Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

“You have al-Qaida operating right there, funded and trained right there,” Wallace said. “Here was a
leader that wanted to come in and change that and stand by us and the people of America for justice
and democracy. We have lost that. There is no one else there that could do that.”
Daughter of destiny
Arkansas Online
December 28, 2007
Christopher Hitchens
The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an
extraordinary degree of physical courage.
When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in
1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her
subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in
prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had
inflicted it upon her.
Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in
1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police
in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988,
on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was.
Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of
the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a
bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following
day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be
elected the leader of a Muslim country.
Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent "comeback" tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges
and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its
own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy
Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the
Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run
the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of
Aquino.
Who knows who did this deed? It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in
Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman's Hotel. It is as if
she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it's hard to construct any cui bono analysis
on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death.
The likeliest culprit is the Al-Qaida/ Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert
and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at
whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home
motorcade on Oct. 18.