s Minister of Information Sher Ali Khan, have since used scores of media men to vilify and target Bhutto so that ordinary people do not think and discuss the role of the Army and the Generals. Bhutto made his share of mistakes and had his flaws but he was a popularly elected leader and it is about time things are put in perspective.

This group of “establishment’s media men” has distorted history to hide the ugly realities from the people of Pakistan. An ugly reality is that the year 1971 was a year of loot, plunder and rape in East Pakistan. Mr. Bhutto did not order to loot and rape. The man in charge was the Commander-in-Chief Yahya Khan, the all-powerful Chief Martial Law Administrator. After the fall of Dacca on December 16, 1971, junior officers were on the verge of mutiny; General Hamid was heckled and shouted down in an officers meeting; and there was no constitution and no law except martial law. Many generals and air marshals fearing a complete breakdown forced Yahya to hand over power at a time when the US president Richard Nixon had to warn Indira Gandhi not to enter West Pakistan. Given the grave situation and a complete constitutional vacuum, there was simply no other way to transfer power from a Chief Martial Law Administrator to the man who was the leader of the majority party in West Pakistan. But the army establishment was never a friend of Mujib or Bhutto or for that matter, any popular leader. So it has systematically distorted history and used any body who was willing to do its dirty job.

Would Cowasjee investigate and write about the role of some Haroons, the family that has owned DAWN. Mahmood Haroon served General Yahya as Agriculture Minister and General Zia as Minister of Interior. In Mehrangate case, his brother Yusuf Haroon was named as a recipient of Rs. 5 million from the ISI. Yusuf Haroon served as Governor of West Pakistan during the last days of Ayub Khan. Here it would be quite relevant to reproduce a few paras from now declassified secret papers of the US State Department. The points made are revealing and very important enough to be the subject of a secret telegram to the US Secretary of State. The following quotes from secret telegram no. 768 dated May 28, 1969, sent by the US embassy in Karachi to the US Secretary of State. Quote:

 
* In May 26 conversation with M.A.H. Ispahani, I asked (having in mind, actually a report in ref that President Yahya told (Iranian) PM Hoveyda that Americans supported Shaikh Mujibur Rahman) why Karachites continued to express belief that US supported concept of Independent East Pakistan.
* Ispahani responded that answer was simple; Yusuf Haroon, who always had Mujib in his pay was widely regarded as American agent; Mujib is greatest threat to Pakistan and to Pak unity but remained political ally of Haroon’s through pre-PTC period and close liaison between two men obtained until imposition of martial law; Mujib was first important politician Haroon sought after his return here [from the US] in February {Ambassador’s comment: True}: It was therefore logical to conclude that Haroon acted on behalf of United States government in supporting Mujib and that USG supported Mujib through Haroon. He added that Ayub booted Haroon out of country because his belief that Haroon was foreign agent.
* I asked Ispahani if he believed all of himself. He responded he did not but I had asked a question and [got a] frank answer that many believed Haroon was US agent. {Ambassador’s comment: Belief was not proof}
 
Unquote.

The above does establish that (i) Yusuf Haroon was indeed working closely with Americans (ii) he did support Mujib, and (iii) close associates of Quaid-e-Azam such as M.A.H. Ispahani believed (though he expressed his fears to the US Ambassador in a rather diplomatic manner, by saying that is what ‘people’ believed) Mujib was supported by Americans and (iv) even Yahya believed Americans supported independent East Pakistan.

Do these parasites and puppets of the military establishments have the intellectual honesty and moral courage to show the ugly side of their patrons including corrupt Generals who committed serious crimes against the people or all the venom is reserved for the only truly popularly elected leader of the history of what is now Pakistan?

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Bhutto seeks answers at father's grave
By Colin Freeman in Larkana

In terms of wealth, power and popularity, the Bhuttos have long been described as Pakistan's answer to America's Kennedy clan. Yesterday, Benazir Bhutto provided a poignant reminder of how her family also shares the other famous Kennedy trait: a long history of personal tragedy.

Just 11 days after the suicide bombing that came within a whisker of claiming her life, the former prime minister braved the threat of a further assassination attempt to visit the vast family mausoleum in the Bhutto ancestral hometown of Larkana.

Resembling a miniature Taj Mahal, its echoing chambers have no lack of coffins already, their number a testament to the dangers of life in Pakistani politics. As well as Benazir's father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged in 1979 after a military coup against his prime ministership, there are the coffins of her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, who both died in mysterious circumstances. Murtaza was shot after his bodyguards were involved in a gun battle with Pakistani police in 1996, while Shahnawaz was poisoned during a family holiday in France in 1985. Like so many other deaths among Pakistan's ruling class, they remain the subject of intrigue and conspiracy theories.

At the mausoleum, Ms Bhutto offered prayers at the grave of her father, reading from the Koran and spreading petals. "It's so moving for me to finally be here and to be able to pray at his grave and the grave of my young brothers, who lost their lives in the prime of their youth," she said.

She made plain that she wanted answers to the question of who was behind the bombing in Karachi, which killed 139 of her supporters as she returned from exile. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph in the mausoleum, she revealed that she had asked for Scotland Yard's help with the investigation.

Ms Bhutto, 54, who believes that Islamist elements within the government may have had a hand in the attack, said: "I have written to the Pakistan Ministry of Interior asking them to get Scotland Yard to assist.

"I have done this because Pakistan lacks the scientific capabilities to make such an investigation and to identify not just the perpetrators but the financiers and sponsors."

She expressed dissatisfaction with the progress of the inquiry, which has led to the arrest of at least a dozen people but has yet to identify a ringleader. Police, she said, had failed to secure the scene of the bombing and seemed unable to decide what had happened.

