By now many of you may have heard the news that Benazir Bhutto has been killed by a shooter - suicide bomber in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Rawalpindi is one of Pakistan's major cities over in the East.
She got back in her car after a wild rally in the city, then stood up inside the bulletproof vehicle to wave to the crowd. A man raced through the crowd, pulled out a gun and fired two shots, killing Bhutto. Then he blew himself up, just to make sure she was dead.
Bhutto's vehicle sped off to the hospital, where it was originally reported that she had two bullet wounds, one in the head and one in the neck. Later reports said that there were no bullets or shrapnel wounds in her head.
Even later reports said that she died when her head hit the lever of the sun roof of her vehicle. However, Bhutto's family and supporters are continuing to say that she had gunshot wounds.
The most recent news, via Juan Cole's fantastic blog, is that the Pakistani government is wildly backtracking from its claim that Bhutto died of a concussion after video surfaced showing a shooter firing at her from only a few feet away, after which her body heaves up and falls down as if it had been hit by bullets - all of this before the explosion hits.
Footage of Bhutto's assassination is here , and the gunman can be seen in the video firing several shots. The gunman is circled in red in the video. In this video, you can see a man in sunglasses pointing a gun at Bhutto from a very short distance away. 20 people were killed in the blast.
The assassination occurred just 12 days before a major election that President Musharaff was expected to lose. Benazir's supporters were quick to blame Musharaff for the blast, and Bhutto herself had previously said that she would blame Musharaff if she were killed.
Bhutto's entourage had repeatedly requested a greater security detail, but the requests had all been denied. Nevertheless, a bit too much is being made of this, as Bhutto was surrounded by bodyguards and was traveling in a bulletproof vehicle. She also had a security detail of up to 700-800 men, five of whom were killed in the attack.
The greater security they requested was along the lines of bombproof vehicles and jammers to stop bombings. But jammers are no good against a suicide bomber.
The day before, shots had been fired at Nawaz Sharif, another opposition candidate. The shots missed Sharif, but killed four of his bodyguards.
Bhutto had just returned from exile to contest the elections in the first democratic opening since Musharaff seized power in 2001. On October 18, soon after her return from exile, another suicide bomber had attacked her entourage, killing 140 people but narrowly missing Bhutto. In that attack, she had a security detail of up to 5,000-6,000, in multiple layers, yet a multi-pronged attack got through anyway.
Another Al Qaeda banner, this one with Bin Laden and a map of Iraq done in the colors of the Iraqi flag. bin Laden is an Arab nationalist in addition to being an Islamist. This paints his hatred for Iran in vivid colors. You can't understand bin Laden well until you grasp his Arab nationalist dimension.Al Qaeda was suspected in that attack, and Al Qaeda quickly claimed responsibility for this attack on one of their websites and in a phone call to a Greek newspaper. In addition, the head of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad.
Yazid said that a Punjabi who was a former member of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a fanatical Sunni group dedicated to killing Shiites, was part of a three man squad that carried out the operation on Al Qaeda's orders. One man was the shooter and bomber, a second played an unknown role, and a third was possibly a spotter.
The operation was highly professional, but Al Qaeda is a professional military organization, and furthermore, there are many Pakistanis, including former Pakistani military, including Special Forces, in its ranks. Al Qaeda and related Islamists have been threatening to kill Bhutto since 1992.
An arrest in Karachi revealed a plot involving hundreds of cells throughout Pakistan involved in tracking targets and sending out death squads to kill them. The targets included Bhutto, Musharaff and other top government figures.
An Al Qaeda banner from an Al Qaeda website, tajdeed.net. I doubt if it is up anymore. Note the emphasis on Saudi Arabia with bin Laden next to it. AQ is first and foremost a Saudi organization.Bhutto was considered even more of an enemy to AQ and Pakistan's Islamists than Musharaff, but Al Qaeda has tried to kill Musharaff a few times already in the past couple of years, since Musharaff has decided to wage war on Pakistan's armed Islamists. But Musharaff has really only gone after the Islamists to do Washington's bidding.
A classic Al Qaeda banner, with the Arabian Peninsula, the crossed swords, and the black flag of Islam. These motifs are all frequently seen in Al Qaeda banners.Every now and again, Pakistan seems to catch these major AQ operatives out of the blue, as if they were pulling them out of a hat. I am convinced that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) knows where most of the top AQ operatives are, but only arrests them once in a while as a show to show the US that it is cooperating in the Terror War.
Another Al Qaeda banner from the same site, this one picturing Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man and the one who has significantly radicalized him and set him into motion that he may as well be called "the brains behind bin Laden". Zawahiri can generally be found in the Bajour Agency or across the border in Afghanistan.Pakistan has pretty much ceded a number of its Western Frontier Provinces and agencies to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Particularly strong formations exist in North and South Waziristan and the Bajour Agency.
Another Al Qaeda logo. Note the horse. This horse is often seen on AQ logos. I am not sure what it means, but it is one of their motifs.The Dir District is basically off-limits to US and Pakistani forces, and I am convinced that this is where Osama bin Laden has been for the past couple of years, where he is being protected by a radical Wahhabi preacher. No one can go near that province without AQ knowing about it.
