Pakistan expert: Jihadi nuke threat 'pure fantasy'
by Frank James
Anyone seeking thoughtful analyses of Benazir Bhutto's place in Pakistani politics as well as the distressing state-of-affairs in that nation before and after her assassination, should listen to and read Tariq Ali, a Pakistani novelist and historian.
One of Ali's most important contributions is that he takes issue with the notion, so prevalent on the presidential campaign trail, among a number of U.S. policymakers and in the media, that the reason to worry most about Pakistan is the risk of its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of extremists. That scenario is exceedingly fanciful, according to Ali.
He wrote the following in a piece published in the London Review of Books in November:
Western pundits blather on about the jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger. This is pure fantasy, reminiscent of a similar campaign almost three decades ago, when the threat wasnt the jihadis who were fighting alongside the West in Afghanistan, but nationalist military radicals. The cover story of Time magazine for 15 June 1979 dealt with Pakistan; a senior Western diplomat was quoted as saying that the big danger was that there is another Gaddafi down there, some radical major or colonel in the Pakistani army. We could wake up and find him in Zias place one morning and, believe me, Pakistan wouldnt be the only place that would be destabilised.
The Pakistan army is half a million strong. Its tentacles are everywhere: land, industry, public utilities and so on. It would require a cataclysmic upheaval (a US invasion and occupation, for example) for this army to feel threatened by a jihadi uprising. Two considerations unite senior officers: the unity of the organisation and keeping politicians at bay. One reason is the fear that they might lose the comforts and privileges they have acquired after decades of rule; but they also have the deep aversion to democracy that is the hallmark of most armies. Unused to accountability within their own ranks, its difficult for them to accept it in society at large.
Ali may be wrong but his argument is worth considering because it has a strong logic. The Pakistani military is the most coherent institution in Pakistan and all knowledgeable analysts agree its power is pervasive.
While the military has used extremists to do its biddingbacking them in the fight with India over contested Kashmir and supporting the emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistanthere's a big difference between the Pakistani military's use of extremists as a cat's paw and it allowing them to take over the nation or its nuclear stockpile. That would run counter to its survival instincts as well as its tendencies towards conservatism, a trait shared by armies generally.
Again, it's possible that Ali and analysts who agree with him are wrong and that extremists could, with some effort, or complicity on the Pakistani military's part, get their hands on Pakistan's nuclear devices. It's also possible Ali is right.
But don't expect to hear from presidential candidates in New Hampshire and Iowa that the menace of nuke-armed jihadis is perhaps overstated. Whatever the real risks of such a threat, playing up the risks, and arguing why you're the best candidate to deal with it, is likely to draw more voter attention than not.
Ali is also an informative source on Bhutto, who he knew since she was a teenager. After her death this week, he wrote a piece that appeared in the Guardian, a British newspaper, that her murder, though tragic, presented Pakistan with a slim opportunity, not that he was confident that his native land would take it.
It was a chance for her party, which has largely been driven by Bhutto's personality, to become a broader institution propelled by the needs of Pakistan's impoverished masses.
But first, he provides a brief and useful sketch of Bhutto.
I first met Benazir at her father's house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father's death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time.
She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.
She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints - all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn't be on the "wrong side" of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.
It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.
Benazir's horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation. The People's party needs to be refounded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done. The Bhutto family should not be asked for any more sacrifices.
Evidently, the Bhutto family isn't going to heed Ali's advice. Reports are that Bhutto's husband, the checkered Asif Ali Zardari, known widely for being prodigiously corrupt, will be running the party.
And the BBC, among others, is reporting that Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal, has been named his mother's heir as the new head of the Pakistan People's Party.
The Bhutto family's story is the stuff of novels, which comes across strongly Ali's London Review of Books piece.
Take the humiliation of Bhutto's husband Zardari at the hands of Bhutto's brother Murtaza and the payback that occurred while Bhutto was prime minister.
Murtaza Bhutto had contested the elections from abroad and won a seat in the Sind provincial legislature. He returned home and expressed his unhappiness with his sisters agenda. Family gatherings became tense. Murtaza had his weaknesses, but he wasnt corrupt and he argued in favour of the old partys radical manifesto.
He made no secret of the fact that he regarded Zardari as an interloper whose only interest was money. Nusrat Bhutto suggested that Murtaza be made the chief minister of Sind: Benazirs response was to remove her mother as chairperson of the PPP. Any sympathy Murtaza may have felt for his sister turned to loathing.
He no longer felt obliged to control his tongue and at every possible opportunity lambasted Zardari and the corrupt regime over which his sister presided. It was difficult to fault him on the facts. The incumbent chief minister of Sind was Abdullah Shah, one of Zardaris creatures. He began to harass Murtazas supporters. Murtaza decided to confront the organ-grinder himself.