"In the past 10 days we have heard multiple theories. First it was a car bomb, then a grenade, then a suicide bomber," she said. "It is going to end up like most other terrorist attacks in Pakistan, where the terrorists responsible never get caught."

Heavier security around Ms Bhutto was much in evidence yesterday as her convoy approached through the paddy fields. Instead of the open-topped bus used in her homecoming parade in Karachi, she travelled in a fleet of armoured saloons with tinted windows, while gunmen from a tribe of Bhutto loyalists were also on guard.

Last night, a Scotland Yard spokesman said that any request for help would be made via the Foreign Office. An FCO spokesman said: "We have not yet been contacted by the Pakistani government but any request for assistance would be given careful consideration."

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'It was what we feared, but dared not to happen'
By Christina Lamb

Our correspondent was on board Benazir Bhutto's bombed bus. She reports on a tragic homecoming


THE sound came first. A low, ominous bang, like the sound of a large metal
door clanging shut. I was standing in the middle of Benazir Bhutto’s open-top bus, talking to Aitzaz Ahsan, her long-time legal adviser. We stared at each other in horror. This was what we had all feared but somehow, crazily, dared to hope wouldn’t happen.

Someone shouted: “Down!” But there was no need. A wall of orange flame came over the left side of the bus and blasted us all to the floor.

The twanging music that for nine hours had been blaring out, welcoming Bhutto home after eight years in exile, stopped. For a moment there was ghastly silence.

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My friendship with Bhutto began at her wedding Benazir Bhutto has a long list of enemies A history of trouble in the NW Frontier“It’s okay, it’s okay – it’s a burst tyre,” said Agha Siraj Dur-rani, an amiable giant of a man who, as the closest friend of Bhutto’s husband, had spent the whole journey scanning the crowds for potential threats. But we all knew what it really was.

Then the sirens and screams started. I was sure there would be another one
and that it would be worse. Within a minute, it came. Again the bang, much louder and nearer this time, and once more from the left. Orange flames shot up all around us, rocking the bus and sending pieces of shrapnel raining down.

In the left-hand corner at the back of the bus, I could see two young men lying dead in pools of blood. There were probably 20 of us on the bus when the attack happened in Karachi on Thursday night. Around me were some of Bhutto’s closest lieutenants. She had told them not to come, not wanting the party’s leadership all at risk. But there were also relatives and friends. Bhutto herself had gone downstairs 15 minutes earlier to a bulletproof compartment to relax her feet, swollen from standing for so many hours. We had no idea if she was still alive.

“We have to get off the bus,” I shouted. We knew we were the targets. Everything was lit up as if it were day instead of six minutes past midnight, and there seemed to be bodies strewn everywhere. A nearby tree was on fire, as were a police van and a car. Flames were coming from the side of the bus. I was terrified the fuel tank would explode. I climbed over a body and made for the ladder where people had started clambering down. Someone yelled: “Don’t – it’s too exposed.”

There was the sound of pistol fire. One man jumped off the side. I was about
to do the same when Victoria Schofield, Bhutto’s friend from her Oxford days, pulled me to a chute. She jumped down to be caught by a guard at the bottom, and I followed her, not caring about the 14ft drop.

All about us, the road was littered with body parts and plastic sandals. The nearest bodies had to be those of some of the boys in white Bhutto T-shirts who had made a human shield around the bus, linking hands so nobody could
get through, and waving and smiling at us through the nine hours.

I thought about all the people who had travelled for days to see their returning leader and who had been dancing and waving flags, hoisting up children, who would beam with delight when we waved from the bus.

Trying not to look at a severed arm with its palm facing upward, I ran down a side street, just wanting to get away from the carnage.

A crying woman in a pink shalwar kameez grabbed me and tried to lead me to an ambulance. Only then did I realise there were great splashes of blood all over my left shoulder and arm and spattered across my trousers. It was somebody else’s.

“I’m fine. I’m not hurt,” I said, shaking her away. Only later would I realise there were bits of burnt flesh in my hair; and I would stand in the shower for hours under scalding water, trying to wash them - and that awful night - away.

A man with a moustache stopped me running and took me into his house, where I was soon joined by Rehman Malik, Bhutto’s frizzy-haired security chief, Farooq Naik, her lawyer, and Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who has led the Pakistan People’s party (PPP) during her years in exile. All three were spattered with blood.

Bhutto was fine, they said, and had been driven to Bilawal House, her fortified family home in Karachi. I wanted to phone my husband and son in London, wishing fervently I had not called home so excitedly earlier to say I was on Bhutto’s bus. But the batteries on all our mobile phones were flat after so many hours in the convoy.

The man with a moustache giving us sanctuary turned out to be an army colonel, a bizarre twist in this land where politicians and military have rarely worked together. He produced a battery charger, which we all fought over, and made us milky tea. He then drove us to Bilawal House.

Other survivors from the bus had gathered there, and we all hugged one another, crying with relief. Among them was Bhutto’s cousin Tariq, who had told me on the bus how his wife had begged him not to get on board and how
he had always stayed in farming and avoided politics.

“Our family is cursed,” he had said. “All the Bhuttos who get involved end up dead: Benazir’s father, both her brothers . . . ”

The military hanged her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in 1979; her brother Shahnawaz was poisoned in 1985; and her brother Mir Murtaza was shot in 1996.

Benazir Bhutto, the survivor of this “cursed” dynasty, was now sitting, pale but composed, in Bilawal House, watching BBC World’s live reports from the scene of the bomb attacks.

I sat on the arm of her chair and she told me how she had survived this attempt on her life.

Nursing her sore feet inside her compartment, she had been working on a speech she was due to deliver when the bus reached the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. With her was her political secretary,
Naheed Khan.

