[DEBATE] : What Bhutto Was Worried About By Robert D. Novak

[Riaz K Tayob]

What Bhutto Was Worried About By Robert D. Novak

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto followed two months of urgent pleas 
to the State Department by her representatives for better protection. 
The U.S. reaction was that she was worried over nothing, expressing 
assurance that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would not let 
anything happen to her.

That attitude led a Bhutto agent to inform a high-ranking State 
Department official that her camp no longer viewed the backstage U.S. 
effort to broker a power-sharing agreement between Musharraf and the 
former prime minister as a good-faith effort toward democracy. It was, 
according to the written complaint, an attempt to preserve the 
politically endangered Musharraf as George W. Bush's man in Islamabad.

President Bush confirmed that judgment with his statement Thursday, 
within hours of learning that Bhutto was dead, when he urged that the 
elections scheduled for Jan. 8 be held in furtherance of Pakistani 
"democracy." That may be Musharraf's position, but it definitely is not 
the position of his critics. They believed the election would be a sham 
with Bhutto dead and with Saudi-backed former prime minister Nawaz 
Sharif boycotting the balloting, though Sharif's party reversed course 
yesterday.

The Bush administration decided months ago to broker a power-sharing 
arrangement, with the deeply unpopular Musharraf retiring from the army 
but remaining as president and the popular Bhutto taking a third try as 
prime minister (after twice being ousted by the military). That decision 
was based on Pakistan's strategic importance as a sanctuary for al-Qaeda 
and Taliban fighters. Bush was in a quandary. Bhutto was much tougher 
than Musharraf on Islamist extremists, but Bush had invested heavily in 
the general.

When I last saw Bhutto, over coffee in August at Manhattan's Pierre 
Hotel, she was deeply concerned about U.S. ambivalence but asked me not 
to write about it. She had not heard from Musharraf for three weeks 
after their secret July meeting in Abu Dhabi. She feared the Pakistani 
military strongman was not being prodded from Washington.

Next came Musharraf's state of emergency and purge of Pakistan's Supreme 
Court to guarantee legality of his questionable election as president. 
According to Bhutto's advisers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice 
asked Bhutto in a telephone conversation to go along with that process 
in return for concessions from Musharraf. Bhutto agreed, but she got 
nothing in return.

The unsuccessful Oct. 18 attempt on Bhutto's life followed the regime's 
rejection of her requested security protection when she returned from 
eight years in exile. The Pakistani government vetoed FBI assistance in 
investigating the attack. On Oct. 26, Bhutto sent an e-mail to Mark 
Siegel, her friend and Washington spokesman, to be made public only in 
the event of her death.

"I would hold Musharraf responsible," Bhutto said in the message. "I 
have been made to feel insecure by his minions." She listed obstruction 
to her "taking private cars or using tinted windows," using jammers 
against roadside bombs and being surrounded with police cars. "Without 
him [Musharraf]," she said, those requests could not have been blocked.

In early December, a former Pakistani government official supporting 
Bhutto visited a senior U.S. government official to renew Bhutto's 
security requests. He got a brushoff, a mind-set reflected Dec. 6 at a 
Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central 
Asian affairs, was asked to respond to fears by nonpartisan American 
observers of a rigged election. His reply: "I do think they can have a 
good election. They can have a credible election. They can have a 
transparent and a fair election. It's not going to be a perfect 
election." Boucher's words echoed through corridors of power in 
Islamabad. The Americans' not demanding perfection signaled that they 
would settle for less. Without Benazir Bhutto around, it is apt to be a 
lot less.

A more sinister fallout of a free hand from Washington for Pakistan 
might be Bhutto's murder. Neither her shooting on Thursday nor the 
attempt on her life Oct. 18 bore the trademarks of al-Qaeda. After the 
carnage, government trucks used streams of water to clean up the blood 
and, in the process, destroyed forensic evidence. If not too late, would 
an offer and acceptance of investigation by the FBI be in order? © 2007 
The Washington Post Company

This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from 
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm