Political Waves » 2007

Archive for December, 2007

Behind Closed Doors

They knew, we didn’t — they wanted it that way. They knew it was wrong even as they did it — but they didn’t care. When it comes to torture and clandestine ops, what else is there to say?

We might discuss that we elect these people — that we provide their income — that we disapprove their actions — that most of what they do is immoral, if not completely illegal.

We might. Perhaps we will, and loudly, in the year ahead.

Here are three excellent reads that leave no doubt in your mind about who the Bushies are — and as miffed as I am at the New York Times* for hiring on NeoCon hack, William Kristol, as a columnist, I welcome their editorial today. Then a Times weekend piece that is causing the dust to rise in the torture-tape revelations, followed by Glenn Greenwald’s analysis.

They knew — that’s all there is to say.

Jude

* CNN has been taking it in the shorts recently for their descent into tabloid trashiness, due to the loud, insistent voices of Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck … hate talk will get you ratings but not respect. The same goes for Kristol — this is one of the voices that led us into chaos, and giving him a cushy platform to continue his pontifications will garner readers, but no accolades. As usual, with MSM of any kind, the bottom line is bucks.

Looking at America
New York Times editorial
December 31, 2007

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America. ++

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image
SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times
12/30/07

WASHINGTON — If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency’s every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency’s clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the service’s director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Now, the disclosure of the tapes and their destruction in 2005 have become just the public spectacle the agency had sought to avoid. To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

The Justice Department, the C.I.A.’s inspector general and Congress are investigating whether any official lied about the tapes or broke the law by destroying them. Still in dispute is whether any White House official encouraged their destruction and whether the C.I.A. deliberately hid them from the national Sept. 11 commission.

But interviews with two dozen current and former officials, most of whom would speak about the classified program only on the condition of anonymity, revealed new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated. Their accounts show how political and legal considerations competed with intelligence concerns in the handling of the tapes.

The discussion about the tapes took place in Congressional briefings and secret deliberations among top White House lawyers, including a meeting in May 2004 just days after photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had reminded the administration of the power of such images. The debate stretched over the tenure of two C.I.A. chiefs and became entangled in a feud between the agency’s top lawyers and its inspector general.

The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons. Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, according to several intelligence officials.

“You couldn’t have more than one or two analysts in the room,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official at the time the interrogations were taped. “You want people with spectacular language skills to watch the tapes. You want your top Al Qaeda experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.”

Given such advantages, why was the taping stopped by the end of 2002, less than a year after it started?

“By that time,” Mr. Krongard said, “paranoia was setting in.”

The Decision to Tape

By several accounts, the decision to begin taping Abu Zubaydah and another detainee suspected of being a Qaeda operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was made in the field, with several goals in mind.

First, there was Abu Zubaydah’s precarious condition. “There was concern that we needed to have this all documented in case he should expire from his injuries,” recalled one former intelligence official.

Just as important was the fact that for many years the C.I.A. had rarely conducted even standard interrogations, let alone ones involving physical pressure, so officials wanted to track closely the use of legally fraught interrogation methods. And there was interest in capturing all the information to be gleaned from a rare resource — direct testimony from those who had attacked the United States.

But just months later, the taping was stopped. Some field officers had never liked the idea. “If you’re a case officer, the last thing you want is someone in Washington second-guessing everything you did,” said one former agency veteran.

More significant, interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters. American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.

Heightening the worries about the tapes was word of the first deaths of prisoners in American custody. In November 2002, an Afghan man froze to death overnight while chained in a cell at a C.I.A. site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, the capital. Two more prisoners died in December 2002 in American military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice.

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency’s top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.
But both Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat, thought destroying the tapes would be legally and politically risky.

C.I.A. officials did not press the matter…

The Detention Program

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.

Mr. Helgerson — now conducting the videotapes review with the Justice Department — had already rankled covert officers with an investigation into the 2001 shooting down of a missionary plane by Peruvian military officers advised by the C.I.A. The investigation set off widespread concern within the clandestine branch that a day of reckoning could be coming for officers involved in the agency’s secret prison program. The Peru investigation often pitted Mr. Helgerson against Mr. Muller, who vigorously defended members of the clandestine branch and even lobbied the Justice Department to head off criminal charges in the matter, according to former intelligence officials.

“Muller wanted to show the clandestine branch that he was looking out for them,” said John Radsan, who served as an assistant general counsel for the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004. “And his aggressiveness on Peru was meant to prove to the operations people that they were protected on a lot of other programs, too.”

Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib disclosures, Mr. Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel; David S. Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council.

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general’s report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

Looking for Guidance

After Mr. Tenet and Mr. Muller left the C.I.A. in mid-2004, Mr. Rodriguez and other officials from the clandestine branch decided again to take up the tapes with the new chief at Langley, Mr. Goss, the former congressman.

Mr. Rodriguez had taken over the clandestine directorate in late 2004, and colleagues say Mr. Goss repeatedly emphasized to Mr. Rodriguez that he was expected to run operations without clearing every decision with superiors.

During a meeting in Mr. Goss’s office with Mr. Rodriguez, John A. Rizzo, who by then had replaced Mr. Muller as the agency’s top lawyer, told the new C.I.A. director that the clandestine branch wanted a firm decision about what to do with the tapes.

According to two people close to Mr. Goss, he advised against destroying the tapes, as he had in Congress, and told Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Rodriguez that he thought the tapes should be preserved at the overseas location. Apparently he did not explicitly prohibit the tapes’ destruction.

Yet in November 2005, Congress already was moving to outlaw “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, and The Washington Post reported that some C.I.A. prisoners were being held in Eastern Europe. As the agency scrambled to move the prisoners to new locations, Mr. Rodriguez and his aides decided to use their own authority to destroy the tapes, officials said.

One official who has spoken with Mr. Rodriguez said Mr. Rodriguez and his aides were concerned about protection of the C.I.A. officers on the tapes, from Al Qaeda, as the C.I.A. has stated, and from political pressure.

The tapes might visually identify as many as five or six people present for each interrogation — interrogators themselves, whom the agency now prefers to call “debriefers”; doctors or doctor’s assistants who monitored the prisoner’s medical state; and security officers, the official said. Some traveled regularly in and out of areas where Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists are active, he said.

Apart from concerns about physical safety in the event of a leak, the official said, there was concern for the careers of officers shown on the tapes. “We didn’t want them to become political scapegoats,” he said.

According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Mr. Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

One day in November 2005, Mr. Rodriguez sent a cable ordering the destruction of the recordings. Soon afterward, he notified both Mr. Goss and Mr. Rizzo, taking full responsibility for the decision.

Former intelligence officials said that Mr. Goss was unhappy about the news, in part because it was further evidence that as the C.I.A. director he was so weakened that his subordinates would directly reject his advice. Yet it appears that Mr. Rodriguez was never reprimanded. Nor is there evidence that Mr. Goss promptly notified Congress that the tapes were gone.

The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding. Some say the methods helped get information that prevented terrorist attacks. Others, like John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, say it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods.

Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods.

“To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.” ++

Oligarchical decay
Glenn Greenwald, Salon
Sunday December 30, 2007

A new lengthy article in this morning’s New York Times purports to set forth “new details about why the [CIA interrogation] tapes were made and then eliminated.” Written by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti (who broke the original story), what the article primarily does is rely on anonymous sources to assign principal responsibility for the tapes’ destruction to mid-level CIA official Jose Rodriguez. But in doing so, the article identifies, in passing, the critical question that remains unanswered: what was the involvement of George Bush and Dick Cheney in the videos’ destruction?

Shane and Mazetti previously reported that “several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.” In that article, they quoted one senior intelligence official “with direct knowledge of the matter [who] said there had been ‘vigorous sentiment’ among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.” The White House has simply refused to say whether they were behind the decision.

Just consider how significant that question is, and how striking it is that it remains unanswered. By the time Addington and Gonzales were discussing this matter, it was well known — obvious — that those interrogations tapes were critically relevant to a number of judicial proceedings and government investigations, including The 9/11 Commission’s. It is thus highly likely, to put it mildly, that any decision to destroy that evidence would constitute the crime of obstruction of justice, the same federal felony for which Lewis Libby has now (in a different matter) been convicted.

And here are the two top legal aides to the President and the Vice President participating in a meeting where the destruction of this vital evidence was expressly considered, yet we do not know what it is that they said. Did they advise that the tapes be destroyed or give implicit permission for it? If so, it very likely means that Bush and/or Cheney (and certainly their top aides) committed serious felonies.