“I had been reading it to Naheed, and we’d just finished, but then I thought there were a few more points to add. I was saying we should add the point that I would ask the supreme court to allow political parties in the tribal areas – and as I said ‘tribal areas’, the first bomb went off.”

Both women were thrown to the floor. “First the sound, then the light, then the glass smashing,” Bhutto said. “I knew it was a suicide bomb. My first thought was, it’s actually happened.”

As she spoke to me, we watched the death toll rise on the television screen. First, they said 15. We knew it was far more than that, for the street had been packed with tens of thousands of supporters. Suddenly, it shot up to 89, then more than 100. It was Pakistan’s most deadly bomb.

She told me she had not wanted to come back to Bilawal House. “I thought they would target this, too, and would be waiting, knowing if I escaped I would come here. But my security insisted.”

After a while, Bhutto went upstairs to wash her face. It was her first time back in the house for 8½ years, and her old toothbrush was still in its glass in the bathroom. As she came back down, she stopped at the group of black-and-white photographs on the wall of her and her three children.

She touched them with her hand.

Bhutto’s journey home had begun about 16 hours earlier at Dubai airport. Journalists and supporters of her party had flown there from London, and spirits were so high that the Emirates airline staff struggled to contain them on the flight. One PPP activist from Canada had ended up rolling round the aisle, drunk.

Bhutto arrived at the airport from the villa where she has spent most of the past 8½ years, since fleeing Pakistan amid a welter of corruption charges.

She looked stunning, dressed in an emerald-green-and-white shalwar kameez, the colours of the Pakistani flag, to symbolise national unity. Her jacket was finished with tiny white pearl buttons, and over her head was a trademark floaty white dupatta, which as usual rarely stayed on.

As she said goodbye to her two daughters and her husband, Asif, in the VIP lounge, she announced: “This is the beginning of a long journey for Pakistan back to democracy, and I hope my going back is a catalyst for change. We must believe that miracles do happen.”

Already, however, the warnings were coming in. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, had publicly told her not to come because of security threats. Bhutto said she had prior warning that suicide squads would try to kill her on her return. She said the telephone numbers of suicide bombers had been given to her by a “brotherly country” and she had alerted Musharraf in a letter last Tuesday.

As her plane landed at Karachi airport, a message came from the government
to her security adviser, Malik.

“They told us it wasn’t safe and they would take her in a helicopter direct
to Bilawal House,” he said later. Bhutto is nothing if not brave, and she was defiant in the face of what they thought was a government attempt to stop her triumphant homecoming.

“By then we knew that more than 1m people, maybe 2m, were on the streets,” she said. “They had come from all over the country, taking days and spending what little money they have. How could I disappoint them, sneaking in the back door?”

The excitement among her supporters on the aircraft had reached near-hysteria, and the pilot was refusing to taxi off the runway and open the doors until they quietened. Bhutto herself had to broadcast a message from the cockpit. Finally we came to a stop, the doors were opened and the media was allowed off first. Then came Bhutto. As she reached the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a phalanx of photographers, tears spilt from her eyes and she almost stumbled.

“I was just so emotional to be home,” she told me later. “It felt like this huge burden off my shoulders after so many years.”

I have known Bhutto for more than 20 years. Her wedding in Karachi in December 1987 was my introduction to Pakistan and led me to move there as a free-lance foreign correspondent.

Over the next two years I covered her fight against Pakistan’s last dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, and her struggle to become the country’s first woman prime minister at 35, campaigning even though pregnant with her first child. Within 20 months of being elected, she was deposed.

Since then I have been back and forth, seeing her ups and downs as she became prime minister for a second time, only to be thrown out once more amid charges of corruption against her and her husband that were never proved.

Because of this, I knew her closest aides. When they saw me among the hundreds of journalists at Karachi airport, they hauled me on to her bus, one of only two foreigners on board.

Bhutto had always been a crowd-puller, particularly in her home province of Sindh, but I wondered if she would still have the kind of support I had witnessed 20 years ago.

Then she was untainted, a fresh-faced girl not long out of Harvard and Oxford and daughter of a man who had been seen as the first Pakistani to give a voice to the poor before Zia deposed and hanged him.

This time she was coming back as part of a deal with another dictator, Musharraf, even if she refused to call it that. She insisted it was an “understanding for a transition towards democracy”. But everyone knew that as a result of the deal the government’s corruption cases against her had been dropped, allowing her to return and contest elections due to be held by January.

Moreover, this was a US-brokered deal that had involved frequent meetings with Richard Boucher, the US assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia, as well as 2am phone calls from Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, to break deadlocks.

Britain had also played its part, and Jack Straw was credited with bringing Bhutto in from the cold when he was foreign secretary.

“As long as Washington and Whitehall are wedded to keeping Musharraf in power for their war on terror, she had no choice but to come back like this,” said Malik, who led the negotiations on her side.

Polls commissioned by the US State Department, which showed that Bhutto commands never less than 30% of public support, led America to see that the way forward in an increasingly unstable Pakistan might be to bring her back as the democratic face of a beleaguered Musharraf.

“Each time military rule has failed, they have turned to a Bhutto to save the situation,” says Husain Haqqani, director of the Centre for International Relations at Boston University and a former adviser to Bhutto and the military.

“Her father in 1971, then her in 1988. This time, at least, there is a Benazir Bhutto available to save the situation. If the military and intelligence agencies don’t stop meddling in politics, next time maybe there won’t be.”

In a country where Osama Bin Laden commands far higher popularity ratings than President George W Bush, would America’s role in her return work against her? It seemed not: her supporters came out in their hundreds of thousands to welcome her home.

From the top of the bus, it was an amazing spectacle: red, black and green PPP flags waving and people cheering, dancing and holding banners showing
pictures of Bhutto and her father. Car horns blared.

