Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Monday, December 31, 2007
Growing Fury
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV in Karachi, Pakistan, PETER WONACOTT in Peshawar and JAY SOLOMON in Washington
December 31, 2007
Pakistan's political crisis escalated as the party of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said it would run in next week's parliamentary elections and urged supporters to channel outrage over her death into opposition to President Pervez Musharraf's regime.
Following its dynastic tradition, the Pakistan People's Party also filled the leadership void created by Ms. Bhutto's death by naming as party co-chairmen her husband, Asif Ali Zardari -- who faced corruption and murder charges and spent several years in jail -- and her 19-year-old son. "My mother always said: Democracy is the best revenge," the son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, said at an emotionally charged news conference in the family's ancestral village.
Before the Dec. 27 suicide attack on Ms. Bhutto, her secular, relatively pro-Western party was seen as a potential ally of Mr. Musharraf, who recently was elected to another five-year term as president and who has vowed to restore democracy to Pakistan and to fight the spread of Islamist extremism.
But the PPP's new leadership indicated yesterday that the party, seared by the tragedy, has now become a formidable enemy to the embattled Mr. Musharraf. "Cooperation with him is out of the question now," said Taj Haider, a senior PPP official and former senator. "What we are doing is accusing Gen. Musharraf of murdering Benazir Bhutto."
Ms. Bhutto's husband, Mr. Zardari, yesterday repeatedly referred to the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), a party affiliated with Mr. Musharraf that controlled the outgoing government, as the "murderers' league." He also demanded a United Nations commission of inquiry into his wife's death that would be modeled after the U.N. investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. That commission had the power to interrogate senior government officials in Lebanon and Syria.
The Pakistani government has angrily rejected such calls for an international inquiry. Its Interior Ministry spokesman said that foreign investigators wouldn't understand the Pakistani mentality and aren't needed in solving a "common criminal case."
The government says Ms. Bhutto was killed by an al Qaeda-linked group led by Baitullah Mehsud, a tribal leader from the Waziristan region on the Afghan frontier. Through a spokesman, Mr. Mehsud denied any involvement.
U.S. officials said they have held regular discussions with Ms. Bhutto's aides, as well as the Pakistani government, on providing assistance to the investigation into the attack. The U.S. stands ready, these officials said, to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to provide any forensic or investigative help requested by the Pakistani government.
"Given the suspicions involved, having some sort of international component could help in quieting" Pakistan's political environment, said Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman. He added, though, that such a move could only go forward if there were "consensus" among the various Pakistani political factions.
The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said that future U.S. aid to Pakistan could be conditional on Islamabad supporting an international probe and that the White House must "ensure that the coming election is free and fair."
As conspiracy theories abounded in Pakistan, even the exact manner of Ms. Bhutto's death has become the subject of heated controversy between the PPP and the government. The Interior Ministry maintains that a shockwave from Thursday's blast knocked Ms. Bhutto's head against a lever on her car's sunroof, inflicting a fatal skull fracture. But Mr. Zardari and other PPP officials insisted that she was killed by the assassin's bullets before the explosion, as she left a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, a city near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
Harnessing suspicions of government involvement has become the key campaign plank of the PPP ahead of the national election Jan. 8 that is set to install a new prime minister to share power with Mr. Musharraf. The issue of Islamist extremism has virtually disappeared from the public debate.
Meanwhile, the prospect that a massive sympathy vote would give the PPP a landslide election victory has caused an abrupt about-turn in other Pakistani parties' positions on the election, a centerpiece of Mr. Musharraf's plan for transition to civilian democracy after eight years of military rule.
The party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif -- which just two days ago declared it would boycott the election -- indicated yesterday that it will take part in the vote if PPP also participates.
In contrast, Mr. Musharraf's allies -- until now the most vocal backers of the Jan. 8 election -- have started to call for a delay. Tariq Azim, information secretary of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), told reporters that his party has already suspended campaigning, and that he expects the Central Electoral Commission to postpone the vote by "up to three or four months." The commission, which has said that voter rolls in many areas were destroyed amid looting in the days after Ms. Bhutto's death, is scheduled to meet on the issue today.