But does anyone really believe that we’re going to find out the answers to those questions any time soon? And even if we did find out the answers, and even if they were incriminating, does anyone believe that there would ever be any consequences, any accountability, for this wrongdoing by anyone above a mid-level position of responsibility, such as Rodriguez?
* * * * *

In case after case, our political establishment has adopted the “principle” that our most powerful actors are immune from the rule of law. And they’ve adopted the enabling supplemental “principle” that any information which our political leaders want to keep suppressed is — by definition, for that reason alone — information that is “classified” and should not be disclosed.

The instruments used to secure these prerogatives are numerous and growing. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick this week summarized the Bush administration’s 10 most egregious legal inventions to enable lawbreaking, including the “states secrets privilege” which has now “has ballooned into a doctrine of blanket immunity for any conduct the administration wishes to hide” and the claim that “everyone who has ever spoken to the president about anything is barred from congressional testimony by executive privilege.” All of these developments have a common strain, a shared objective: ensuring that our highest political officials and our most powerful corporations are beyond the reach of the law.

Thus, our establishment believes that any information that would shed light on whether our most powerful actors have broken the law is information that shouldn’t be disclosed. In those accidental cases when — via unauthorized leaks — information is disclosed that demonstrates that crimes have been committed, our establishment bands together to insist that nothing be done, that there is no need to investigate or hold anyone accountable, and that the only real wrongdoing is by those “leakers” who disclosed the lawbreaking.

This is the same pattern seen over and over: leakers reveal that Bush broke the law for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law, and every investigation — legislative and judicial — is successfully blocked, and Congress then moves to legalize the lawbreaking. The top aide to Bush and Cheney, Lewis Libby, is found unanimously by a 12-person jury to have lied deliberately with the intent of blocking an FBI and Grand Jury investigation into illegal leaks and is sentenced by a conservative judge to prison, yet is protected from jail time by the President while our media and political establishment cheer almost unanimously.

Our largest telecommunication corporations reap huge profits by brazenly violating numerous, long-standing federal laws (.pdf) for years by enabling government access to our communications without any judicial approval, and our political establishment bands together to demand that they be protected from any consequences and that any efforts to uncover what happened be squelched. Our government implements a secret torture regime that violates numerous laws and treaties and Congress acts to legalize it and provide retroactive immunity to the lawbreakers. Congress subpoenas numerous officials to find out why 9 federal prosecutors were fired and, when the subpoenas are literally ignored, nothing happens.

And now, our government just destroys evidence crucial both to all sorts of court proceedings and a comprehensive investigation into the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history — part and parcel of its general pattern of destroying or “losing” key evidence — and the Honorable, Independent Attorney General tells both the legislative and judicial branches that they have no right even to investigate. And although we know for a fact that the top aides to both Bush and Cheney were involved in discussions of whether the tapes should be destroyed, we have no idea what they said and are unlikely ever to know, and even if we did find out, it’s impossible to envision anything happening as a result.
* * * * *

And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences. While exempting themselves, these same figures impose increasingly Draconian “law and order” solutions on the masses to ensure that even small infractions of the law prompt vigorous prosecution and inflexible, lengthy prison terms.

As Matt Stoller recently noted in an excellent post on the bipartisan orthodoxies that are untouchable in political debates, “there are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done” (buying and consuming illegal drugs) and “2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world.” It’s almost impossible for the non-rich to defend themselves effectively against government accusations of criminality, and judges have increasingly less sentencing discretion to avoid imposing harsh jail terms. Punishment for crimes is for the masses only, not for members in good standing of our political and corporate establishment.

Where our political elite break the law, our leading media stars and pundits fulfill their central purpose by dutifully arguing that establishment figures who have broken the law have done nothing wrong and deserve protection, even our gratitude, when they do so. In the view of our establishment, even mere civil liability — never mind criminal punishment — is deeply unfair when imposed on lawbreaking corporations, as we see in the “debate” over telecom immunity.

This same warped principle is also expressed in how our establishment scorns the work John Edwards did in representing maimed or dead individuals against the corporations which, through recklessness or negligence, destroyed their lives. From a letter from Theodore Frank of the American Enterprise Institute to the New York Times today (h/t Jay Diamond):

Little wonder that Mr. Romney understands that to improve the economy, one needs to expand the pie, while Mr. Edwards’s policy proposals focus entirely on the redistribution of the existing pie without thought for the future adverse consequences to the size of the pie.

Anything that results in accountability for our largest corporations is inherently bad, even when they’re found under our legal system to have broken the law or acted recklessly. Thus, John Edwards’ self-made wealth is deeply dishonorable and shameful because it came at the expense of our largest corporations and on behalf of the poor and dirty masses, while Mitt Romeny’s wealth, spawned by his CEO-father’s connections, is to be honored and praised because it benefited our establishment and was on behalf of our glorious elite.

Naturally, our establishment sees itself as Good, and thus, whatever their most powerful leaders do — even when illegal — is never really bad. It can’t be, because they do it. Hence, George Bush’s and Lewis Libby’s felonies aren’t really like the felonies of the “drug dealers” and the other street dirt. Neither the Law nor Jail are for the clean, good, upstanding establishment members, so sayeth Jay Rockefeller and Fred Hiatt and Joe Klein and David Ignatius and the rest.
* * * * *

Most revealing of all, anyone who insists that this should be different — anyone who believes that our highest political officials and largest corporations should be held accountable when they break the law — is a shrill “partisan,” bent on vengeance and Guilty of obstructionism: trying to prevent the political establishment from operating in a harmonious, bipartisan manner to do their Important Work. At least under the Bush presidency, investigations into wrongdoing are bad and disruptive and mean-spirited, and calls for consequences for illegal behavior are shrill and nasty.

Digby yesterday analyzed the sudden emergence of the Bipartisan Centrism fetishists — the David Borens and Sam Nunns and David Broders and other old System Guardians who are threatening to back the third-party candidacy of Michael Bloomberg unless they quickly see more “bipartisanship.” As Digby notes — and one should read her whole post — these Harmony Mavens were nowhere to be found during the last six years when our government was fully controlled by a one-party machine that did what it wanted without the slightest consequence.

Only now that the prospect has emerged — however small and remote it is — that there appears to be some rumblings of dissatisfaction among the masses over the deep corruption pervading every pore of our establishment are they now decreeing that we need Harmony and Bipartisan Cooperation:

I wrote about it right after the 2006 election — as soon as the Republicans lost power, I knew the gasbags would insist that it’s time to let bygones be bygones and meet the Republicans halfway in the spirit of a new beginning. GOP politicians have driven the debt sky-high and altered the government so as to be nearly unrecognizable, so logically the Democrats need to extend the hand of conciliation and move to meet them in the middle — the middle now being so far right, it isn’t even fully visible anymore.

Digby’s right that this is an effort to enforce establishment-protecting ideological orthodoxies. The campaigns of Edwards, Mike Hucakbee and Ron Paul each, in their own ways, signify that there is some intense unrest and deep dissatisfaction with our political establishment, and this has to be quashed by the concealing device known as “bipartisanship.” But it is also an attempt to ensure that nothing of any significance is exposed, that none of the lawbreaking and corruption of the last six years — which they all enabled and cheered on — sees the light of day.

There is a mildly increased desperation that is palpable among our political and media elites to protect and defend their system. The extent of their wrongdoing over the last several years — political, legal and economic — is so extreme that the potential for upheaval in the event of accountability is extreme as well. Their chief weapon to protect those privileges is immunity from the rule of law, and most of our political controversies — over presidential power and state secrets and executive privilege and torture and eavesdropping and these CIA videos — really share the same root: the effort of the establishment to maintain their immunity from impropriety-exposing legal proceedings and, thus, from political consequences.

Just as the warantless eavesropping revelations did, the CIA video scandal presents an extremely clear and straightforward case of serious lawbreaking by our highest government officials. It’s far less complex and far more serious than the scandals that brought down Richard Nixon. That a rational person would be highly skeptical about the prospects that we will find out what happened, let alone that there will be consequences for any of it, is pretty compelling evidence of the kind of country we are becoming.

UPDATE: On a not unrelated note, the annual survey of worldwide privacy rights conducted by Privacy International and EPIC has been released for 2007, and the U.S. has been downgraded from “Extensive Surveillance Society” to “Endemic Surveillance Society,” the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia. The survey uses a variety of objective factors to determine the extent of privacy protections citizens enjoy from their government, and the U.S. now finishes at the bottom for obvious reasons.

Evidence that we are becoming a lawless surveillance state is abundant. But let’s forget all of that and figure out how we can best micro-manage the internal affairs of Pakistan and Iraq and Russia and Iran so that we can preserve Freedom and Democracy for the world. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Add comment December 31st, 2007

Following the Game: a weekend mega-read

The situation in Pakistan is one of those “chess board” issues … in order to follow the strategy you have to have sat in on the game from the git-go. Detangling all that led to Bhutto’s death takes the skill of a PI and the patience of a saint. I’m neither, but clearly there are board pieces to consider.