“Only she can do this,” said her mother-in-law, Mrs Zardari, as she looked out on the crowds from the top of the bus. “It makes me cry.”

The sun was already setting as we reached Star Gate, at the end of the airport road, and turned right onto the main Shar-e-Faisal highway towards the city. For the first time, we could get an idea of the size of the crowds packing the road, which stretched as far as we could see into the distance.

As we all looked out, there was a flutter of feathers above our heads. Somebody had released a clutch of white doves, which circled above us amid“ooh”s and “aah”s.

One fell to the floor of the bus and hurt its foot. Bhutto cradled it and put it on her shoulder, where it perched for hours as she waved indefatigably to the crowds.

One thing was clear, however. The bus might have bulletproof sides, but we were standing in the open on top. We were travelling at a snail’s pace, and, with people all around - on the streets, up trees and lampposts, on top of buildings – it felt very exposed.

“How can you possibly secure this?” I asked one of the police officers on the top of the bus.

He looked up at the heavens. “It’s in God’s hands,” he said. Bhutto herself stood right at the front, not behind the bulletproof screen that had been constructed to withstand even a shot from a Dragunov high-velocity rifle (“available as easily as sweets in the bazaar,” according to Zulfikar Ali Mirza, who designed the bus).

Durrani, the best friend of Bhutto’s husband, was getting increasingly worried about how he could protect her.

The route of the convoy took it not only past a number of tall buildings but also under a series of footbridges and flyovers, which we had to duck to get underneath. The crowds on top were so close that their hands brushed ours. Fortunately, nobody threw anything more harmful than petals and rosebuds.

Durrani told me another fear was that someone might use a remote-controlled
toy plane loaded with explosives to land on the bus. He was constantly on his mobile phone.

“The government promised to provide us with jammers so we could intercept
any remote-con-trolled explosive device within 200 metres,” he explained.“But the man in the car in front of the bus with the jammer keeps telling me it isn’t working and that we should do something.”

Desperately, he tried to phone Tariq Aziz – the national security adviser and Musharraf’s point man in the negotiations with the Bhutto camp – but to no avail. Then Asif, Bhutto’s husband, called.

“He asked me what was going on. ‘I can see you all on mobile phones, and they shouldn’t work if the jammer is working.’ I told him it wasn’t. [He said:] ‘For God’s sake, get Benazir behind the bulletproof screen.’ I asked her but she said, ‘No, I must be at the front and greet my people.’ ” It was not only bombers that they were concerned about. As darkness fell, I stood at the front with Bhutto.

“Have you noticed the street-lights?” she asked me. “Each one we approach goes off so the road is in darkness and my guards can’t see anything. Someone is doing this. We’ve had information they might try a shooting.” She was right. Illuminated by the bus’s lights, we passed along like a bright bubble while the crowd on either side was in darkness.

I remembered back to when I lived in Pakistan. Whenever there was a mystery attack in Karachi, usually taking out somebody the intelligence agencies did not like, the shootings would be preceded by the streetlights going off.

Suddenly there was a crack of what sounded like gunfire. I threw myself on the floor before realising with embarrassment that it was fireworks.“I don’t like the firecrackers,” Bhutto said. “Anyone could use it as cover for shooting.”

Her security people used searchlights to sweep the darkened crowds, looking out for anyone with a gun or a suspicious backpack.

“There’s no technique to identify a suicide bomber in an open street like this until it’s too late,” Durrani admitted. “That’s why we decided on a human shield.”

He said they had trained 5,000 young men, volunteers for the so-called “jan israin na Benazir Bhutto” – those prepared to sacrifice themselves for Bhutto. Of those, 3,000 were sent on to the bridges and tall buildings and into the crowd while 2,000 stayed around the bus.

Unarmed, they were identifiable by white or black T-shirts. Bravest of all – and many of them doomed – were those who formed a human chain around the bus. Others formed an outer cordon around the bus’s police escort, holding a rope to stop the crowds coming too near.

At about 10pm we suddenly lurched to a halt. There was a moment of panic until someone explained that the bus had a flat tyre. Some local activists were told to get off as the load was too heavy. I was allowed to stay.

We sat stationary, crowds surrounding us and the vans of bored-looking police officers with Kalashnikovs forming a cordon either side. Somebody brought burgers and Pepsis, which we gobbled hungrily. Pizzas also arrived.

Seven hours after leaving the airport, we weren’t even halfway along the 15km route to the Jinnah memorial, where Bhutto planned to make her speech.

“If we keep going at this rate I’ll have to order in breakfast on the bus,” Malik joked.

Eventually the bus started moving again. As it got later, the security fears began to be forgotten and the mood became euphoric.

There were even women in the crowd, which had been almost exclusively male. Many had brought their children, dressed in their best and excited to see such a spectacle.

Bhutto rested in the armchair inside the bulletproof shield on top of the bus, the wounded dove still perched on her shoulder, her face animated. I sat on the arm and we chatted.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked. “Not at all,” she laughed. “It’s incredible, far more people than in 1986. How must Musharraf be feeling seeing this?”

She continued: “This is the real Pakistan, not the militants or the military. We are giving a voice to the moderates that don’t want to see their country taken over by terrorists.”

For a moment she grew sombre. “I just hope I can meet all these expectations . . . but also that I am allowed to.”

Abida Hussein, one of Pakistan’s best-known women MPs and a former critic of Bhutto who recently switched sides, got on the bus. The two women went downstairs to the safe compartment. Perhaps 20 minutes remained before the bombs would shatter the euphoria.

Karachi’s police chief said yesterday the first bomb was a grenade or car bomb to make space, while the second blast was the work of a suicide bomber. His body – or body parts – has not yet been identified.

Although three people died on top of the bus, the only reason that Bhutto and the rest of us were not killed, it seems, is that the human shield worked – the young volunteers around the bus stopped the suicide bomber getting closer, paying for our protection with their own lives.

So, who did it? The awful thing about Pakistan today is that it could be any one of a number of people or organisations, from militants to the military.

Potential suspects include ethnic groups such as the MQM, the organisation that vies with the PPP for rule of Karachi, Tali-ban sympathisers and even old-guard politicians in deadly opposition to Bhutto.

“Far from bringing stability, Bhutto’s return has threatened everybody,” said a member of Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest religious party.

Bhutto has pointed the finger at remnants in the intelligence and political elite from the Zia regime that executed her father. Some of them, she says, are still in power – although she is keen to make clear she is not implicating the president.

“We have confidence in some elements of the current regime, such as General Musharraf and the foreign minister, but it is the wild cards that give us concern, and those wild cards are usually the old cards,” she said. Musharraf had telephoned her the morning after the attack, she said. “He told me he had warned me not to come back, that there were security risks and he himself had faced two assassination attempts. But he said this shows we moderates must stand together.”

Senior members of her party were not so sure. “My fear is they will use this
as an excuse to declare martial law and not go ahead with the elections,” said Malik.

Would the army really relinquish power? It has run the show for 33 of the country’s 60 years of existence and pulled the strings from behind for much of the rest of the time. During Bhutto’s two stints as prime minister she often complained: “I am in office but not in power.” She later admitted she had been forced to leave both the nuclear programme and Afghan policy in the hands of the military.

Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, the military has markedly increased its role in the public and private sectors. Retired generals and brigadiers run the tax authority, the postal system and the housing department. Two of Pakistan’s four provinces have generals as governors. According to Military
Inc, a recent book by the defence analyst Ayesha Siddiqa, the army also controls large parts of the economy.

For Bhutto, the assassination attempt was a brutal awakening to how much the country has changed since she packed her bags and fled to London in 1998.

The evening after the attack, I sat with Bhutto in her small, book-lined study. She had just held her first press conference since her return, a bravura performance at which she had railed against “those who turned triumph into tragedy” and insisted she would not be deterred from her fight to bring back democracy, even if it cost her her life.

Dressed in sombre grey silk with a black armband, she told me she had had just less than four hours’ sleep after the attack, from 6am to 10am. She had woken up with blood in her ears from the effect of the blast.

“I haven’t felt weepy yet, but it suddenly hit me about 5.30am that maybe I wouldn’t have made it,” she said. “I kept thinking of the noise, the light and the place littered with dead bodies. Everything seemed lit up.

“Also I kept thinking of the boys, the human shields. Do you know more than
50 of them lost their lives?”

On the wall of the study was an old spelling certificate for her youngest daughter, Aseefa, who is 14, a reminder that Bhutto may be a politician but is also a devoted mother.

Her eldest, Bilawal, 19, started at Oxford earlier this month, while Aseefa and her other daughter, Bakhtwar, 17, have remained in Dubai with their father and “a house full of dogs”, as both have important exams coming up.

The first thing she thought of after the bomb went off was the children, and she admitted it had been hard speaking to them that morning.

“They kept saying, ‘Mummy, are you okay? Mummy, are you okay?’ They had been desperately keen to come with me, and I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t want you to come.’ ” She added: “The worst thing is hurting them, making them fearful. I feel children need their parents. Losing my father was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I was 25 – they are still much smaller. I worry about the effect on them.”

She insisted, however, that they understood that she had to return to Pakistan. “My mother comes from Iran, and many of her relatives and friends
never went back home, so I used to think I didn’t want to be one of those people who’d lost their country.”

She said that after the attack her husband had been about to jump on the next plane from Dubai to be with her. “I said: ‘Don’t come back, because what if they don’t let you out? Then the girls will be on their own.’ ”
Although she vows to continue, she is having to rethink her strategy. Today
she had planned to return in procession to her ancestral home in Larkana, but that has been put on hold.

“Originally I was planning to be on the road the whole time, but now that’s clearly impossible,” she said. “We can’t be intimidated by them but we can’t
take reckless risks. We know they won’t give up.

“The problem is, in Pakistan people want to see their leaders,” she added.“Our power base are the poor and dispossessed. They don’t have TVs or computers we can reach them through.”

Yesterday the usually cacophonous city of Karachi was subdued. Relatives of those who never came home on Friday morning crowded city hospitals and morgues, waving pictures of the missing. Others brought them to Bhutto’s house.

A survivor, Nadir Ali Magsi, a 25-year-old peasant farmer from a village close to Larkana, lay in the neurosurgery ward at Jinnah hospital. He had shrapnel embedded in his head and legs. One eye was bandaged up, and he had difficulty hearing, but he managed to speak.

“Benazir zindabad,” he repeatedly said. Long live Benazir.

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Scenes From A Wreckage
By AMIR MIR

For almost 10 hours on October 18, the people of Karachi choked the streets, cheering Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in a mass catharsis on her return home from exile. As Benazir's cavalcade threaded through an enraptured throng towards the mausoleum of Mohammed Ali Jinnah where she was to address a public rally, the PPP leader stood atop an especially fortified, bullet-proof truck, waving lustily at her followers and occasionally wiping eyes brimming with tears of joy. At 12.09 am on October 19, the cavalcade had reached the Karsaz Bridge, still 10 km away from the destination. But Benazir was not to be seen—19 minutes earlier she had gone down to use the makeshift washroom built in the lower deck of the truck.

