12-31-2007

PAKISTAN AFTER BENAZIR BHUTTO

Nathan Gardels is the editor of NPQ.

By Nathan Gardels

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is a great victory for al-Qaida, 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 their 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-Qaida after they had assassinated the Afghan resistance leader of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, two 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-Qaida) camps start falling like dominoes.”

Instead, the U.S. looked to Gen. Pervez 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 e-mail 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 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 West 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 headquarters of the army!

“Of course, Musharraf knows this. He tolerates it to maintain the complicated balance of forces that keep him in power.

“That is why the only hope for Pakistan is if Bhutto’s presence can shift the balance of power so that Musharraf and the military either are overthrown or are really compelled to move in Bhutto’s direction, rejecting the modus vivendi with al-Qaida and their allies in the ISI.”

Now that hope is gone. Tragically, Pakistan suffers a political void at the democratic center without Bhutto and is at the same time the emergent center of Islamist fundamentalism globally.

As Levy puts it: “There is no question in my mind that the center of gravity of Islamist fundamentalism is shifting from the Arab world to the Asiatic world. As V.S. Naipaul pointed out in his book ‘Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among Converted Peoples,’ the zeal of converts outside the Arab world is more fervent. Just looking at a map through Osama bin Laden’s eyes will tell you that Kashmir is closer to the center of the Muslim world, not Palestine. For most of the jihadists, Kashmir is the real Palestine.

“In this sense, the war in Iraq was not only foolish but a moral crime because it diverted focus and resources from the real issue. Not focusing on Pakistan after 9/11, and instead contracting out to Musharraf, was a grave strategic error of the U.S. It paralleled two other mistakes in dealing with Islamist fundamentalists: firstly, the indiscriminate and unquestioning support of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, not distinguishing between the fundamentalist stem cells of al-Qaida (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s groups) and the democratic forces of young Commander (Ahmad Shah) Masood’s Northern Alliance; and then, secondly, America’s dangerous tolerance of Saudi Wahhabism in return for oil.”

Because of her highly unique stance between Eastand West, and because she was a woman, Benazir Bhutto would have been a keyplayer in starting to unravel this knot that pits the interests of oil andjihadism against human rights and democracy across the Middle East and SouthAsia. Her husband and son will now be the figureheads in her party, thePakistan People’s Party. But who can replace her in this role?

(c) GLOBAL VIEWPOINT, DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES (Dec. 31, 2007)