Richard Whalen

The assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has unleashed a global tidal wave of false sentiments and genuine fears for Pakistan and the region. Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim nation, and she was widely loved in her country. But outsiders saw her as opportunistic, Machiavellian and dangerous.

“She was Lady Macbeth -- suspected of having her two brothers killed and possibly her husband,” says a veteran American journalist who interviewed her and closely watched her career over the decades.

Pakistan is a Muslim-majority nation torn from Hindu India in the savage 1947 partition. Gaining power in turbulent Pakistan demands a blood price from all who seek and conspire for it. In the case of Bhutto, she was the closest approximation of a democratic political heroine, but she was at heart an autocrat who ruled with a steely-eyed and totally realistic determination to say and do whatever was necessary to gain power.

In the aftermath of her assassination, the immediate question in the backrooms of governments across the world is: who will control Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, estimated by an American expert to number about 80 warheads. Neighboring India, also nuclear-armed, is on a hair- trigger alert. India stole Pakistan’s Kashmir territory in the Himalayas and the two nations have fought three inconclusive wars over the lost land. A fourth could erupt in the predictably chaotic aftermath of Bhutto’s murder.

Who benefits from Bhutto’s assassination? Certainly not Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf. (Washington forced the former general to remove his military uniform and govern as a civilian.) Prior to the January 8th scheduled elections, Musharraf had hoped to arrange a behind-the-scenes power-sharing deal with Bhutto. Certainly not Bhutto’s principal civilian rival, the equally cynical and corrupt Nawaz Sharif, whose following is smaller than hers and less able to provide a “democratic” front for the real military rulers of Pakistan.

Pakistan is ruled by a military state-within-the-state, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the most ruthless and effective secret service in the developing world. The nightmare possibility is that rival factions within the ISI, divided over Bhutto’s future role, killed her and are waging a civil war triggered by her murder.

For the United States, waging a small, dirty war in Afghanistan, Bhutto’s violent removal from the international scene generates enormous uncertainty. There is obvious danger of a wider Afghanistan war spilling over the entire region of South Asia. Pakistan’s Afghan border areas are ruled by fierce outlaw tribes, drug smugglers, assassins (the name “assassin” originated in what is now Pakistan) and men with guns who are available for hire to the highest bidder. Al Qaeda makes its headquarters there.

American CIA investigators found that the trail of the 9/11 attacks conspiracy led to Pakistan’s wild border lands. Osama bin Laden is still believed to be hiding there under ISI protection, receiving kidney dialysis at a remote army hospital. The Pakistani Army has pretended to search for him, because that’s what Washington has paid for. But the Pakistani insiders and the Saudis who bankroll impoverished Pakistan’s government and regional intrigues know perfectly well where bin Laden is hiding.

Up to now, I believe that it has not been in President Bush’s interests to push beyond Pakistani pretenses and expose ugly realities. Now the U.S. will have to deal with these realities that include the likely necessity to find a way to continue stable, authoritarian and non-democratic government under the Pakistan military, perhaps with a thin democratic “cover” from Nawaz Sharif.

In recent weeks, as the U.S. military’s “surge” in Iraq succeeded, Mideast sources have speculated that Islamic Jihadists had quietly withdrawn from Iraq, transited Iran and moved into the new main front – Pakistan, where the possibility of establishing a new Islamic Revolutionary government seemed greatest. Bhutto’s assassination as the preliminary to this scheme to take over Pakistan by religious subversion and force is quite logical.

Bhutto had complained to the ISI about the inadequacy of her protection. If Bhutto was killed by Islamic fanatics, the nature of the attack indicates complicity within her own circle.

Now Pakistan could descend into a tumultuous civil war and an al Qaeda offensive. I think that President Musharraf should announce, after a period of mourning, a new date for the elections - ideally within a month.