It was then that someone tossed a grenade on the right side of Benazir's truck, hoping the explosion would break the three rings of security cordon around it. The outer ring was of Pakistani policemen, the other two of the Janisar Force of the PPP. Her personal guards valiantly held their ground. In the ensuing confusion, a suicide bomber tried to sneak under Benazir's truck from the left to inflict maximum damage. Challenged, he detonated himself. (Subsequently, the truck's windshield was found riddled with bullets, suggesting a sniper had tried to ensure nobody could escape to safety.) The carnivalesque mood soon turned funereal—human flesh and limbs flew around, people wailed in agony and grief, and the death toll reached a chilling 143.

What saved Benazir was that she wasn't atop the truck at that fatal moment; the explosion was powerful enough to rip off a door of her truck. Government sources say the assassination plan reveals prior knowledge of the security architecture around Benazir. Not only was the attack three-pronged, those who masterminded it also chose a suicide bomber in order to evade the jamming devices fitted into two vehicles immediately in front and behind Benazir's truck. The jammers could have prevented any explosion triggered by a remote-controlled device, as had happened during one of the two attempts on Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf's life in 2003.

The nature of explosives used is another indicator of intricate planning. Investigators say the suicide bomber (whose head has been recovered, and is supposed to be a 21-year-old who had a 48-hour stubble) had strapped himself with 15-20 kg of an explosive mix of C4 and Trinitrotoluene or TNT. The C4 explosive is rated as the best quality military plastic explosive that detonates with tremendous velocity, and isn't readily available. The other ingredient—TNT—has the capacity to shatter concrete structures and hillocks. Investigators say the TNT was meant to pierce through the bullet-proof casing of Benazir's vehicle, with the C4 inflicting damage over a wide area. Fortunately for Benazir, two police jeeps accompanying her bore the brunt of the explosion.

So, who were these people who could access such devastating and rare explosives, and who were aware of the obstacles they would encounter in targeting Benazir? The signature of Al Qaeda, as well as local militant groups affiliated to it, is writ large—the self-destructing agent, the total apathy towards popular sentiment, the appetite for the 'big' hit. But did these groups have the assistance, or tacit approval, of jehadi-minded elements in the administration? Benazir herself thought so. On October 19, she disclosed that she had written a confidential letter to Musharraf on October 16, informing him about three senior officials who were planning to assassinate her when she returned home.Her information, she said, had come from a brotherly country (read Afghanistan) who told her about four suicide squads having entered Karachi to kill her. "However, I had made it clear (to Musharraf) that I won't blame Taliban or Al Qaeda if I am attacked, but I will name the three officials as I know quite well my enemies in the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment," she told journalists.

Benazir has not yet named the three persons, but PPP insiders disclosed their identity to Outlook. It's an illustrious list: Brig (retd) Ejaz Hussain Shah, DG, Intelligence Bureau; Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, chief minister of Punjab; and Hassan Waseem Afzal, a former official of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). A fourth, familiar name pops up in the concluding part of the letter—that of former isi chief, Lt Gen Hameed Gul, who's a vocal supporter of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

PPP insiders believe the quartet's motive in organising the assassination attempt on Benazir was to check the burgeoning moderate political alliance between her and Musharraf. As such, the Musharraf camp was bitterly divided over his deal with Benazir. One group led by the secretary of the National Security Council, Tariq Aziz Warraich, was in favour of Musharraf sharing power with the PPP. Shah's group opposed the deal with Benazir, believing it would be at the cost of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam). Ejaz Shah is close to the powerful Chaudhry brothers—Elahi and Shujaat Hussain—whose party the ruling PML-Q is, besides sharing their fundamentalist worldview.

Indeed, it was Shah who had 'arranged' the surrender of Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed, the killer of American journalist Daniel Pearl, on February 5, 2005, in Lahore. Then, Shah was the home secretary of Punjab. Shah knows Omar's family well as both of them belong to the Nankana Sahib area of Punjab. The relationship between Shah and Omar was really one of a handler and his agent. In an interview with Daily Times, August 13, 2007, Benazir Bhutto said, "Brig Shah and the isi recruited Omar Sheikh, who killed Danny Pearl. So I would feel very uncomfortable to have the Intelligence Bureau, which has more than 1,00,000 people under it, run by a man who worked so closely with militants and extremists."

Links with militants apart, Shah was instrumental, say PPP insiders, in splitting PML (Nawaz) and weaning away 20 PPP members in the National Assembly, to form the PML-Q. It's Shah on whom the PML-Q depends to manipulate the impending general election to its advantage. For the Chaudhry brothers, the general election is a do-or-die battle: a defeat could well spell political oblivion for them.

The third person named in Benazir's letter, Hassan Waseem Afzal, is currently secretary to the governor of Punjab. He was appointed to this post after he was removed as NAB's deputy chairman on Benazir's insistence a few months before her Abu Dhabi meeting with Musharraf in July this year. It was one step Benazir had wanted Musharraf to take as a confidence-building measure with her. Afzal had incurred her wrath because he had made it his personal mission to pursue corruption cases against her in the United Kingdom, Spain and Switzerland. It was on his order that the Interpol issued a red alert notice against her.
The fourth conspirator PPP names is Gul, a retired, dyed-in-the-wool Pakistani general who headed the isi following the jehad against the Soviets in Afghanistan and was responsible for fomenting the Kashmir insurgency in 1989. Gul worked in tandem with the Americans against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but began to oppose America post-9/11. In 2003, Gul declared, "God will destroy America."

