Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

I was questioned all night and warned that it would be in my interests to leave the country. Early next
morning, I was driven back to Islamabad. My flat had been ransacked. Two cars and a red motorbike
appeared on the street corner and followed me everywhere.
I was determined not to be driven out, but my enemies had the last word. The interior ministry refused
to renew my visa and I was asked to leave the country. The local press described me as either an
Indian spy or the “Pamella Bordes of Pakistan”. To my outrage, one article even claimed I had rented
room 306 of the Holiday Inn to entertain.
As I drove to Islamabad airport, I notice fresh graffiti on the wall. “We apologise for this democratic
interruption,” it read. “Normal martial law will be resumed shortly.” A few months later, on August 6,
1990, Benazir woke to the news that troops had surrounded ministries, television and radio stations.
The president, flanked by the service chiefs, announced that her government had been dismissed for
“corruption, mismanagement and violation of the constitution”.
For more than a decade, my work took me elsewhere in the world – to Latin America and Africa – but
I went back and forth to Pakistan and was there for Benazir’s triumphant reelection in 1993 and her
removal once more three years later amid accusations of nepotism and the undermining of the justice
system. That was the first time I saw her in tears.
I married Paulo, a Portuguese journalist, and in July 1999 – three months after a Pakistani court had
found the exiled Benazir guilty of corruption – our son, Lourenço, was born. I thought about giving up
the peripatetic life of a foreign correspondent to write books and be more of a mother. But on
September 11, 2001, I stared over and over again at the film of the second aircraft hitting the second
tower of the World Trade Center.
“Mummy, Mummy, plane crashing!” shouted two-year-old Lourenço. I felt a familiar shivering in my
guts. I knew I had to go back.
As in the old days, the lobby of the Serena hotel in Quetta, the Pakistani city just across the border
from Kanda-har, was full of ISI agents in salwar kameez and aviator glasses. Pakistan was again under
a military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in 1999. Benazir was out of the
picture, living in exile in Dubai with her husband and two daughters.
Even if Musharraf was genuine in his professed support for the American war on the Taliban, it
seemed naive to think that ISI would meekly obey. A key paradox to Pakistan is that, while it is
nominally an ally in the war on terror, its powerful military intelligence has another agenda. ISI made
the Taliban what they were by channelling weapons to them in Afghanistan’s years of chaos during
the 1990s, and supporting them was an ideology, not just a policy.
When I began investigating reports from contacts that ISI was still supplying arms to the Taliban, the
men in aviator glasses struck. I was arrested at 2.30am in my hotel room, as was Justin Sutcliffe, the
photographer working with me.
We spent the next two days being interrogated in an abandoned bungalow. Fortunately Justin had
managed to smuggle in a mobile phone. While I made a loud fuss to our captors, he phoned from the
toilet for help. Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, intervened. On the third day we were deported
as a threat to national security. Three months later, after the abduction and beheading of Daniel Pearl,
the American investigative reporter, we wondered what might have happened had we not had that
phone. There were signs of ISI methodology in the Pearl case.