Pakistan Votes - On Reflection

Today Pakistanis vote for a new parliament and possibly deciding a new Prime Minister. It is important to remember that these elections were delayed by six weeks because of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. It is important to reflect on the significance of her death. Her party, the Pakistan People's Party, claim that religious extremists carried out the assassination because they resented everything she stood for - a Western-educated woman representing modernity, women's power and cosmopolitan thinking. To the Bush Administration, she was the force that could stabilize the regime of Pervez Musharraf.

That I fear is a trust sadly replaced. Perhaps it is better that we never know what a third Bhutto government would mean for Pakistan. However, I know friend who is very familiar with the politics of that region. In the Islamic world, Pakistan has arguably one of the most politically active armies. There have been four military regimes since her independence from Britain. Four of her twelve presidents are generals. Each has taken power from a perceived corrupt government. Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are known to be corrupt. Benazir Bhutto's husband has the nickname of Mr. Ten percent because he skimmed 10% of all government contracts. Consider this, the job of Prime Minister of Pakistan is not known for being well-paid. So how were Benazir Bhutto and her family able to survive in high-priced London and Dubai with the accumulated compensation of a Pakistani Prime Minister for over ten years? More importantly, she lived in some of the nicest West-end districts of the City such as Mayfair and Park Lane. Thus, the allegation of corrupt by her husband must have some element of truth, especially with a nickname like Mr. Ten-percent. In fact, the President of Pakistan had fired her, despite being appointed by her to his position. It is practically unheard of that a head of state, whether a Governor-General or a President, would fire the prime minister who appointed him or her.

In October 2007, she returned to Pakistan vowing to fight the religious extremists and support Musharraf's stance in the War against terror. The truth was, during her tenure as Prime Minister, she often relied on the religious militants to counter her lack of control over the Army or the Inter-Services Intelligence, the country's intelligence agency. When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996, she was Prime Minister of Pakistan. She supported their raise on the pre-text of stability for Afghanistan and in the name of trade in the Central Asian countries. She was also the Prime Minister at the time when the Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988 and the vacuum in Afghanistan's political structure occurred. In the early 1990s, it was widely known that Pakistan and Iran were engaging in a proxy war in Afghanistan. Pakistan supported what is now known as the Taliban regime, while the Iranians backed the Northern Alliance. So it really was not the case that Bhutto would have done more to fight religious extremism in Pakistan. More importantly, since Pakistan's independence from Britain, I believe that no democratically-elected government ever had too much control over the border tribal regions near Afghanistan. A Commonwealth High Commissioner visited to the North West Frontier region of Pakistan in the late 1990s with a full fledged Army escort when Sharif was Prime Minister. We are talking about soldiers armed with automatic rifles or machine guns and tanks just to guarantee the ambassador's safety.

Shortly after her assassination, the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune published a piece by acclaimed writer William Dalrymple about Bhutto's support of religious extremists in Kashmir during her tenure as Prime Minister. In fact, Dalrymple says that Inter-Services Intelligence recruited and trained thousands of young jihadists to fight the Indian Army in Kashmir. In fact, some of those jihadists later joined bin Laden and his terrorist group in Afghanistan. More importantly, Bhutto defended this policy in the name of fighting repression in Kashmir in 1994. Hamid Gul, her head of the intelligence agency, admitted that Pakistan was sending jihadists into India in an attempt to tie down the resources of the Indian Army so that the people of Kashmir have a chance to rise up against India. He went on to say that it was "the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them."

If Bhutto was the ally of the West in the fight against religious extremism, why did she and her military support one of the most oppressive and extremist regimes? Given her history of support for religious extremists, what made this Bush Administration believe she was right person to reinforce the shaky Musharraf regime? I am not sure that Bhutto could have given the necessary political support to ensure the Musharraf regime could stay in power. Even if she could stabilize his power base, I doubt she will have the political will to fight the extremists as she has pledged during her brief return, given her past track record in office.

Perhaps in death, Bhutto may be able to unite the people of Pakistan against the religious extremist elements in the tribal regions. As a martyr of democracy and modernity, her party may have a stronger will to continue the fight against militants in those regions that seek to put the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan. In fact, the news of her assassination prompted her political rival Sharif and his party, the Pakistan Muslim League, to pick her cause against religious extremists. This I believe is a good sign for Western civilization that the major opposition parties, namely the Pakistan People's Party and the Pakistan Muslim League, and this government is united. If she was alive and elected, she would be unable to contain the monster she, to a large extent, created because her rival, Sharif would have defended them with the religious right.