Government sources, however, say a high-level meeting presided over by Musharraf dismissed Benazir's accusations as "childish". They also say her insistence on implicating Musharraf's close associates in the Karachi carnage could even threaten her equation with the president. (The FIR filed by Benazir in Karachi states as suspects "those whose names were given to Gen Musharraf".) They claim the suicide attack bore the signature of Al Qaeda, arguing that she has incurred its wrath because of her support for military operation against the Red Mosque fanatics in Islamabad in July and for declaring that she would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to question Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan about his nuclear proliferation activities. Her emergence as an ally of Musharraf, government sources say, explains the fury of militants who had targeted him as well earlier.

But, are Benazir's claims as ridiculous as government sources are making them out to be? Why, even Musharraf in his book, In the Line of Fire, wrote that militants roped in Pakistani air force personnel in the conspiracy to kill him in 2003. In another abortive attempt the same year, Musharraf implicated personnel of the Special Services Group charged with vip security. What was accepted as true in Musharraf's case cannot prime facie be falsified in Benazir's. Nothing is impossible in Pakistan's cloak-and-dagger politics.

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Commentary: Bhutto undeterred by cowardly bombings
By Wajid Shamsul Hasan

Editor's note: Wajid Shamsul Hasan is a former Pakistani High Commissioner in Britain. He is a friend and adviser to Benazir Bhutto.

LONDON, England -- Born into one of the most famous political families on the Asian sub-continent, Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was raised to withstand constant public scrutiny.

A bright student, Bhutto had academic insight that brought her success at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. While in school, she wanted to be a journalist or a foreign policy expert, but she soon found herself plunged into politics.

I got the first glimpse of Bhutto when she accompanied her father, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to the Indian city of Simla for a summit with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to negotiate an agreement for peace in 1972.

As a member of the media team in Mr. Bhutto's entourage, I saw in the younger Bhutto the making of another great female leader. In her early 20s, she carried herself with grace, stately dignity and striking confidence.

The military coup against her father in 1977, followed by his judicial murder in 1979, catapulted her into politics to complete the elder Bhutto's mission of empowering his people.

As the leader of the country's biggest party -- the Pakistan People's Party -- Bhutto has not given up her father's mission of transforming Pakistan into a modern democracy with equality for all its citizens.

Because she has dared to challenge Pakistan's regressive forces and a pro-status quo establishment, Bhutto has braved more than two decades of persecution and prosecution. She has proven her political prowess by holding the People's Party together while in exile.

Bhutto's popularity has been sustained even though she's been a target of disinformation and faced a host of unproven charges of corruption --- charges that even her main political rival, General Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged as politically motivated.

It came as a rude shock to Bhutto's opponents when she received an unprecedented welcome in Karachi last week as "the daughter of their destiny." The people's carnival that converted Karachi into a "mini-Pakistan" was marred by two suicide bombings aimed at killing her. She survived, but more than 130 others were killed, over 500 injured.

So far no one has claimed responsibility. Meanwhile, the government has rushed to introduce Bhutto-specific laws to curtail her political activities.

Will she be deterred by such cowardly acts of hidden faces to keep her away from her people? Most certainly not!

The attacks have strengthened the confidence of the masses in her leadership and in her democratic mission of empowering the people. She wishes to empower the people not only to better their own lot but to get rid of extremism, terrorism and intolerance, forces that are pushing Pakistan to the edge of failed statehood.

I have known Bhutto closely. She is brave, bold and courageous and she will not be intimidated.

Once, I accompanied Bhutto as she went to offer her condolences after the death of a party worker. When we reached the family's street, located in the heart of armed opposition, gunfire could be heard.

It was intended to scare Bhutto off, so she wouldn't go to the deceased worker's house. We advised her to return home as the gunfire boomed all around.

"Nothing doing. We must go on," she said. "If we turn back now those trying to scare us will ingrain permanent fear in the locality especially for the aggrieved family of the victim. We must break the siege of fear and send the message to the gangsters that no amount of gunfire can deter us."

It is a message that resonates today.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer

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Bhutto Attacks
Cold comfort is the best we can hope for.
By Aaron Mannes

The question of who was behind Friday’s assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto is the whodunit from hell and, instead of a pistol, the drawing room dénouement will feature Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s October 18 return from a decade of exile was bound to be a pivotal moment in Pakistani politics, and thus, also will likely to be a violent one. Frustrated with President Musharraf’s unending military dictatorship and stagnating living conditions, the people of Karachi turned out in huge numbers to greet Bhutto as their potential savior.

The attack, which struck as Bhutto’s convoy slowly made its way through the city of Karachi, did not injure Bhutto. It did, however, kill 140 people, half of whom were members of Bhutto’s security detail. So far details remain unclear, although security services claim to have identified the heads of two suicide bombers.

At the best of times Pakistan is a society with a penchant for conspiracy theories, and the circumstances of the attack can only fuel this speculation. Despite ample warning that an attack on Bhutto was likely, security was inadequate to control the massive crowds that formed to meet Bhutto. Because of these crowds Bhutto’s convoy took about ten hours to travel about ten miles, while Karachi became a giant street party — and a perfect target for terror. Oddly, streetlights along the convoy’s route were turned off, complicating security efforts to spot possible attackers. In fairness however, Pakistani infrastructure is spotty at best, and these failings may have been due to raw incompetence. The government’s response to Bhutto’s accusations is that Bhutto ignored their security advice and insisted on a massive rally — of course such rallies are central to Pakistani politics.

Bhutto has vowed to fight Pakistan’s Islamists. Reportedly, a Taliban leader in South Waziristan, Baitullah Mehsud, who has been linked to the bombing attacks that were a response to the government’s storming of the Red Mosque earlier this summer, promised to greet Bhutto with suicide bombs. Mehsud has since denied making this statement. Even if this particular band of Islamists had nothing to do with the attacks, there is a vast constellation of Pakistani Islamist groups — most with at least tangential links to al Qaeda - that would object to Bhutto taking power and many would be savvy enough not to advertise their intentions.