Bhutto herself was not the Queen, despite her tendency toward elitism … but neither was she a powerless pawn; she had a “destiny” and she clearly had her eyes wide open. Musharraf has the tendencies of a Rook, charging ahead to clear the path of opposition … and Dubby, likewise, pushing powerfully in a straight-ahead manner, dancing with the Devil [who can clearly outmaneuver him] to get what he wants.

There are plenty of pawns in this game … many have already been sacrificed. Some pawns are more important than others, of course — a critical pawn in this game is A.Q. Kahn and his history of selling WMD for pocket money [L’il Kim is one of his happy customers.] He has been covered by the Rooks, still in play.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda are more the Knights, nothing straightforward about them despite their rhetoric — they pounce from behind. And the King? I think it’s Osama* … getting everything he wanted, watching from safety and still protected by the board.

Since this game was set up by PNAC, the oil cartels and the Dark Ones, they can’t be thrilled with the current result … but, following the Shock Doctrine theory, I’m sure they’re scrambling for opportunities of profit and power, as I write.

Last night, Pat Buchanan predicted Musharraf would be a memory by this time next year — John Edwards demanded an independent investigation, followed quickly by Hillary’s echo for same; word is, Dub may be considering it. Giuiliani is using the moment to remind us all that nobody stands more calmly in front of a TV camera in a crisis [surrounded by bureaucrats keeping his back] and directs traffic against terrorism more skillfully than he. Huckabee made a dreadful mess of his moment, connecting the chaos in Pakistan to the border dialogues, and warning us to beware of “unusual activity of Pakistanis” in this country. NOT helpful.

Pakistan is a divided country, a wobbling military dictatorship perpetually poised on civil war, the cradle of fanaticism and armed with the weapons of Armageddon — nobody knows what happens next … but to say it’s dangerous is akin to saying lava is merely hot; may cooler heads prevail and may skilled chess masters come to the head of the class.

There are diverse voices speaking in this post; better to have them all in our archives, I think — I especially appreciated the Hitchens and Reeves pieces, and a blog post by Nathan Gardels toward the bottom. As well, Juan Cole asks about Plan B, and P.M. Carpenter points us back to the little brush popper [who took time out of his vacation to issue a lethargic one-minute message of condolence.]

The questions at hand are “who?” [Pakistani police abandoned their posts shortly into the Bhutto gathering,] and “why?” [see the Andhra News snip below regarding nukes] … “how” will evidently be cleared up soon; the government has given a go ahead for a possible exhumation. “What next?” is the bigger question. You’ll find some hints here, examining the players … but only the saint’s can see the board clearly.

The last piece is an article from der Spiegel, giving us a heads up on how the Europeans see this — they see it as our fault, of course. Who could blame them?

Jude

* Bhutto was on record as saying that Osama was dead. Whether that was a political expediency or not, we shall never know.

‘Everyone Wanted to Kill Her’
Musharraf’s regime offers its version of what–and who–killed Bhutto.
Fasih Ahmed, Newsweek Exclusive
Dec 28, 2007

Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest Friday evening in her ancestral hometown of Larkana, her grave surrounded by thousands of anguished supporters who thronged to the rural town in Sindh province to pay their respects to the assassinated former prime minister. While her family and party stayed silent, the government of President Pervez Musharraf rushed to defuse nationwide anger at what many Pakistanis believe to be either the complicity or, more charitably, the incompetence of the regime.

The doctors who treated Bhutto at Rawalpindi’s state-run General Hospital held a televised press conference to refute reports that her death had been caused by bullets or shrapnel from the suicide bombing. “There were no wounds on her neck and no exit wound in her head,” said one of the doctors. The official version blames Bhutto’s death on a fatal blow. At a press conference in Islamabad and later on state-owned television, Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Cheema showed video footage of a beaming Bhutto seconds before she was killed, along with photographs of her blood-stained vehicle. He said Bhutto died when her head struck the sunroof doors of her customized SUV. “Three bullets were fired but missed her,” he said. “She was ducking or was thrown by the shockwaves from the explosion, and her head struck one of the levers of the sunroof.”

Bhutto had appeared through the sunroof of her armored SUV to wave at supporters at the end of her election rally in Pakistan’s military capital, Rawalpindi. The government’s finding contradicts eyewitness accounts by Bhutto’s aides, who said that two bullets struck Bhutto in the head and neck before the assassin detonated himself.

“We provided excellent security to Ms. Bhutto, but our expert advice was ignored by her,” Cheema told reporters. While Bhutto’s party has avoided pointing fingers, Cheema blamed militant tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud for the Oct. 18 suicide attacks on Bhutto’s homecoming procession (which Mehsud has denied) and for Bhutto’s assassination.

“Look, it is horrible, but everyone wanted to kill her,” Cheema said. He read what he said was the transcript of a purported phone call that took place late Dec. 27 between Mehsud and a Waziristan-based cleric.

According to the transcript, without referring specifically to Bhutto or her murder, Mehsud and the cleric congratulate each other. The cleric then names two “brave boys” who “did the work,” and Mehsud and the cleric work out, in surprising detail, a future meeting in Waziristan. “It’s been so long, we must meet,” says Mehsud, according to the transcript presented by the government.

Although the case is “solved,” Cheema said, the government has ordered judicial and police inquiries into the assassination to put a stop to “conspiracy theories and speculative reporting.” Cheema also accused Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who arrived in Islamabad early Friday morning with his three children, of attempting to prevent Bhutto’s official autopsy.

Up until the day she died, Bhutto had been demanding an independent and international investigation into the Oct. 18 attack. Bhutto’s family and party are unlikely to accept the results of any investigation or inquiry conducted under Musharraf. Cheema insisted that foreign forensics experts would not be required. “Have faith in your own intelligence agencies,” he chided a reporter. “We’re very professional. These same foreign countries come to us for help and depend on our expertise,” he said.

Bhutto is now buried alongside her father, another former prime minister, who was hanged 28 years ago on the orders of military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. His execution did not provoke the sort of reaction hers has; the funeral prayers for Bhutto at mosques throughout the country on Friday afternoon brought some reprieve from violence.

At least 20 deaths were reported and hundreds of shops, banks, government offices, private businesses and police stations were set ablaze by mobs. Schools, banks and businesses were ordered closed by the government on Thursday, rail and air travel remain suspended, and the army has been given shoot-on-sight orders to combat violent protestors in Sindh. Music video channels suspended programming in favor of prayers. Like other Musharraf loyalists, the former chief minister of Punjab, Pervaiz Elahi, who had been vying to become Pakistan’s next prime minister, has gone underground. The ruling party’s election rallies have been canceled indefinitely out of fear of retaliation. In death, as in life, Bhutto is proving an indomitable adversary. ++

Revealed: Pakistan hosed away scene after Bhutto attack
May have violated law by skipping autopsy
John Byrne, Raw Story
Saturday December 29, 2007

Despite official reports by Pakistan’s interior ministry claiming that the government had intercepted congratulatory messages sent by al Qaeda surrounding the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, a motley of strange occurrences has sparked new suspicion of the government’s official story.

On Friday, doctors at Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she died, said that Bhutto had been killed by shrapnel to the head from an explosion, not by two bullets that Bhutto supporters cited in the aftermath of the attack. Bhutto, 54, was killed as in the aftermath of a shooting and suicide bombing as she left a political rally in the city of Rawalpindi.

The government soon changed their story, saying she’d been killed by hitting the sunroof of her LandCruiser after she’d stood up to wave to a crowd. Doctors said there were no bullet marks on the former prime minister’s body, and released a limited x-ray of what they said was her skull.

More alarming, however, to Bhutto supporters was the fact no autopsy was conducted prior to burial. The official line — according to Pakistan’s interim prime minister Mohammadmian Soomro — was that Bhutto’s husband had insisted no autopsy be performed.

But according to veteran lawyer Athar Minallah who spoke to McClatchy Newspapers Friday, “an autopsy is mandatory under Pakistan’s criminal law in a case of this nature.”

“It is absurd, because without autopsy it is not possible to investigate,” Minallah told McClatchy’s Saeed Shah and Warren Strobel in a little publicized piece. “Is the state not interested in reaching the perpetrators of this heinous crime or there was a cover-up?”

Autopsies are generally not conducted in Islam unless ordered by a court, because the religion calls for burial as quickly as possible. It’s unclear whether Bhutto’s circumstances would have warranted an exception.

