Crisis, what crisis?
By Jason Burke, The Guardian, January 2, 2008

How long will it be until Pakistan implodes? Take your pick of the analysts: a week or so as opposition parties take to the streets to complain about the postponement of elections, just announced; two weeks if the elections take place and the country descends into chaos; a few months and the mullahs will have poured down from the North West Frontier Province, seized Islamabad and the nuclear button; a year or so and Pakistan will have become another Afghanistan. Or perhaps it won’t implode at all.

The latter seems the most likely to me. On my first trip to Pakistan, in 1993, the country was as unstable as ever. Nawaz Sharif’s first government had fallen. Benazir Bhutto was back in power. Everyone was talking about a default on the country’s debts, rampant militancy, war, political chaos, inefficiency, corruption, and so on. Living there in the late 90s, I heard the same refrain every day. Clearly the events of the last week have shaken many – and rightfully given the strategically critical nature of the world’s second largest Muslim state – but perhaps the thing we should wonder at most is the astonishing fact that Pakistan successfully manages to keep itself together – apart from the inevitable and logical splitting off of eastern Pakistan to form Bangladesh in 1971 – not its manifest and manifold problems over 60 years of history. [complete article]

A revenger’s tragedy
By Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman, January 3, 2008

Quite what motivation Musharraf’s government would have for assassinating Bhutto, it is hard to discern. He expected her to provide legitimacy for his presidency. Indeed, the very fact that she was eager to participate in the elections put a democratic sheen on his clinging to power. Her death not only weakens Musharraf’s position further, but may actually write the final chapter of his rule.

Security experts in Pakistan have little doubt who is behind the assassination. “I am convinced that the intelligence services were involved,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, author of the highly acclaimed book Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. Only through the collusion of the security services could both a gunman and a suicide bomber have got so close to Bhutto, she says. Other analysts agree. There seems to be a general consensus that renegade current and former members of the ISI are working with religious extremists to spread a reign of terror.

Benazir Bhutto is the highest-value victim so far, but it is not just the PPP that is being targeted. Almost all Pakistani politicians are under threat. Hours before Bhutto’s assassination, an election rally organised by the Muslim League, the party of the other former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was attacked by unknown gunmen. Four party workers were killed. The Muslim League blames a pro-Musharraf party, the PML(Q), for the incident. But Musharraf allies are themselves under attack.

On 21 December, the day of the festival of Eid ul-Adha, a suicide bomber attacked a mosque in Charsadda District, near Pesha war, during Friday prayers. The intended victim, the former interior minister Aftab Sherpao, escaped unhurt but the blast killed more than 50 people. Even religious politicians, such as Maulana Fazlur Rahman, head of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Islamic Party of Religious Leaders), who has close ties with the Taliban, have received death threats. “The truth is that anyone can be bumped off in Pakistan,” says Imran Khan, the former cricketer and leader of the Movement for Justice Party, and it can simply be “blamed on al-Qaeda”. [complete article]

Pakistan: Restore democracy
International Crisis Group, January 2, 2008

In the next two months, Pakistan must work towards the following outcomes, with the strong and consistent support of the international community:

* Musharraf’s resignation, with Senate Chairman Mohammadmian Soomro taking over under the constitution as acting president and appointing neutral caretaker governments at the national and provincial levels with the consensus of the major political parties in all four federal units;
* postponement of the polls, accompanied with the announcement of an early new election date. The Election Commission announced on 2 January a postponement to 18 February but said nothing about other necessary changes needed if this step is to contribute to restoration of democracy in Pakistan,
* full restoration of the constitution, including an independent judiciary and constitutionally guaranteed fundamental freedoms of speech, assembly and association and safeguards against illegal arrest and detention;
* reconstitution of the Election Commission of Pakistan, with the consensus of all major political parties; and,
* the transfer of power and legitimate authority to elected civilian hands. [complete article]

Musharraf denies role in Bhutto’s assassination
By Griff Witte, Washington Post, January 3, 2008

Bhutto’s followers have focused their suspicions on several people with either past or present ties to Musharraf, four of whom Bhutto had named in a letter to the president as enemies plotting to kill her. One of those she implicated was Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, a former chief minister of Punjab province and a likely candidate to be prime minister if Musharraf’s allies do well enough in next month’s elections to form a government.

But Musharraf said the allegation that Elahi, or anyone else from the government, had participated in the attack was baseless and that Scotland Yard investigators whom he had invited to probe the matter would not be pursuing that possibility.

“I would like to know how she died, ultimately,” Musharraf said. “But I will not like anyone to go on a wild goose chase and start creating a disturbance.”