PPP officials yesterday cautioned against any moves to prevent the Jan. 8 vote from occurring on schedule. "If they postpone it once, then they can keep postponing again and again," said Mr. Haider, the former senator. Should the government embark on this path, he added, the PPP will respond "on the streets," with massive unrest.
Even some supporters of Mr. Musharraf agreed, saying that a national vote could help defuse tensions and end the continuing violence. "Preparations are made. Everything is ready," said Muhammad Intikhab Khan, a senior official in the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) and a candidate for provincial legislature in the Northwest Frontier Province. "Everything will cool down afterward. We shouldn't give suicide bombers a victory."
Many candidates have pumped personal fortunes into plastering their faces on billboards and leaflets around the country, and few have the desire to bear those expenses once again if the election is postponed.
While Pakistan's military has repeatedly intervened in Pakistani politics in the past -- including the 1999 coup that brought Mr. Musharraf to power -- it has shown no signs of flexing its muscles as the current political drama has unfolded.
Ms. Bhutto's only son, the new PPP chairman, is too young to run in the election himself: Under Pakistani law, a candidate must be at least 25 years of age. He is likely to be little more than figurehead leader for the foreseeable future. A first-year student at Oxford University -- his mother's alma mater -- he said that he intends to remain in Britain and complete his studies. "When I return, I promise to lead the party, as my mother wanted me to do," he said in reply to a reporter's question at yesterday's news conference.
Visibly irritated, Mr. Zardari interrupted, asking journalists to abstain from questioning Bilawal: "He may be the chairman, but he is my son, and he is at a tender age."
Mr. Zardari said he won't be running in the elections himself, and won't be a candidate for prime minister. That job, he said, is likely to be occupied in the case of a PPP victory by Amin Fahim, the party's most senior official in Pakistan before Ms. Bhutto's return from self-imposed exile in October.
Like the Bhuttos, Mr. Fahim hails from an aristocratic landholding family in Pakistan's southern Sindh province. He is known for writing poetry inspired by the mystical Sufi current of Islam. While serving as PPP faction leader in the outgoing parliament, he forged consensus with Mr. Musharraf on some key legislative initiatives, such as the women's rights protection bill.
Real authority over the party, and over any PPP-dominated government, however, is expected to lie with Mr. Zardari. Known as "Mr. 10 Percent" for allegedly demanding kickbacks on public contracts while Ms. Bhutto served as prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Zardari is a divisive figure in Pakistan, and has little of his wife's broad popular support or charisma.
Mr. Zardari has always maintained his innocence, and Ms. Bhutto herself, in an interview last month, rejected accusations against her husband of illicit business dealings. She has said that those who didn't want to side with extremists in trying to tarnish her image used the corruption card instead.
But some former officials in Ms. Bhutto's government say her husband was, to an uncommon degree, involved in detailed business decisions while holding political office. While serving as a cabinet minister for his wife, he had a diverse portfolio that included appointing heads of utilities and negotiating purchases of commercial aircraft, these officials say.
The charges against him included masterminding the murder of Ms. Bhutto's brother, and tying a bomb to a Pakistani businessman's leg as part of an extortion scheme. He was never convicted of these charges, and has always maintained they were politically motivated.
In choosing its new leadership, the PPP had to fall back on Ms. Bhutto's closest relatives, says political analyst Abdul Khalique Junejo, because she had run the party throughout the years as a family fiefdom. "The party has no institutions -- it was a one-woman show," he said. As for Mr. Zardari, he added: "Before marrying her, he had no political standing. He is known just as her husband."
Before Ms. Bhutto's own ascent to party leadership, the PPP was led by her father, former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. After being removed from office, he was hanged by the country's military rulers in 1979 in the city of Rawalpindi -- the same place where Ms. Bhutto died last week.