According to the reporters, “the scene of the attack also was watered down with a high-pressure hose within an hour, washing away evidence.”

Shah, who reported from the scene Thursday, wrote in a second piece that police rangers charged with protecting her “abandoned their posts” shortly before the bombing, leaving just a handful of Bhutto’s own bodyguards protecting her.

“Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday’s rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts,” Shah wrote. “As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: ‘Willing to die for Benazir.’”

Some of Bhutto’s supporters were suspect of the “sunroof theory.”

A “senior official” of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party called the claim “false,” saying he’d seen at least two bullet marks on her body after the attack.

“It was a targeted, planned killing,” BPP’s Babar Awan said. “The firing was from more than one side.”

Another newspaper also asserted witnesses saw her shot.

Multiple reports said Bhutto had shown disregard for her personal safety by waving to the crowd.

“In her enthusiasm, she got carried away, and exposed herself in ways” she shouldn’t have, a former State Department official told Shah.

Pakistan indicated Saturday it would delay January elections because of turmoil caused by Bhutto’s death. Protests and looting have left at least 38 people dead. ++

Militants, Bhutto aides allege cover-up
RAVI NESSMAN, AP
1 hour, 8 minutes ago

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - An Islamic militant group said Saturday it had no link to Benazir Bhutto’s killing and the opposition leader’s aides accused the government of a cover-up, disputing the official account of her death.

The government stood firmly by its account of Thursday’s assassination and insisted it needed no foreign help in any investigation.

“This is not an ordinary criminal matter in which we require assistance of the international community. I think we are capable of handling it,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema.

Bhutto’s aides said they doubted militant commander Baitullah Mehsud was behind the attack on the opposition leader and said the government’s claim that she died when she hit her head on the sunroof of her vehicle was “dangerous nonsense.”

Cheema said the government’s account was based on “nothing but the facts.”

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton called for an independent, international investigation into Bhutto’s death — perhaps by the United Nations — saying Friday there was “no reason to trust the Pakistani government.”

Attackers opened fire at a motorcade of Bhutto’s supporters as they returned to Karachi after her funeral, killing one man and wounding two, said Waqar Mehdi, a spokesman for Bhutto’s party. The government said mass rioting has killed 38 people and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage.

In Rawalpindi, thousands of Bhutto supporters spilled onto the streets after a prayer ceremony for her, throwing stones and clashing with police who fired tear gas to try and subdue the crowd.

President Pervez Musharraf told his top security officials that those looting and plundering “must be dealt with firmly and all measures be taken to ensure (the) safety and security of the people,” the Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

Pakistan’s election commission called an emergency meeting for Monday to discuss the violence’s impact on Jan. 8 parliamentary elections.

Nine election offices in Bhutto’s home province of Sindh in the south were burned to the ground, along with voter rolls and ballot boxes, the commission said in a statement. The violence also hampered the printing of ballot papers, training of poll workers and other pre-election logistics, the statement said.

The U.S. government, which sees nuclear-armed Pakistan as a crucial ally in the war on terror, has pushed Musharraf to keep the election on track to promote stability, moderation and democracy in Pakistan, American officials said.

Prime Minister Mohammedmian Soomro said Friday the government had no immediate plans to postpone the election, despite the violence and the decision by Nawaz Sharif, another opposition leader, to boycott the poll.

Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party also called a meeting Sunday to decide whether to participate in the vote. Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that their son would read a message left by Bhutto and addressed to the party in event of her death.

Roads across Bhutto’s southern Sindh province were littered with burning vehicles, smoking reminders of the continuing chaos since her assassination Thursday. Factories, stores and restaurants were set ablaze in Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi, where 17 people have been killed and dozens injured, officials said.

Army, police and paramilitary troops patrolled the nearly deserted streets of Bhutto’s home city of Larkana, where rioting left shops at a jewelry market smoldering…

The government blamed Bhutto’s killing on al-Qaida and Taliban militants operating with increasing impunity in the lawless tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. It released a transcript Friday of a purported conversation between Mehsud and another militant, apparently discussing the assassination.

“It was a spectacular job. They were very brave boys who killed her,” Mehsud said, according to the transcript.

But a spokesman for Mehsud, Maulana Mohammed Umer, denied the militant was involved in the attack and dismissed the allegations as “government propaganda.”

“The fact is that we are only against America, and we don’t consider political leaders of Pakistan our enemy,” he said in a telephone call he made to The Associated Press from the tribal region of South Waziristan, adding that he was speaking on instructions from Mehsud.

Cheema said the government had evidence to back its claim.

“I don’t think anybody has the capability to carry out such suicide attacks except for those people,” he said.

Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party accused the government of trying to frame Mehsud, saying the militant — through emissaries — had previously told Bhutto he was not involved in the Karachi bombing.

“The story that al-Qaida or Baitullah Mehsud did it appears to us to be a planted story, an incorrect story, because they want to divert the attention,” said Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for Bhutto’s party.

After the Karachi attack, Bhutto accused elements in the ruling pro-Musharraf party of plotting to kill her. The government denied the claims. Babar said Bhutto’s allegations were never investigated.

Bhutto was killed Thursday evening when a suicide attacker shot at her and then blew himself up as she left a rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad. The attack killed about 20 others as well. Authorities initially said she died from bullet wounds, and a surgeon who treated her said the impact from shrapnel on her skull killed her.

But Cheema said she was killed when she tried to duck back into the armored vehicle during the attack, and the shock waves from the blast smashed her head into a lever attached to the sunroof, fracturing her skull, he said.

“We gave you absolute facts, nothing but the facts,” he said. “It was corroborated by the doctors’ report. It was corroborated by the evidence collected.”

Bhutto’s spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, who was in the vehicle with her boss, disputed the government’s version.

“To hear that Ms. Bhutto fell from an impact from a bump on a sunroof is absolutely rubbish. It is dangerous nonsense, because it implies there was no assassination attempt,” she told the BBC.

“There was a clear bullet wound at the back of the neck. It went in one direction and came out another,” she said. “My entire car is coated with her blood, my clothes, everybody — so she did not concuss her head against the sun roof.”

The government said it was forming two inquiries into Bhutto’s death, one to be carried out by a high court judge and another by security forces. ++

Associated Press writers Zarar Khan in Larkana, Sadaqat Jan in Islamabad, Ishtiaq Mahsud in Dera Ismail Khan and Afzal Nadeem in Karachi contributed to this report.

Pak Government condemns Bhuttos statement over AQ Khan
Andhra News, India
Sept 27, 2007

[thank you, Christine]

The Pakistan Government has condemned former Prime Minister Benazir Bhuttos statement that if she becomes the Prime Minister, she would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to question Dr. A.Q. Khan, the disgraced founder of Pakistans nuclear programme. It has to be determined, if Khan was solely responsible for what he had confessed to, or if there were others involved, Bhutto had said. She had also said that when in power, her party would hold a parliamentary debate over the issue.

Islamabad, Sep 27 : The Pakistan Government has condemned former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s statement that if she becomes the Prime Minister, she would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to question Dr. A.Q. Khan, the disgraced founder of Pakistan’s nuclear programme.It has to be determined, if Khan was solely responsible for what he had confessed to, or if there were “others” involved, Bhutto had said.She had also said that when in power, her party would hold a parliamentary debate over the issue.

Condemning Bhutto’s statement, Foreign Office spokeswoman Taslim Aslam said that the Pakistan Government had fully investigated the matter and, “in case there is new information …we will conduct investigations and provide information to the IAEA”.

Other countries have failed to match Pakistan’s efforts to prevent proliferation; the Daily Times quoted Aslam, as saying. ++

Daughter of Destiny
Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007
Christopher Hitchens, Slate
Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan’s military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.

Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.

Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent “comeback” tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of Aquino.

Who knows who did this deed? It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman’s Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it’s hard to construct any cui bono analysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.

She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir’s undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. (He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.

Daughter of Destiny is the title she gave to her autobiography. She always displayed the same unironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan’s nuclear program was. How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her playboy husband, Asif Ali Zardari. (The Swiss courts recently found against her in this matter; an excellent background piece was written by John Burns in the New York Times in 1998.) And now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together.

This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of “security” and with lofty disregard for her own safety. This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her. ++

THE DEATH OF BENAZIR: COMES THE WHIRLWIND
Richard Reeves, Yahoo
Fri Dec 28

PARIS — It has been only eight weeks since I wrote a column that began, “I cried for Pakistan …” That was after the first attempt to assassinate Benazir Bhutto when she returned to her country to run again for prime minister. I said then that I assumed there would be more attempts — and sooner or later one would succeed.

