BENAZIR AND BEYOND
Less than a week later, it is difficult to determine the full impact of the tragic assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.
The list of those potentially responsible seems to grow by the day, from the Taliban and Al Qaeda to her political opponents in the Pakistani military and the Musharraf administration. Initial reports that she was killed by an assassin's bullet now compete with a supposed medical finding that she died from a fractured skull as she fell back into her SUV from the force of either shrapnel or the suicide bomber's blast. We will probably never know. The motives of those who investigate political assassinations in Pakistan are, to a man, suspect; much of the forensic evidence has been destroyed as a consequence of the immediate clean up by local fire officials; and the Pakistani government has in the past refused foreign forensic help from qualified scientists. That Benazir Bhutto is the latest victim of terrorism cannot be questioned. But who or what groups or individuals are actually responsible will probably never be answered.
The tragedy of her untimely demise is matched only by the complexity of her courage. She was a conscious (and quite willful) paradox in action. Her western education (at Harvard and Oxford) was a counterpoint to her cultural moorings in a South Asian and thoroughly Islamic world. Her feminist commitment was as fervent as her commitment to an arranged marriage to a man she barley knew. Her inherited land based wealth stood in stark contrast to the poverty of her countrymen and women.
She preached on behalf of the rule of law in Pakistan but was held by a Swiss court to have violated the law on her own behalf. Though twice removed from office under questionable circumstances, the charge of corruption was not entirely without basis. She was imprisoned with her mother and father and in jail while authorities hanged her father. Her two brothers were themselves killed under questionable circumstances. And the day she returned from an eight year exile, she herself was nearly assassinated by a suicide bomber that killed over 100 of her supporters. That terrorist missed. Last week's, unfortunately, did not.
She did not plan a political career and did not want her children ever to have one at all. She wanted for them a safety she never demanded or expected for herself. She became a politician by accident and thus acquired that ineffable quality all non-accidental politicians covet -- what we, on this side of the world, in our media driven culture, call authenticity.
She would not have used that word. Her politics was complicated and complex. She truly respected the cultural and religious traditions of her land, which were her own as well, even as she led Pakistan through its own modernist emergence. On the occasion of her arranged marriage, she told reporters that she did not expect westerners to understand. I do not think she expected us to understand her politics either. It bridged the contradictions she lived and witnessed.
At the time of her death, the Bush administration was still trying to fashion an unlikely coalition, marrying her democratic bona fides to Musharraf's militaristic stability. The likelihood that such a marriage would ever work was probably always remote. It is now remoter still.
At some level, the US is still MIA in that part of the world. Our Iraqi mis-adventure poisons many wells, but none more than the well of democracy, such as it is, in a place called Pakistan. We had legitimacy, buckets of it, in the wake of 9/11. No one, not even the Pakistanis, questioned our right to go into Afghanistan and clean it out of AL Qaeda and Taliban, and had we remained focused there, we might have succeeded. We certainly might have captured bin Laden, and we would have been able to stop the Taliban from re-emerging and taking refuge in the remote tribal areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But we didn't. Instead, we fought a war that needed no fighting, against an enemy that did not exist, in a country that was neither attacking us nor funding those who would. We fought a war planned at the desks of a handful of neo-cons long ago, and long before 9/11. And we fought a war that those same neo-cons did an abysmal job of planning. It's usually a bad sign when you declare victory before it has been won, but that happened in Iraq too.
The list of mistakes in Mesopatamia is long and painful. Unilateralism. No WMD. A silly coalition of the willing that was always small and has grown even smaller still over time. Insufficient troops. An inept Coalition Provisional Authority. De-baathification, which destroyed Iraq's administrative apparatus, and torture, which destroyed our own integrity. Ignored or minimized sectarian conflict. Until recently, not even a reasonable counter-insurgency strategy . And even today, an unwillingness to level with the American people.
Now we can add Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto to the list. Our Iraqi mistake did not kill her. But it sure did not help either.