The hallowed family name is such a key electoral asset that Ms. Bhutto's son, previously known just as Bilawal Zardari, added "Bhutto" to his surname as he assumed the party's chairmanship yesterday. Raised mostly in Dubai and Britain, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari spoke only in English at yesterday's news conference -- unlike his father, who dominated the proceedings and used passionate Urdu throughout.
"If you think of [the PPP] as a political party, it would be a surprise," said Frank Anderson, who served as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Near East division chief in 1991-94. "But if you think of it as a feudal manor, the huge Bhutto family business, then, yeah, the son is the next in line. If they did anything else, it would smack of democracy."
Indeed, such a dynastic succession is common among political parties on the Indian subcontinent. In Bangladesh, a country that seceded from Pakistan in 1971, the two main opposition chiefs are respectively the daughter and the widow of the country's two main independence leaders. In India, when Indian National Congress leader and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down in 1984, her position was assumed by her son Rajiv. Ms. Gandhi herself was the daughter of India's first prime minister. After her son was assassinated in 1991, the party's leadership eventually passed to his Italian-born wife, Sonia.
Such precedents were very much on the mind of mourning PPP activists in the Karachi suburb of Sachalgoth, as they gathered cross-legged on a rug around a TV set to watch the latest developments yesterday. "So what that Bilawal is so young? Rajiv Gandhi was also politically inexperienced when his mother was killed," said the suburb's PPP leader Taj Muhammad Wasan. "He will be surrounded by some very senior advisers."
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Saturday, December 29, 2007
A Bhutto Successor?
A senior official of Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) told TIME late Saturday that the slain former prime minister's 19-year-old son, Bilawal, will likely be named as her political heir and the new party leader on Sunday. PPP members are due to meet to discuss the party's future and to give Bilawal, a student at Oxford, a chance to read his mother's last will and testament.
A Pakistani television news channel also carried reports that Bilawal will be made the new leader, which the channel said accorded with Benazir Bhutto's wishes. If confirmed, the teenager will become the third leader of the 40-year-old center-left party, one of Pakistan's most powerful. Bilawal will follow his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who founded the PPP in 1967, led Pakistan as Prime Minister for four years in the mid 1970s and was hanged in 1979 by a military government, and Benazir, who took over from her father and was killed in a shooting and suicide bomb attack two days ago.
The quick anointment of a Bhutto to head the PPP will help rally party members devastated by the assassination of their tough but beloved leader. The party hopes to ride a wave of sympathy in parliamentary elections that are set for Jan. 8 but may yet be postponed in the face of widespread violence around the country. Rival opposition parties have called for a boycott of the polls but PPP officials say their party intends to participate.
Bilawal was born in September 1988, nearly three months before his mother was elected Prime Minister for the first time. After Benazir and her children went into self-imposed exile in the late 1990s, the family split their time between London and Dubai, where Bilawal attended the Rashid School for Boys, serving as vice president of the school's student council. In Fall 2007 he enrolled at Oxford, where both his grandfather and his mother studied. A 2004 profile of Bilawal in the respected Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn said the teenager liked target-shooting, swimming, horseback riding and squash, and regretted being away from Pakistan in part because it meant he played less cricket. His grandfather, he said, "was a very courageous man and I consider myself very lucky because I have three powerful role models that will obviously influence my career choices when I am older."
As PPP members have begun to contemplate who should take over as party leader, a consensus has emerged that the person needs to be a Bhutto, a name that retains incredible power and vote-winning influence in secular Pakistan despite — or perhaps because of — the tragedies and controversies the family has faced. It is not the first time a young Bhutto has taken over from a dead parent. "This was also the situation when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was murdered," says Babar Awan, a PPP Senator and close ally of Benazir. "Benazir was a teenager, she was a student at Harvard in 1979 [when Zulfikar Ali was hanged]. It is basically the hard core of the PPP that rallies around their great hope and that they attach to the House of Bhutto."