I cry again. Bhutto, whom I knew, was killed on Wednesday. I know and love Pakistan, having lived and worked there for a time, but it is dysfunctional and has been for a long time. There is significance in the fact that Ms. Bhutto was killed a few yards from where the country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951.

I don’t know what will happen next, but it will not be good. There is a “Let’s pretend” quality about American attitudes toward the Islamic republic of 165 million people, most of them illiterate. The first thing I saw on television after being called about the assassination was my president, George Bush, expressing sympathy, saying:

“The United States strongly condemns the cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan’s democracy …”

Pakistan has no democracy. It has been an American-supported military dictatorship for the past eight years — and for most of its troubled history of 60 years.

Over those six decades, a yin-and-yang relationship has developed between their country and ours. They have usually seen us as useful Western idiots who supply them with money and arms when it is in our interest: when we needed spy plane bases to overfly the Soviet Union in the 1950s; when our relations with India were periodically bad; when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan up to the Pakistani border in the 1980s; when we began chasing Islamic terrorists and the Taliban after Sept. 11, 2001. We, in turn, have seen them as useful primitives, cutting off the aid when we did not need them anymore.

We did not care who ran Pakistan during the good times and the bad. We also looked the other way as they used our money to arm themselves not against our enemies but against their enemy, India, a Pakistani militarization that included a string of dictator generals and the development of nuclear weapons 20 miles from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

We also looked away for years as Pakistani intelligence agencies — riddled with dangerous Islamic fundamentalists — used money from the United States and Saudi Arabia to create the Taliban. It is no wonder that many Pakistanis and knowledgeable foreigners believe those agencies are behind the Bhutto assassination. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, comfortable anywhere in the West, Benazir liked to say she was their worst nightmare: modern, liberal and female.

The American policy of using Bhutto and her Islamic, relatively democratic and socialist Pakistan Peoples’ Party as a way to legitimize the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf is now bleeding into the sand with the blood of the party loyalists who surrounded Bhutto. It is impossible to predict what will happen next, although the possibilities go all the way to the breakup of the country, or as Benazir told Gail Sheehy of Parade magazine in an interview to be published next month:

“If I could say one thing to President Bush, it would be this: Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country. I now think al-Qaida can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.”

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the most pertinent commentary I read was by David Ignatius of The Washington Post, who had been a friend of Benazir’s since they were together writing for the Harvard Crimson in the early 1970s:

“Bhutto’s death is a brutal demonstration of the difficulty for outsiders in understanding — let alone tinkering with — a country such as Pakistan. The Bush administration attempted a bit of political engineering when it tried to broker an alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto and sought to position her as the country’s next prime minister. Yesterday’s events were a reminder that global politics is not Prospero’s island, where we can conjure up the outcomes we want. In places such as Pakistan, where we can’t be sure where events are heading, the wisest course for the United States is the cautious one of trying to identify and protect American interests. Pakistanis will decide how and when their country makes its accommodation with the modern world.”

I agree with every word of that. We do not have the power to change Pakistan. Next comes the whirlwind. The principal American (and global) interest has to be (almost certainly in cooperation with Indian military and intelligence agencies) to somehow neutralize the nuclear weapons in Kahuta. The WMDs this time are real. ++

Pakistan Totters as Bush’s “Gift” to bin Laden Bears Fruit
Ralph Lopez, One Thousand Reasons
December 29, 2007

Former CIA Al Qaeda Unit Chief Michael Scheuer’s 2004 scenario came that much closer to reality today, in which George Bush’s bungled invasion of Iraq gives Al Qaeda just the battleground it needs to attract legions of recruits, the solid propaganda of an evil empire stealing oil money from the mouths of hungry Muslim children, in a war against a former ally who only became bad when he stepped out of line.

In December of 2001, Al Qaeda was a desperate remnant of fighters willing to die alongside bin Laden, and U.S. Special Forces was about to oblige them. Then someone somewhere - the highest order we have now came from Tommy Franks, but did it go higher? - refused the urgent request of the ranking Special Forces commander on the ground to seal the mountain passes out of Tora Bora with a battalion of U.S. Army Rangers.

That commander on the ground, Gary Bernsten, wrote in “Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and Al Qaeda”:

“The biggest and most important failure on the CENTCOM leadership came at Tora Bora when they turned down my request for a battalion of U.S. rangers to block bin Laden’s escape.”

Tommy Franks insists he didn’t know if bin Laden was there, but Bernsten is blunt: “”He was there, and could have been caught.”

Bernsten is corroborated by former CIA official Hank Crumpton, who personally briefed Bush and Cheney, as well as Franks, about the need to go after bin Laden in Tora Bora.

With the assassination of Bhutto, Pakistan is closer than ever to civil war. And ultimately, Islamist forces marching into Islamabad in victory, us tied down in Iraq and not able to do a damned thing about it. This is the first of the many dominoes bin Laden had envisioned, including the “apostate” regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and UAE. But most especially on bin Laden’s list was Pakistan.

Writes Scheuer, in “Imperial Hubris,” of bin Laden dreaming of a gift from Allah like the invasion of Iraq:

“And then, dreamed bin Laden wildly, things would get bad for the Americans. They would stay too long in Iraq, insist on installing a democracy that would subordinate the long dominant Sunnis, vigorously limit Islam’s role in government, and act in ways that spotlighted their interest in Iraq’s massive oil reserves.”

George Bush has much to answer for, for turning the American tragedy of 9/11 into a spoiled rich boy’s chance to get the guy who once threatened his daddy. He has subscribed to the Roman conception of power, in which the battles of the prince do not need to conform to the battles of the nation; they BECOME the battles of the nation. As fights among royalty and its enemies play out, so does the history of the nation.

George Bush listened to the senior White House aide quoted famously in Ron Susskind’s book, perhaps one of the tweedy, power-mad draft-doger intellectuals with whom Bush surrounds himself, one of “history’s actors”:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The “history’s actors” theory of foreign policy may work well enough if the emperor is skillful. But if he is not, then that emperor’s tantrums, and reality, turn and bite the nation in the ass. ++

U.S. Brokered Bhutto’s Return to Pakistan
White House Would Back Her as Prime Minister While Musharraf Held Presidency
Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, WaPo
Friday, December 28, 2007; Front Page

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy — and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan’s most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington’s key ally in the battle against terrorism.

It was a stunning turnaround for Bhutto, a former prime minister who was forced from power in 1996 amid corruption charges. She was suddenly visiting with top State Department officials, dining with U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and conferring with members of the National Security Council. As President Pervez Musharraf’s political future began to unravel this year, Bhutto became the only politician who might help keep him in power.

“The U.S. came to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability, but was instead the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact,” said Mark Siegel, who lobbied for Bhutto in Washington and witnessed much of the behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

But the diplomacy that ended abruptly with Bhutto’s assassination yesterday was always an enormous gamble, according to current and former U.S. policymakers, intelligence officials and outside analysts. By entering into the legendary “Great Game” of South Asia, the United States also made its goals and allies more vulnerable — in a country in which more than 70 percent of the population already looked unfavorably upon Washington.

Bhutto’s assassination leaves Pakistan’s future — and Musharraf’s — in doubt, some experts said. “U.S. policy is in tatters. The administration was relying on Benazir Bhutto’s participation in elections to legitimate Musharraf’s continued power as president,” said Barnett R. Rubin of New York University. “Now Musharraf is finished.”

Bhutto’s assassination also demonstrates the growing power and reach of militant anti-government forces in Pakistan, which pose an existential threat to the country, said J. Alexander Thier, a former U.N. official now at the U.S. Institute for Peace. “The dangerous cocktail of forces of instability exist in Pakistan — Talibanism, sectarianism, ethnic nationalism — could react in dangerous and unexpected ways if things unravel further,” he said.

But others insist the U.S.-orchestrated deal fundamentally altered Pakistani politics in ways that will be difficult to undo, even though Bhutto is gone. “Her return has helped crack open this political situation. It’s now very fluid, which makes it uncomfortable and dangerous,” said Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But the status quo before she returned was also dangerous from a U.S. perspective. Forcing some movement in the long run was in the U.S. interests.”

Bhutto’s assassination during a campaign stop in Rawalpindi might even work in favor of her Pakistan People’s Party, with parliamentary elections due in less than two weeks, Coleman said. “From the U.S. perspective, the PPP is the best ally the U.S. has in terms of an institution in Pakistan.”

Bhutto’s political comeback was a long time in the works — and uncertain for much of the past 18 months. In mid-2006, Bhutto and Musharraf started communicating through intermediaries about how they might cooperate. Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Boucher was often an intermediary, traveling to Islamabad to speak with Musharraf and to Bhutto’s homes in London and Dubai to meet with her.

Under U.S. urging, Bhutto and Musharraf met face to face in January and July in Dubai, according to U.S. officials. It was not a warm exchange, with Musharraf resisting a deal to drop corruption charges so she could return to Pakistan. He made no secret of his feelings.

In his 2006 autobiography “In the Line of Fire,” Musharraf wrote that Bhutto had “twice been tried, been tested and failed, [and] had to be denied a third chance.”

She had not allowed her own party to become democratic, he alleged. “Benazir became her party’s ‘chairperson for life,’ in the tradition of the old African dictators!”

A turning point was Bhutto’s three-week U.S. visit in August, when she talked again to Boucher and to Khalilzad, an old friend. A former U.S. ambassador in neighboring Afghanistan, Khalilzad had long been skeptical about Musharraf, and while in Kabul he had disagreed with then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell over whether the Pakistani leader was being helpful in the fight against the Taliban. He also warned that Pakistani intelligence was allowing the Taliban to regroup in the border areas, U.S. officials said. ++

Memo to Pundits: George W. Bush Was the Triggerman, and We Don’t Need Another George W. Bush
P.M. Carpenter
December 28, 2007

Let’s be clear. George W. Bush was the triggerman.

I did a slow burn yesterday throughout the cable-news coverage of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Pundits and analysts came out of Washington’s woodwork to pontificate on the tragedy and speculate on who the villain behind it might be. It could be al Qaeda, of course, or even Ms. Bhutto’s insidious protector, President Musharraf. Yet not one of these musical-chair popinjays ever so much as even hinted at the manifest truth: that the ultimate responsibility for Ms. Bhutto’s death and Pakistan’s fresh round of turmoil lies with the man in the White House.

For seven years, through self-thwarting military crusades and mindless saber-rattling and Western ideological offensives, Mr. Bush has stirred the pot and rattled the hornet’s nest of the Middle East and South Asia. He took an intolerable situation and made it impossible. His gun-blazing cowboyism has radicalized vast segments of Islam, propped up dictators and alienated moderates. And now it has killed the astonishingly courageous Ms. Bhutto.

Was it al Qaeda that physically pulled the trigger, as it promised it would? Could be. And God knows it’s strong enough once again to have squeezed it off. As Mr. Bush was playing global checkers rather than chess, and chasing the one stabilizing strongman and principal opponent of al Qaeda in the Middle East, he was letting the terrorists off the hook — to regroup, and multiply, and metastasize, with exponential momentum.

I know of not one Middle East analyst who differs with the analysis. Bush diverted crucial resources from the critical battle. In doing so he pumped life into a severely endangered species. He also handed it the perfect propaganda material on which to newly thrive — the monsters could not have written the script more favorably themselves — and he squandered every square inch of the mountainous good will heaped on the U.S. after 9/11. His single-minded bellicosity and obliviousness to harsh, geopolitical realities have done nothing but aggravate and embroil. And now his propensities have killed the courageous Ms. Bhutto.

Yet not one of the cable-news pundits even hinted at the manifest, blistering truth in their exhaustive speculations. One wonders whether the cause was gutlessness or blindness. Nevertheless the effect was the same: The American people will continue to have little inkling of the catastrophic consequences that Mr. Bush has wrought for U.S. national interests, or of the equally disastrous consequences for the poor bastards at the geographical heart of it all.

The pundits did, however, speculate with profundity on what it all means to the presidential crop. And in my opinion, they balled that up as badly as their whodunit analyses.

Experience, experience! they cried with approval. That will be the electorate’s demand that goes forth, thereby benefiting, principally, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. “Change” is now so risky and yesterday.

And what were these reassuring voices of experience saying? A short survey of the banality should suffice.

McCain’s insights were that Bhutto’s assassination was “tragic,” that the “radical Islamic extremists” profited from it, and that if he were president he’d be huddling at that very moment with his national security council. Damn, I wouldn’t have thought of that. I guess that’s why I’m not in the big leagues.

Giuliani’s insights were that Bhutto’s assassination was “tragic,” that “terrorism anywhere” — and it happens to be everywhere — “is an enemy of freedom,” and we must, of course, “redouble our efforts to win” — yep — the “Terrorists’ War on Us.” Well, if nothing else, he can dazzle them to death with clever wordplay.

Clinton’s insights were that Bhutto’s assassination was “tragic,” that she was “outraged,” and that “it certainly raises the stakes high for what we expect from our next president.” And that would be, specifically … ? Perhaps experience in converting a national healthcare plan into more than 1,000 pages of inscrutable, unworkable mumbo-jumbo?

Parenthetically, because it’s just too juicy to pass up, Mike Huckabee’s insight was that maybe Musharraf should continue martial law, which, of course, was abandoned weeks ago. Would someone please buy that man a newspaper subscription?

But the upshot of all the “experienced” candidates’ wisdom was — if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly — that more of the same is the surefire cure for what ails us. More Bushian doggedness, more us vs. them, more muscular squaring off into other peoples’ problems, however much we’ve so haplessly exacerbated those problems for seven, long, agonizing years.

Contrary to the pundits’ speculations on what the electorate will now both want and need — that is, purely self-proclaimed experience — it seems to me that accumulating events cry out instead for profound change. And if the electorate can’t see that, then once again it will get the president it deserves. ++

A Moment of Clarity on Pakistan Policy
Gareth Porter, HuffPo
December 27, 2007

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto may plunge Pakistan into much more serious chaos and violence. But the tragedy should at least be a clarifying moment for American policy toward Pakistan. It should make us more determined than ever to throw light on the shadowy policy of the Bush-Cheney administration of coddling the Pakistani military regime for so many years, despite the clear evidence that it was no friend of the United States.

Precisely who was responsibility for the assassination of Bhutto may never be known, but the circumstantial evidence points to Taliban extremists, assisted by a wink and a nod from elements in the Musharraf regime.

Bhutto had been the object of an assassination attempt in Karachi two months ago under circumstances that raised suspicions of official complicity. The street lights had suddenly failed to work, making the would-be assassin’s work easier, despite protests by her staff.

After that attempt, Bhutto believed elements in and close to the military aligned with the extremists wanted her dead. “I know exactly who wants to kill me,” “They are dignitaries of General Zia’s former regime who are behind extremism and fanaticism,” she told the French magazine Paris-Match. She pointed specifically to the army’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which was instrumental in creating the Taliban regime and has been managing Pakistan’s alliance with the Taliban — and al Qaeda — ever since.

Whether Pervez Musharraf was personally involved in the plot to kill Bhutto is a secondary question. The problem of Pakistan’s policy toward al Qaeda and the Taliban was never about Musharraf personally. It was about a Pakistani military whose loyalties in the struggle against terrorism were ambiguous, at best.

The Bush-Cheney policy toward Pakistan after 9/11, however, was based on the lie that the Musharraf regime was fully committed to the struggle against al Qaeda and the Taliban. In reality, Bush and Cheney made a deal with Musharraf under which his regime gave up a little but got a great deal in return: the CIA was permitted to use missiles to kill selected jihadi leaders in Pakistan and Pakistani intelligence helped captured individual al Qaeda officials if and when the United States had sufficient intelligence to identify their whereabouts. In return the United States welcomed him as a hero in Washington, provided $4.5 billion in disguised subsidies to the Pakistan military by 2006 and agreed to sell $3 billion worth of arms, including new F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the White House remained silent while Musharraf made a political pact in 2004 with the five party Islamic alliance aligned with the Taliban and al Qaeda in the two border provinces in order to have a majority in the parliament to support the military takeover. It did not protest when the Pakistani military allowed the made deals with the jihadi leadership in the border provinces in 2004 and 2006 that emboldened the Taliban to escalate the war against the Kharzai regime in Afghanistan. Nor did it make any public protest over the rapid growth of Al Qaeda training bases in Pakistan.

The whole history of the Pakistani military, as veteran journalist Selig Harrison reminds us, has been intertwined with the jihadis ideology, both in Afghanistan and at home. And the Pakistani military, while fearing the power of the extremists, also viewed them as allies against the democratic opposition to military rule.

As a representative of Pakistani landowning elite, Bhutto certainly had her political faults, but there was nothing ambivalent about her attitude toward the religious extremists. Furthermore, unlike Musharaff and the Pakistani military, she was unalterably opposed to the Taliban. Significantly her last day had begun with a joint statement with Afghan President Karzai, who had been fighting with Musharraf for years over his pro-Taliban policy.