He rang Zardari and invited him round for an informal chat sans bodyguards to try and settle the problems within the family. Zardari agreed. As the two men were pacing the garden, Murtazas retainers appeared and grabbed Zardari. Someone brought out a cut-throat razor and some warm water and Murtaza shaved off half of Zardaris moustache to the delight of the retainers, then told him to get lost. A fuming Zardari, who had probably feared much worse, was compelled to shave off the other half at home.
The media, bemused, were informed that the new clean-shaven consort had accepted intelligence advice that the moustache made him too recognisable a target. In which case why did he allow it to sprout again immediately afterwards?
Some months later, in September 1996, as Murtaza and his entourage were returning home from a political meeting, they were ambushed, just outside their house, by some seventy armed policemen accompanied by four senior officers. A number of snipers were positioned in surrounding trees. The street lights had been switched off. Murtaza clearly understood what was happening and got out of his car with his hands raised; his bodyguards were instructed not to open fire. The police opened fire instead and seven men were killed, Murtaza among them.
The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation false entries in police logbooks, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated, the provincial PPP governor (regarded as untrustworthy) dispatched to a non-event in Egypt, a policeman killed who they feared might talk made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime ministers brother had been taken at a very high level.
While the ambush was being prepared, the police had sealed off Murtazas house (from which his father had been lifted by Zias commandos in 1978). The family inside felt something was wrong. At this point, a remarkably composed Fatima Bhutto, aged 14, decided to ring her aunt at Prime Ministers House. The conversation that followed remains imprinted on her memory and a few years ago she gave me an account of it. It was Zardari who took her call:
Fatima: I wish to speak to my aunt, please.
Zardari: Its not possible.
Fatima: Why? [At this point, Fatima says she heard loud wails and what sounded like fake crying.]
Zardari: Shes hysterical, cant you hear?
Fatima: Why?
Zardari: Dont you know? Your fathers been shot.
Fatima and Ghinwa found out where Murtaza had been taken and rushed out of the house.
There was no sign on the street outside that anything had happened: the scene of the killing had been wiped clean of all evidence. There were no traces of blood and no signs of any disturbance. They drove straight to the hospital but it was too late; Murtaza was already dead.
Later they learned that he had been left bleeding on the ground for almost an hour before being taken to a hospital where there were no emergency facilities of any kind.
When Benazir arrived to attend her brothers funeral in Larkana, angry crowds stoned her limo. She had to retreat. In another unusual display of emotion, local people encouraged Murtazas widow to attend the actual burial ceremony in defiance of Islamic tradition. According to Fatima, one of Benazirs hangers-on instigated legal proceedings against Ghinwa in a religious court for breaching Islamic law. Nothing was sacred.
Anyone who witnessed Murtazas murder was arrested; one witness died in prison. When Fatima rang Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested and not the killers she was told: Look, youre very young. You dont understand things
In November 1996 Benazir was once again removed from power, this time by her own president, Farooq Leghari, a PPP stalwart. He cited corruption, but what had also angered him was the ISIs crude attempt at blackmail the intelligence agencies had photographed Legharis daughter meeting a boyfriend and threatened to go public. The week Benazir fell, the chief minister of Sind, Abdullah Shah, hopped on a motorboat and fled Karachi for the Gulf and thence the US.
A judicial tribunal had been appointed by Benazirs government to inquire into the circumstances leading to Murtazas death. Headed by a Supreme Court judge, it took detailed evidence from all parties. Murtazas lawyers accused Zardari, Abdullah Shah and two senior police officials of conspiracy to murder. Benazir (now out of power) accepted that there had been a conspiracy, but suggested that the hidden hand responsible for this was President Farooq Ahmad Leghari: the intention, she said, was to kill a Bhutto to get rid of a Bhutto.
Nobody took this seriously. Given all that had happened, it was an incredible suggestion.
The tribunal said there was no legally acceptable evidence to link Zardari to the incident, but accepted that this was a case of extra-judicial killings by the police and concluded that such an incident could not have taken place without approval from the highest quarters. Nothing happened. Eleven years later, Fatima Bhutto publicly accused Zardari; she also claimed that many of those involved that day appear to have been rewarded for their actions.
In an interview on an independent TV station just before the emergency was imposed, Benazir was asked to explain how it happened that her brother had bled to death outside his home while she was prime minister. She walked out of the studio. A sharp op-ed piece by Fatima in the LA Times on 14 November elicited the following response: My niece is angry with me. Well, yes.
Makes U.S. politics seem fairly tame, doesn't it? As noted in much of the fawning U.S. media coverage of Bhutto's life following her assassination last week, she denied complicity in her brother's death.
Whatever the truth, the ascent of her husband Zardari to her party's leadership arguably doesn't get Pakistan closer to being the kind of democracy U.S. policymakers would like to see in that important ally.
As Ali writes in the same piece about the aftermath of the 1979 execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's father, when he was deposed as prime minister :
The tragedy led to the PPP being treated as a family heirloom, which was unhealthy for both party and country.
It appears to be a case of history repeating itself. Of course, the U.S. may have trouble arguing against dynastic succession in Pakistani politics given the prominence of Bushes and Clintons
in our own presidential politics.