Many people had tipped Benazir's husband Asif Ali Zardari for the top spot, and in the unpredictable world of Pakistani politics that could still happen. An experienced politician, Zardari served as Environment Minister in his wife's second administration. But he is also a controversial figure in Pakistan, and has spent a total of 11 years in prison on various charges including blackmail and corruption, for which he earned the nickname "Mr. 10%." Supporters dismiss these charges, most of which have been thrown out of Pakistani courts (a few are still pending), as politically related mischief. "He's a strong man," says PPP Senator Awan. "All of us are controversial. Wasn't Benazir Bhutto? Wasn't Zulfikar Ali Bhutto? All those who don't accept the military role in politics are controversial. The charges are 100% unfounded and fake."
Other possible runners include Benazir's sister Sanam, though she seems incredibly reluctant to join the family firm, or Fatima Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali's eldest son Murtaza. Fatima, however, had split with her aunt Benazir, whom she once described as "the most dangerous woman in Pakistan." The decision to go with Bilawal appears to have come after his father turned down the job in deference to the slain Benazir's expressed wishes. The senior PPP official, who requested anonymity to allow him to speak more openly, told TIME that Bilawal will head the party, and that the party's deputy leader and longtime Benazir loyalist, Mukhdoom Amin Fahim, is likely to become the prime minister, assuming the party wins a majority in parliament. Bilawal would take over as the parliamentary leader once he finishes his studies and once he has more experience, the official said. Earlier in the day PPP Senator Awan told TIME that Bilawal was a natural future leader. "Yes, of course," he said. "he has to be groomed and trained but that will happen."
The young Bhutto, Benazir's only son, knows the dangers of the job he might be about to take on. Last year Benazir told a reporter that she hoped her three children would choose a different career. "My children have told me they are very worried about my safety," she said. "I understand those fears. But they are Bhuttos and we have to face the future with courage, whatever it brings."
Source : TIme
—With reporting by Jumana Farouky/London and Khuda Yar Khan/Islamabad
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U.S. Troops to Head to Pakistan
Beginning early next year, U.S. Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan, as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counter terrorism units, according to defense officials involved with the planning.
These Pakistan-centric operations will mark a shift for the U.S. military and for U.S. Pakistan relations. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the U.S. used Pakistani bases to stage movements into Afghanistan
Yet once the U.S. deposed the Taliban government and established its main operating base at Bagram, north of Kabul, U.S. forces left Pakistan almost entirely. Since then, Pakistan has restricted U.S. involvement in cross-border military operations as well as paramilitary operations on its soil.
But the Pentagon has been frustrated by the inability of Pakistani national forces to control the borders or the frontier area. And Pakistan's political instability has heightened U.S. concern about Islamic extremists there.
According to Pentagon sources, reaching a different agreement with Pakistan became a priority for the new head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, Adm. Eric T. Olson. Olson visited Pakistan in August, November and again this month, meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistani Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairman Gen. Tariq Majid and Lt. Gen. Muhammad Masood Aslam, commander of the military and paramilitary troops in northwest Pakistan. Olson also visited the headquarters of the Frontier Corps, a separate paramilitary force recruited from Pakistan's border tribes.
Now, a new agreement, reported when it was still being negotiated last month, has been finalized. And the first U.S. personnel could be on the ground in Pakistan by early in the new year, according to Pentagon sources.
U.S. Central Command Commander Adm. William Fallon alluded to the agreement and spoke approvingly of Pakistan's recent counterterrorism efforts in an interview with Voice of America last week.
"What we've seen in the last several months is more of a willingness to use their regular army units," along the Afghan border, Fallon said. "And this is where, I think, we can help a lot from the U.S. in providing the kind of training and assistance and mentoring based on our experience with insurgencies recently and with the terrorist problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think we share a lot with them, and we'll look forward to doing that."
If Pakistan actually follows through, perhaps 2008 will be a better year.
Source : Washington Post
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