Her project was to rallying the forces in Pakistan who supported democracy and opposed the religious extremists who had seized power in Pakistan’s northwest border region. Now we will never know how successful she might have been.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto ought to be the death knell for the Bush-Cheney policy of smothering the military regime in Pakistan with rewards in the hope that they will do something nice. Americans should honor her courage and her cause by demanding a full Congressional investigation of the secret deals made by the Bush-Cheney administration with Musharraf and their doleful consequences for U.S. insecurity. ++

With Bhutto gone, does Bush have a Plan B?
Bush’s failed policies in Pakistan, a nuclear power that al-Qaida still uses to plot against the West, threatens U.S. security more than Iraq ever did.
Juan Cole, Salon
Dec. 27, 2007

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday provoked rioting in Islamabad and Karachi, with her supporters blaming President Pervez Musharraf, while he pointed his finger at Muslim extremists. The renewed instability in Pakistan came as a grim reminder that the Bush administration has been pursuing a two-front war, neither of which has been going well. Bush’s decision to put hundreds of billions of dollars into an Iraq imbroglio while slighting the effort to fight al-Qaida, rebuild Afghanistan, and move Pakistan toward democracy and a rule of law has been shown up as a desperate and unsuccessful gamble. The question is whether President Musharraf now most resembles the shah of Iran in 1978. That is, has his authority among the people collapsed irretrievably?

The Bush administration backed military dictator Musharraf to the hilt as a way of dealing with U.S. security and al-Qaida on the cheap while it poured hundreds of billions into Baghdad. George W. Bush was entirely willing to let the Pakistani judiciary, the rule of law, and any real democracy be gutted by an ambitious general. For Washington, allowing Bhutto to return to Pakistan was simply a way to shore up Musharraf’s legitimacy. Now Pakistan faces new turmoil, and Bush appears to have no Plan B. Since Pakistan is a nuclear power and al-Qaida extremists still use it as a base to plot against the West, this failure is inexcusable and threatens U.S. security in a way Iraq never did.

Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, was leaning out of the sunroof of a car leaving a political rally on Thursday evening in Rawalpindi near the capital, Islamabad, when an armed assailant dressed as a policeman approached, shot her twice, and then detonated a belt bomb, killing her and some 22 other persons.

When Bhutto’s death was announced, rioting broke out in Rawalpindi and her home base, the southern port city of Karachi. Many of her supporters blamed Musharraf, who, though he recently resigned from the military, came to power in a 1999 military coup and has ruled as a military dictator. The house of a senior politician from the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-i Azam), Musharraf’s party, was burned down by an angry mob. It is clear that many in the Pakistan People’s Party blame Musharraf and his supporters for Bhutto’s death, whether fairly or unfairly. If this sentiment becomes widespread, it is hard to see how Musharraf can survive.

The Pakistan People’s Party was expected to do well in the scheduled Jan. 8 parliamentary elections, which the Bush administration had hoped would begin a transition away from military rule. The PPP, which has an impressive grass-roots organization that has proved it can get out the vote in election after election, has been important in Pakistani politics since the 1970s. It has been in power at the federal level during 11 of the past 36 years and has particular strength in the Punjab, Pakistan’s wealthiest and most populous province. The party will hold a convention to formally elect a successor to Bhutto, but whether parliamentary elections can still be held on Jan. 8 has been cast into doubt. Bhutto’s rival, Nawaz Sharif, who heads the right-of-center Muslim League, announced that his party would boycott the elections to protest the failure of the Pakistani military to give Bhutto better security.

Bhutto’s assassination was a profound blow to Bush administration policy in South Asia. Washington looked the other way when Musharraf had himself elected “president” in a referendum in spring of 2002, wherein he had no competition. It accepted Musharraf’s interference in the fall 2002 elections, which was aimed at handicapping the two major parties, the Pakistan People’s Party and the Muslim League. All Musharraf managed to do was to throw the key northwest frontier province and Baluchistan into the hands of the Muslim fundamentalist parties, which had never before done so well in those regions, but which were left without much competition when their rivals were hobbled by the military. These Muslim fundamentalist local governments in turn ran interference for Muslim radicals, denying that there was any such thing as al-Qaida.

The combination of political ineptitude whereby Musharraf helped put the fundamentalists in power in the Pushtun regions of Pakistan and the heavy-handedness of his military interventions in the fiercely independent tribal north, helped set the stage for the greater political violence. The government’s neglect of the hardscrabble farming regions of the north also fueled discontent.

At the same time it was coddling the dictator, the United States has been attempting to do nation building in Afghanistan and to strengthen the government of Hamid Karzai, while trying to face down a resurgent Pushtun insurgency in the south of that country. In the frontier badlands of the tribal areas straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan, remnants of the Taliban and the “Arab Afghans” of al-Qaida have been hiding out and regrouping. There is some evidence that they continue to have contacts with, and even to train, Muslim militants based in Europe. The Pakistani military dislikes the Karzai government and sees the “Northern Alliance” that came to power with American help as overly friendly to India and Iran. It is suspected that some elements in the Pakistani army and its military intelligence branch, the Inter-Services Intelligence, are secretly stirring up Pushtun tribesmen against the Karzai regime in hopes that a government more friendly to Pakistan will come to power.

Paradoxically, the Pakistani military has cracked down hard on Taliban-like groups inside Pakistan itself. Troops have fought several major engagements in the rugged tribal territories of the north, and over time have captured some 700 al-Qaida operatives. But the fiercely independent tribespeople of Waziristan and its neighboring areas have fought back. Starting in September 2006 the military even attempted a truce with the tribal leaders in hopes that they would deal with the Muslim militants themselves. That truce began to break down when the military stormed the Red Mosque in the capital, Islamabad, where Pushtun and Baluch tribesmen belonging to a neo-Deobandi cult and advocating strict puritanism had established themselves and begun acting like vigilantes. Musharraf ordered his military to close the mosque, where the cultists had stored arms, resulting in a sanguinary conflict. In the aftermath, Muslim militants in Pakistan’s northeast carried out a record number of suicide bombings.

If he faced a rural crisis deriving from the fundamentalism of neglected northern farming communities, Musharraf faced an urban crisis as well. Pakistan’s good economic growth for the past six years has helped create a new middle class, numbering in the tens of millions, who are educated and connected to the world by cable television and the Internet. They depend on the rule of law to pursue their white-collar occupations, and when Musharraf attempted to fire the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the urban middle classes staged large rallies and resisted the packing of the courts. They won the first round when Musharraf, weakened by the Red Mosque fiasco, was forced to reinstate the chief justice.

Benazir Bhutto served as prime minister twice, from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, and was dismissed on charges of corruption both times. She has been in political exile since 1999, the year of Musharraf’s military coup. After the Red Mosque debacle and his conflict with the country’s Supreme Court, Musharraf was so weakened that he accepted a new American plan. It provided for Bhutto to return and contest elections, such that she would likely be the next prime minister, and for Musharraf to resign from the military and become a civilian president. This plan was in danger of being derailed when the Supreme Court seemed likely to decide that Musharraf was ineligible to serve as president, and the dictator reacted by dismissing the court, packing it with his own supporters, and declaring a state of emergency. Bhutto expressed outrage at those high-handed actions and clearly feared that they would taint her own legitimacy. Under severe American pressure, Musharraf lifted the state of emergency and agreed to new elections on Jan. 8.

Pakistan’s future is now murky, and to the extent that this nation of 160 million buttresses the eastern flank of American security in the greater Middle East, its fate is profoundly intertwined with America’s own. The money for the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to Florida from banks in Pakistan, and al-Qaida used the country for transit to Afghanistan. Instability in Pakistan may well spill over into Afghanistan, as well, endangering the some 26,000 U.S. troops and a similar number of NATO troops in that country. And it is not as if Afghanistan were stable to begin with. If Pakistani politics finds its footing, if a successor to Benazir Bhutto is elected in short order by the PPP and the party can remain united, and if elections are held soon, the crisis could pass. If there is substantial and ongoing turmoil, however, Muslim radicals will certainly take advantage of it.

In order to get through this crisis, Bush must insist that the Pakistani Supreme Court, summarily dismissed and placed under house arrest by Musharraf, be reinstated. The PPP must be allowed to elect a successor to Ms. Bhutto without the interference of the military. Early elections must be held, and the country must return to civilian rule. Pakistan’s population is, contrary to the impression of many pundits in the United States, mostly moderate and uninterested in the Taliban form of Islam. But if the United States and “democracy” become associated in their minds with military dictatorship, arbitrary dismissal of judges, and political instability, they may turn to other kinds of politics, far less favorable to the United States. Musharraf may hope that the Pakistani military will stand with him even if the vast majority of people turn against him. It is a forlorn hope, and a dangerous one, as the shah of Iran discovered in 1978-79. ++

BHUTTO, BUSH, AND MUSHARRAF
John Chuckman, One Thousand Reasons
Friday December 28, 2007

With the assassination of Ms. Bhutto, we are given to understand, by many newspaper stories and broadcasts, that anti-democratic religious zealots killed Pakistan’s last hope for democracy.