Sherry Rehman, spokeswoman for Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, accused Musharraf of trying to set the terms of Scotland Yard’s investigation before it even began. “It’s not for him to decide what’s a wild goose chase,” she said. [complete article]

See also, British police to help investigate Bhutto murder (The Indepedent), Pakistani opposition parties decry election delay (NYT), Musharraf not ‘fully satisfied’ by Bhutto inquiry (AP), and Gingerly, U.S. reaches out to Sharif in Pakistan (CSM).

Pakistan’s days of rage leave cloud of uncertainty
By Somini Sengupta, New York Times, January 2, 2008

The highway that leads from Benazir Bhutto’s ancestral village to this, her hometown, is one long road of ruin. Here and there along a stretch of 200 miles lie twisted hulks of tractor-trailers, their contents spilling out on the highway, casualties of the riots that broke out after Ms. Bhutto’s assassination last Thursday.

On New Year’s Eve, as the last light of 2007 fell from the sky, piles of coal still smoldered on the pavement. Rotten oranges littered the road. A consignment of pickup trucks that the United States had bought for Pakistani law enforcement officials fighting militants had been picked clean; brakes, steering wheels, batteries had been carted away.

The truck drivers, most of them ethnic Pashtuns from the faraway tribal areas of the northwest, waited in vain for rescue here in the southern ethnic Sindhi heartland. One of them had his left ear caked with blood; the mobs had pelted him with stones and then burned his coal truck, costing him his only source of income.

The road was a perfect emblem of the mood of this country, as it ushered in a new year under a thick shroud woven of rage and uncertainty. [complete article]

Pakistan elections delayed until Feb. 18
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, January 3, 2008

Pakistan’s election commission announced Wednesday that parliamentary elections would be postponed until Feb. 18, a delay of six weeks, after the death of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and the riots that have damaged some election commission offices and paralyzed parts of Sindh Province. [complete article]

See also, U.S. isn’t ready to accept Pakistan’s initial findings (NYT), In reversal, Pakistan welcomes outside help with inquiry on Bhutto (NYT), Benazir Bhutto’s tainted widower Asif Ali Zadari reemerges as kingmaker (The Times), Zardari rejects claim of al-Qaida link to Bhutto’s murder (The Guardian), The future Pakistan deserves (Muhammad Nawaz Sharif), Opponent calls for Musharraf to quit at once (NYT), and Doctors cite pressure to keep silent on Bhutto (WP).

After Benazir
By Declan Walsh and Jason Burke, The Observer, December 30, 2007

Speaking again to this newspaper not long before her death – this time by phone from Dubai – Bhutto had voiced her concerns. They were not with the militants but with those inside the security establishment – the same people whom her husband blamed for the Karachi attack.

‘I’m not worried about Mahsud,’ said Bhutto. ‘I’m worried about the threat within the government. People like Mahsud are just pawns. It is the forces behind them that have presided over the rise of extremism and militancy in my country. They feel threatened now that their infrastructure will be rolled back when democracy is restored.’

The reality was that Bhutto’s return was deeply threatening to powerful interests in a Pakistani establishment increasingly dominated under Musharraf’s rule by the army and the intelligence agencies.

It was marked by a hatred towards the Bhuttos within a core section of Pakistan’s military – one that runs back to the coup against Bhutto’s father in the late 1970s. This group were less threatened by her threat to roll up the extremists than her promise to give western countries access to the disgraced scientist Khan, who operated a nuclear weapons supermarket from Pakistan for much of the 1990s. The fear was that Khan might implicate powerful figures in the army who had supported his illegal activities.

Deep down, Bhutto considered these people the real enemy: ‘I’m talking about the retired military officers who fought the jihad, who created the Afghan mujahideen, and later morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The real threat comes from them; it doesn’t come from their puppets or their pawns. They have a lot of supporters within the echelons of administration and intelligence.’ [complete article]

Pakistan’s flawed and feudal princess
By William Dalrymple, The Observer, December 30, 2007

Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments – one of us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.

‘London is like a second home for me,’ she once told me. ‘I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through Harrods and WH Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours. I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes, I used to drive all the way up from Oxford just for an ice cream and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin.’

It was difficult to imagine any of her neighbouring heads of state, even India’s earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like this.

For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn’t was possibly more attractive even than what she was. She wasn’t a religious fundamentalist, she didn’t have a beard, she didn’t organise rallies where everyone shouts: ‘Death to America’ and she didn’t issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors, even though Salman Rushdie ridiculed her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.

However, the very reasons that made the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that gave many Pakistanis second thoughts. Her English might have been fluent, but you couldn’t say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently, but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse; apart from a few imperatives, she was completely at sea. [complete article]

See also, Pakistan at standstill as discord and unrest grow (WP), Bhutto’s son, 19, to take over as Pakistan opposition leader (The Guardian), and Fury at claims on Bhutto killing (The Guardian).