However, many Pakistanis, including Bhutto herself, believe that if the Islamists were involved, they did so as cat’s paws for Pakistani intelligence. Pakistani intelligence has supported various Islamist groups to further its interests in Aghanistan, Kashmir, and Pakistan. Bhutto goes further and has stated that while she does not hold Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf responsible; there are three officials, whom she will not name, linked to former President Zia ul-Haq (who overthrew and executed her father), behind the attack. Not surprisingly, there is a great deal of speculation about these individuals. Topping the list is retired General Ejaz Shah, the head of the Intelligence Bureau (and consequently ultimately responsible for Bhutto’s security). Shah was reportedly the intelligence community’s liaison to the Taliban, al Qaeda, and to Omar Sheikh who is in prison for the murder of Daniel Pearl. 

Also suspected are Chaudhru Pervez Ellahi and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. When Musharraf deposed the last elected Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, the intelligence services engineered a split of Sharif’s party, the Pakistani Muslim League (PML). The Chaudhry cousins head the faction loyal to Musharraf. Bhutto, head of the other major national party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), has been in ongoing negotiations with Musharraf about entering a power-sharing arrangement. Few in Pakistan think much of the Chaudhry faction of the PML, while the PPP (as seen in the turnout to Bhutto’s homecoming) commands a substantial following. With Bhutto providing civilian legitimacy to Musharraf’s regime, the Chaudhry brothers would be out of the equation. Another possible candidate for Bhutto’s list is Ejaz ul-Haq, currently Musharraf’s Minister for Religious Affairs and the son of Zia ul-Haq, who executed Bhutto’s father.

Although Bhutto’s charges are a fascinating window into Pakistani politics, their veracity is uncertain. It is possible that as Bhutto moves closer to Musharraf, these are rivals that will need to be removed. She had previously called on Musharraf to fire General Shah because of his Islamist links. PML chief Hussain has responded that there was in fact a conspiracy, engineered by Bhutto’s husband (nicknamed Mr. 10% for his “deal-making” activities when Bhutto was in office) in order to garner sympathy for Bhutto.

There are other, more harrowing potential motives behind the attempt on Bhutto’s life. In courting Western support for her return to Pakistan, Bhutto promised that the International Atomic Energy Agency would receive access to A. Q. Khan, father of the Pakistani nuclear program and head of an international clandestine nuclear proliferation ring, who is currently under house arrest. The full extent of Khan’s network remains unknown. It is inconceivable that Khan carried out his operations without substantial assistance from figures in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. This is information that the intelligence services would not like to see revealed. Another player that would prefer that the IAEA not have access to A. Q. Khan would be his leading customer. Khan may be able to reveal critical details about Iran’s nuclear program that would galvanize the international community against the Iranian nuclear program. Iran has launched suicide terror attacks around the world in support of their strategic interests, and there are militant Shia organizations in Pakistan with links to Iran.

Because of the long links between Pakistani intelligence and the Islamists, none of these scenarios are mutually exclusive. The government has refused Bhutto’s request for international participation in the investigation, which will only foster conspiracy theorists. But, in all likelihood, the attack on Bhutto was linked to a Pakistani Islamist organization. However, it is a cold comfort that attributing a massive terror attack to the Islamist “usual suspects” is the least disturbing scenario. 

— Aaron Mannes, editor of TheTerrorWonk, researches international security affairs at the University of Maryland’s Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics and is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland.

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Bhutto attack may remain unsolved
By Laura King

Pakistan has a poor record of bringing to justice those responsible for attacks similar to the one that targeted the ex-premier last week.

KARACHI, PAKISTAN -- The government of President Pervez Musharraf says that those responsible for trying to kill former leader Benazir Bhutto in a horrific bombing last week that left nearly 140 people dead will be brought to justice. But history suggests otherwise.

Of dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks that have taken place in Pakistan over the last several years, including a number of high-profile assassination attempts, very few such cases have been definitively solved.

One notable exception: two attempts in 2003 to kill Musharraf with massive bombs near his headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. The alleged mastermind was hunted down and shot to death months later by Pakistani security forces.

Analysts, along with current and former investigators and government officials, said it was highly unlikely that those who planned the attack against Bhutto in this port city as she returned home from eight years in self-imposed exile would be captured, tried and convicted.

They cited factors including imprecise investigative methods, the shifting nature of the many Islamic militant groups with the desire and motivation to kill Bhutto, the vagaries of the Pakistani judicial system and a degree of sympathy in some official quarters for the militants' cause.

"Are we going to try? Yes," said one Pakistani official who is close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Are we going to succeed? To be very honest, I have my doubts."

Both Bhutto and the government have cast suspicion on Islamists who are angered by her pro-Western stance and repelled by the idea of a woman in a leadership role. But assuming that theory is correct, narrowing down the list of suspects will be a difficult and painstaking task.

Modern forensic methods are little used in Pakistan. From the moment of the attack early Friday, the crime scene was tainted and trampled by hundreds of people, victims and rescuers alike.

Amid panic and chaos, police made little effort to cordon off the area around the blasts, which took place on the main boulevard leading from Karachi's international airport to the center of the city.

"It wasn't exactly 'CSI' -- not Miami, or Las Vegas, or even some small town," said a Western diplomat in Karachi, referring to the popular American TV crime series in which latex-gloved forensics experts examine the tiniest of clues.

Bhutto, unharmed in the attack, was quickly hustled from her damaged vehicle, which then sat by the roadside virtually unguarded for hours. By early morning, boys were swarming over the scene, collecting bolts and ball bearings sprayed in all directions by the force of the twin blasts. Cars and trucks passed within inches of the spot where the explosions occurred.

Bhutto has demanded that foreign investigators be brought in