The bodies of spies hang in the trees for months on the main roads into the area. Mercenaries tracking bin Laden are convinced he is there (in fact, there have been photos of him posing with the radical preacher in the past few years).
A street scene in Dir, the main city in the Dir District. A PBS crew went here to film "In Search of Bin Laden" a couple of years back, but they left after a couple of days due to the very bad vibes in the place.Part of the year, bin Laden goes across the border to Nuristan in Afghanistan. In the past year or so, more districts have come under AQ/Taliban control. The Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Peshawar, Bannu, Kohat, Laki Marwat and Dir Districts and the Khyber, Kurram and Mohmand Agencies have all fallen. The Orakzai Agency and the Hangu, Mardan, Malakand, Chitral and Charsadda Districts are all threatened.
In recent days, the Swat District fell and there was heavy fighting as government troops tried to take it back. Later, the Shangla District fell.
A really nice map of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) showing the provinces and agencies named above. Here is a great map of the Dir-Bajaur-Nuristan-Peshawar-Swat Valley area.It is hard to say whether or not Musharaff was involved in killing Bhutto. The problem is that the ISI is completely tied up in the Taliban and possibly even Al Qaeda. Well, some of the ISI. Maybe.
Another Al Qaeda banner with a number of their martyrs. I can't really identify most of them, but Sheik Yassin of Hamas is second from right. Interesting that Yassin is revered by Al Qaeda, but while Hamas and Al Qaeda are not sister groups, they are uncomfortable close for my tastes.But then we don't really know, because the ISI is one of the most opaque spy agencies around. For many years, Pakistan cultivated "the jihadis" as an auxiliary wing of the Pakistani armed forces. To understand why, we must understand Pakistani geopolitics.
Pakistan's number one deadly enemy is India and vice versa. The tragedy that set all of this nonsense in motion was that of Kashmir. When Pakistan and India split in 1947 after the British left, 90% of the Kashmiri population voted to go to Pakistan (the population was about 90% Muslim, but there were significant populations of Hindus called Pandits and even Buddhists).
But the governor of the province was a Hindu and he nullified the vote. Pakistan and India have fought a few wars over the Kashmir since. In 1949, the UN ruled that Kashmiris should be allowed to have a plebiscite to determine whether they want to stay with India, go independent, or go with Pakistan.
India has ignored the resolution ever since. An insurgency started in Kashmir after a couple of decades and it has smoldered ever since. Pakistan has pumped many jihadis into Kashmir, but there are also many locals who want to leave India.
Truth is, Pakistan is a lot more frightened of India than vice versa. Pakistan is terrified of India. We need to keep that in mind. All of Pakistan's military strategy revolves around the omnipresent conflict with India. It colors everything. Even support for the Taliban in Afghanistan was colored by this conflict.
Pakistan preferred anti-Indian Islamists it could control instead of the possibility of of a nationalist Pashtun government, as Pashtun nationalists have long campaigned for a Pashtunistan, encompassing Pashtun regions on both sides of the border. Such a new state would cleave off a good part of Pakistan. As Pakistan is threatened by India, she dares not lose any territory at all, as a smaller state will make her less secure.
Now that Karzai is in power, his regime is seen as pro-Indian, or at least not anti-Indian enough. Plus, he is a Pashtun. Bad. Possibility of Pashtun nationalism. So the ISI is to a greater or lesser degree running the Taliban insurgency inside Afghanistan for the reasons described above.
Note: After this post was published, TGGP argued on his excellent blog that my characterization of this situation in this post does not make sense. That is, since the Taliban are themselves Pashtuns, they must favor Pashtunistan, hence why would they ISI support them and dislike Karzai? But Pashtunistan has always been supported by the more secular Pashtuns.
Yes, they do exist. It is false to see the Pashtuns are all Islamists. There was a huge rally the other day for Benazir's party, the PPP, in the capital of the Bajour Agency, which is virtually run by Al Qaeda. The Pashtun areas area full of all sorts of folks, all the way from Al Qaeda Islamists to ardent secularists.
Instead of seeing Pakistan as Islamist-overrun, it is better to see all this conflict instead as a civil war inside of Pakistan, with Islamists fighting seculars.
Now onto TGGP's complaint. Karzai represents the more secular-minded Pashtuns who have tended to promote Pashtunistan. As an alternative to that and as a way to co-opt the Pashtunistan notion, the ISI promoted the Taliban. Pashtuns, yes, but so Islamist that they have had the very notion of nationalism, not to mention Pashtun nationalism, deracinated from their very being.
These guys are with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda barely believes in nation-states. They want to more or less dissolve them into a religious caliphate empire. Nation-states are secular, man-made institutions that privilege man's flawed laws and rule over God's, hence they are rejected.
As quivers in its bow in the war against India, Pakistan has long cultivated the "jihadi option". At various times in its history, Pakistan has "called in the jihadis" to perform various nefarious deeds for the state. Pakistan has always thought it could control the jihadis, but recently they have veered out of control and area attacking the host.
Training little kids to be terrorists. Wonderful! Look at the proud father beaming at his future suicide bombers. This is typical fare for an Al Qaeda site. They think child abuse like this is cool.There is also the question of domestic Pakistani politics. This snake's nest is home to a vicious political zero-sum game where rulers have been having their rivals killed for decades now. Bhutto's father, a former prime minister, was himself arrested by a government that succeeded him.
Soon afterwards, in 1979, he was hanged by his political rivals on charges of "conspiracy to murder" and Benazir was tossed in prison for a couple of years. Bhutto's hanging led to massive riots similar to those taking place as I write this in the wake of Benazir's killing. Who knows if Bhutto was guilty of the charges, but his killers surely were.
The party founded by Bhutto, himself a wealthy semi-feudal landowner of huge plots of land, is called the Pakistan People's Party. It is nominally a leftwing socialist party, and it's probably the best large Pakistani party from a progressive point of view.
Meanwhile, Musharaff is a member of a group of people called Mohajirs. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the famous father of the Muslim nuclear bomb, is another Mohajir.
The Mohajirs , from the Arab word for refugee, immigrant or emigrant (in this case, refugee) - muhajir - are Pakistani Muslims who fled India for Pakistan during the communal slaughter in 1947 as Hindus fled Pakistan and Muslims fled India, with both sides massacring hundreds of thousands of the other side in the process. A multiracial group, the one thing that the Mohajirs had in common in India was the Urdu language.
One would think that Mohajirs, the scars of Pakistan's baptism of blood, would have been welcomed in Pakistan. Not so. They claim to have experienced long-term discrimination inside Pakistan, but the sort of discrimination they experienced is the sort that Jews, Asians and Whites in the US complain about, that is, reverse discrimination.
The Mohajirs who fled India were much more educated than the people already residing in the new state of Pakistan, hence they were overrepresented in the better jobs. A quota system that amounted to reverse discrimination was put into place to limit the Mohajirs to 7% of such jobs, the proportion of their percentage in the population.
This reverse discrimination angered the Mohajirs so much that they formed an anti-discrimination movement in 1986 that culminated in a Mohajir political party. Mutahida Quami Movement, or MQM. This party was formed by Altaf Hussein. Hussein is presently a refugee in London, and he is regarded as a political terrorist (guilty of killing his political enemies) by many rivals.
As Pakistan is one of only two nations on Earth formed as explicitly religious states - Israel the Jewish state is the other - the importance of Islam to Pakistan cannot be underestimated. The narrative of the Mohajirs is that they sacrificed all - including 1 million lives - for Islam, in fleeing India at great cost in life and suffering, all for the sake of Islam. So, in effect, they see themselves as the super-martyrs for Islam.
They also formed their own clique that looks out for its own interests and no one else's, similar to many caste-type groups in Pakistan. Hence, Mohajirs in general and Musharaff's party in particular are not well-liked by non-Mohajirs.
Now that you have some background on some of the events in the backdrop of Bhutto's assassination, you can reach your own conclusions about who killed her and why. At first I was not sure who did it, but now I am certain that Al Qaeda killed her.
The Pakistani government is blaming Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader in South Waziristan. Mehsud had threatened to kill Bhutto before she even returned home. He is also believed to be responsible for an increasingly sophisticated and frightening series of bombings, including suicide attacks, against government and military targets.
A number of these attacks have occurred in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani military and the ISI have their headquarters. At least three of the attacks is thought to be have been against Pakistan's nuclear sites. As of this fall, Al Qaeda has vowed to target Pakistan's nuclear program.
So, yes, Al Qaeda did the attack, but were they alone? The tangled web of AQ's tentacles wrap deeply into the ISI and the "jihadi option" of the Pakistani state.
An Al Qaeda logo with bin Laden, the black flag of Islam, a photo of the planes heading into the World Trade Center and US flags at half mast after the attack. More typical Al Qaeda themes. Note that bin Laden is always beaming charismatically in all of these banners.Charismatic portrayals of its heroes is typical of these AQ productions. One one level is humanizes them and makes them attractive, and on the other it almost makes them saint-like. To AQ's core followers, bin Laden is nearly a Mahdi.
The Pakistani state is capable of killing political rivals, and has done so in the past.
There are many Taliban and Al Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani military and ISI, and it is possible that elements in the military and intelligence services may have been involved in the attack due to their alliance with Al Qaeda. However, I do not believe that Bhutto's non-Islamist rivals in Pakistani politics had anything to do with her murder. That includes Musharaff.
An excellent piece by Pakistani Leftist Tariq Ali goes into a lot more details about Pakistani politics than I did here.
Meanwhile, as we ponder this mystery, Pakistan, an extremely unstable state with 50 nuclear weapons, is convulsed with wild riots. One of the dangerous and unstable states on Earth just got a lot more so. Hang onto your seats for the wild ride.