Less than a week later, it is difficult to determine the full impact of the tragic assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.
The list of those potentially responsible seems to grow by the day, from the Taliban and Al Qaeda to her political opponents in the Pakistani military and the Musharraf administration. Initial reports that she was killed by an assassin's bullet now compete with a supposed medical finding that she died from a fractured skull as she fell back into her SUV from the force of either shrapnel or the suicide bomber's blast. We will probably never know. The motives of those who investigate political assassinations in Pakistan are, to a man, suspect; much of the forensic evidence has been destroyed as a consequence of the immediate clean up by local fire officials; and the Pakistani government has in the past refused foreign forensic help from qualified scientists. That Benazir Bhutto is the latest victim of terrorism cannot be questioned. But who or what groups or individuals are actually responsible will probably never be answered.
The tragedy of her untimely demise is matched only by the complexity of her courage. She was a conscious (and quite willful) paradox in action. Her western education (at Harvard and Oxford) was a counterpoint to her cultural moorings in a South Asian and thoroughly Islamic world. Her feminist commitment was as fervent as her commitment to an arranged marriage to a man she barley knew. Her inherited land based wealth stood in stark contrast to the poverty of her countrymen and women.
She preached on behalf of the rule of law in Pakistan but was held by a Swiss court to have violated the law on her own behalf. Though twice removed from office under questionable circumstances, the charge of corruption was not entirely without basis. She was imprisoned with her mother and father and in jail while authorities hanged her father. Her two brothers were themselves killed under questionable circumstances. And the day she returned from an eight year exile, she herself was nearly assassinated by a suicide bomber that killed over 100 of her supporters. That terrorist missed. Last week's, unfortunately, did not.
She did not plan a political career and did not want her children ever to have one at all. She wanted for them a safety she never demanded or expected for herself. She became a politician by accident and thus acquired that ineffable quality all non-accidental politicians covet -- what we, on this side of the world, in our media driven culture, call authenticity.
She would not have used that word. Her politics was complicated and complex. She truly respected the cultural and religious traditions of her land, which were her own as well, even as she led Pakistan through its own modernist emergence. On the occasion of her arranged marriage, she told reporters that she did not expect westerners to understand. I do not think she expected us to understand her politics either. It bridged the contradictions she lived and witnessed.
At the time of her death, the Bush administration was still trying to fashion an unlikely coalition, marrying her democratic bona fides to Musharraf's militaristic stability. The likelihood that such a marriage would ever work was probably always remote. It is now remoter still.
At some level, the US is still MIA in that part of the world. Our Iraqi mis-adventure poisons many wells, but none more than the well of democracy, such as it is, in a place called Pakistan. We had legitimacy, buckets of it, in the wake of 9/11. No one, not even the Pakistanis, questioned our right to go into Afghanistan and clean it out of AL Qaeda and Taliban, and had we remained focused there, we might have succeeded. We certainly might have captured bin Laden, and we would have been able to stop the Taliban from re-emerging and taking refuge in the remote tribal areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But we didn't. Instead, we fought a war that needed no fighting, against an enemy that did not exist, in a country that was neither attacking us nor funding those who would. We fought a war planned at the desks of a handful of neo-cons long ago, and long before 9/11. And we fought a war that those same neo-cons did an abysmal job of planning. It's usually a bad sign when you declare victory before it has been won, but that happened in Iraq too.
The list of mistakes in Mesopatamia is long and painful. Unilateralism. No WMD. A silly coalition of the willing that was always small and has grown even smaller still over time. Insufficient troops. An inept Coalition Provisional Authority. De-baathification, which destroyed Iraq's administrative apparatus, and torture, which destroyed our own integrity. Ignored or minimized sectarian conflict. Until recently, not even a reasonable counter-insurgency strategy . And even today, an unwillingness to level with the American people.
Now we can add Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto to the list. Our Iraqi mistake did not kill her. But it sure did not help either.
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