Ms. Bhutto was in many ways an admirable and accomplished leader, a talented woman of courage, but her assassination was a far more complex event than simplistic claims about the dark work of anti-democratic forces.

President Musharraf, for most of the years since the American invasion of Afghanistan, was treated in public as an acceptable ally by the United States. The U.S. desperately needed Pakistan’s help in its invasion of Afghanistan, a land about which American politicians had little understanding. To secure that help, America forgave Pakistan’s debts, removed its embargo-bad guy status (for developing atomic weapons in secret), provided large amounts of military assistance, and even managed to swallow its pride over the embarrassing work of Pakistan’s scientific hero, Dr. A. Q. Khan, who supplied atomic-weapons technology to other countries.

Once Americans had mired themselves in Afghanistan – after all the hoopla over a “victory” which amounted to little more than massive bombing while the Northern Alliance warlords did most of the fighting against their rival, the Taleban - the extent of the mess into which they had put themselves slowly dawned. This is particularly true regarding the almost non-existent border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a huge area that forms almost a de facto third country of Pashtuns.

Intense pressure started being applied to Musharraf to allow American special forces to conduct the kind of brutal and socially-disruptive operations they have maintained in the mountains of Afghanistan. The American approach to rooting out the dispersed Taleban, following its initial “victory,” amounted to going from village to village in the mountains, crashing down doors, using stun grenades, holding men at gunpoint in their own homes, separating the village’s women from the men’s protection, plus many other unforgivable insults in such a tradition-bound land.

All of this has really been getting them nowhere. In effect, the American government demonstrated it had no idea what to do in Afghanistan after it invaded, only knowing it wanted to get the “bad guys.”

Recently, Musharraf’s position vis-à-vis the U.S. has undergone a dramatic change. Overnight, the State Department changed him from valiant ally to enemy of democracy, and the American press obliged with the appropriate stories and emphasis.

The reason for this change was simply Musharraf’s refusal to cooperate enough with Bush’s secret demands to extend America’s special-forces operations into Pakistan’s side of the Pashtun territory: that is, to allow a foreign country into his country to terrorize and insult huge parts of its population. In Bush’s worldview, this only amounted to Pakistan’s fully embracing the “war on terror,” but for many Pakistanis, the “war on terror” is only one more aspect of American interference in their part of the world. The Taleban is viewed by millions there as heroic resisters, standing up to American arrogance, a view not without some substance.

In trying to accommodate Bush, Musharraf launched various showy operations by Pakistan’s army, but his efforts were viewed in Washington as weak. The U.S. kept pushing the limits, trying to force Pakistan to internalize the “war on terror,” and Musharraf resisted. There was a horrific incident in which the U.S. bombed a madrassah (a religious school) in rural Pakistan, succeeding only in killing eighty children, falsely claiming it was Pakistan’s work against a terrorist center.

Musharraf has, rather bravely, opposed America’s demands for a de facto American invasion of his country. He has been remarkably outspoken about American policies on several occasions, not something calculated to endear him to Bush’s gang. So, suddenly he became an undemocratic pariah who needed to be replaced. It was easy enough to exploit public dissatisfaction with a military dictator, even if he was only trying to do his best for his country within some terrible limits.

America gave Ms. Bhutto a blessing and a gentle push, likely a bundle of cash, and undoubtedly the promise of lots of future support, to return home as opposition to Musharraf. One could fairly say that her assassination just proves how little Washington policymakers understand the region. It sent her to her death, desperately hoping against hope to get what it wanted.

Ms. Bhutto was regarded in Washington as more amenable to American demands in Pakistan. She had the double merit of being able to give Pakistan’s government the gloss of democracy while serving key American interests. But it couldn’t be clearer that democracy is not what the U.S. was really concerned with, because Musharraf was just a fine ally so long as he did as he was told.

The truth is that Musharraf has, in opposing America’s demands, been a rather brave representative of Pakistan’s interests, a patriot in American parlance.

True democracy for a place like Pakistan is a long way off, not because of this or that leader or party, but because of the country’s backward economic state. This is even truer for Afghanistan. You cannot instantly create democracies out of lands living in centuries-old economies, burdened with centuries-old customs. The best thing America could have done for this region would have been generous economic assistance, but the U.S. has demonstrated, again and again, it has little genuine interest in that sort of thing. The customs and backwardness of centuries only melt away under the tide of economic development. Democracy follows almost automatically eventually.

The quick fix is what the U.S. demands, a quick fix to its own perceptions of problems under the guise of supporting democracy and opposition to terror, will achieve absolutely nothing over the long term. ++

Pakistan After Bhutto: Both a Void at the Democratic Center and the Global center of Islamist Jihadism
Nathan Gardels
December 28, 2007

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is a great victory for Al Qaeda, whether it carried out the attack directly, through rogue agents in Pakistan’s intelligence services or, as Bhutto herself feared before her death, in conspiracy with them. Bhutto’s murder is the closest they’ve come to killing a Western leader; it is the most sensational attack since downing the Twin Towers on 9/11. And it confirms that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the front line in the fight against Islamic jihadists.

The day after 9/11, Bhutto told me already then she had received intelligence that she was the “next target” of Al Qaeda after they had assassinated the Afghan resistance leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, several days before the attack on New York. In order to protect their position in Afghanistan, he needed to be eliminated. Once he was gone, they feared she was the one popular leader who could rally Pakistanis against them and the Taliban, even from exile, and spoil Pakistan’s support and indulgence of the Taliban’s protective rule.

Bhutto recalled that “I shared power with the security apparatus through the president when I was last prime minister. Yet the extremists were on the run. Osama did not dare go to Kabul until the decision to overthrow me was taken in mid-1996. The Taliban were stuck in southern Afghanistan because of our foreign policy. It was only after my brother was killed in the third week of September 1996 that the Taliban unilaterally went into Kabul.”

“Osama first bankrolled the extremists against me way back in 1989,” she said, ” He gave $10 million for a no-confidence move against me in the parliament. Some said he returned to Saudi Arabia after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan but was sucked back into South Asia by extremists in Islamabad. They wanted his financial investment in my overthrow.”

Bhutto’s advice after 9/11 was straightforward — and not followed. “Islamabad,” she said, ” is the jugular vein of Kabul. Clean up Islamabad and the Afghan (Al Qaeda) camps start falling like dominoes.”

Instead, the US looked to General Musharraf and accepted on face value his strongman guarantees that he would crack down on extremism. We bombed Afghanistan, routed some camps, chased Osama to the border with Pakistan, then moved on to Iraq — the wrong war against the wrong enemy — leaving the nourishment flowing from Islamabad to the extremists.

This was not only Bhutto’s view, but also that of the French intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy, who wrote a book on the death of Daniel Pearl, and whom I interviewed at the end of November.

Two weeks ago, I got an email from Benazir thanking me for publishing this interview because it so closely accorded with her own views.

“It turns out I was right beyond my most pessimistic analysis at the time when I wrote the book on Daniel Pearl,” Levy said, “Pakistan was a ticking bomb with nuclear weapons. Now the political bomb is detonating.

“There are three components to this crisis — the jihadist forces are increasing in the border regions with Afghanistan and also in the heartlands; the secret services (ISI) have been even further infiltrated, not less so, by jihadists than when I wrote my book; and (Gen. Pervez) Musharraf is unable to react in any way other than dictatorship, which in itself will fuel a worse crisis. A great eruption awaits, I’m afraid.”

Levy’s hope rested on Bhutto: “In Pakistan, there is a substantial moderating middle class, which Bhutto represents, that is an important force for progress. We must admire, on this score, the personal courage of Benazir Bhutto defying both the forces of tyranny and the jihad. Courage, of course, is always a surprise. But it is not only courage. She also senses part of the opinion is moving. Will it move fast enough? Of this, I’m not sure.”

In the end, he argues of the US and its allies that ” we were all fools rushing off to war into Iraq. The real epicenter of the Islamist danger was Pakistan. Al-Qaida’s core base is not in Tora Bora or even the tribal areas of Pakistan, but in Karachi and Islamabad — close to the nuclear weapons and close to the headquarters of the ISI. Al-Qaida are the proverbial guerilla fish in the sea of Pakistan’s major urban population.

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for instance, who was one of the real brains of al-Qaida, who conceived the 9/11 attacks and claimed to have killed Daniel Pearl with his own hands (although I’m not sure), was captured in Rawalpindi, only two miles from the he