Murdered: Benazir Bhutto
She was known as Happy Bhutto at Harvard.
Michael Winterbottom’s recent film about Daniel Pearl (the WSJ journalist murdered in Pakistan a few years ago) — A Mighty Heart — gives a sympathetic portrait of good people trying to hold the country together.
I sense that for such people Bhutto was John F. Kennedy, a sophisticated ray of hope.
Pakistan was a basket case politically from birth. Got worse during the Soviet-Afghan war, as the US used Pakistan as the staging area of its war on the Soviet forces; the CIA bred the Paki secret police (ISI), as decades before it had bred Iran’s Savak. In this mileau both Al Qaeda (such as it is and was) and the BCCI octopus were born and raised.
When post 9/11 Bush-Cheney embraced Musharraf a la mode mafiosi, a fissure opened, in Paki politics and society, that perhaps will never seal. The state for many practical purposes was already partitioned before Bhutto’s murder today. Will it lead to more or less “unity”?
I remember feeling sorry for Musharraf during the months after the 9/11 attacks: a man compelled by force of circumstances to Seem Tough for television while sitting on a time bomb.
It seems the most dangerous place on earth. [Oops, I see in the 12/29 NY Times that Joe Biden has been saying this repeatedly on the campaign trail. Well, I concur...] Who can have any confidence about its nuclear weapons? Perhaps one will find its way to New York or Washington or Houston or Tel Aviv, perhaps sooner now than later.
ed says:
Fast forward three years:
The day after Hosni Mubarak resigns in Egypt, the Anti Terrorism court in Islamabad issues a warrant for the arrest of General and former President Mushareff in connection with the murder of Benazir Bhutto.
The general is living in London. His attorney says the charges are baseless.
February 12th, 2011 at 11:26 am