Benazir Bhutto - SZABIST

in Pakistan, it is also a loss to the world, which suffers from too few patriots and too few leaders who
put others before their own careers and power.
After Bhutto, the deluge
The Washington Times
January 2, 2008
Mahmud Sipra
Those that planned and finally took her life may have succeeded in depriving her supporters and her
young family of her physical presence but in doing so they have unwittingly unleashed a deluge that
their misguided agenda will now find impossible to withstand.
To take Benazir Bhutto’s name in the past tense is hard.
It is going to be even harder to visualise Pakistan’s politics without her towering presence. Like her
father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto before her, she strode like a colossus over Pakistan’s political landscape
during her short political life leaving an indelible imprint stamped on the psyche of a people. To
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, they came to listen to. To Benazir, they came not so much to listen to but to feel
her reassuring presence. If ZAB was the stuff of legerdemain, his daughter Benazir will now be Joan
of Arc.
No obituary, no eulogy, no amount of outpouring of grief at her tragic death will adequately explain
the chemistry she enjoyed with the people. Her ability to photosynthesise with the people — that great
reservoir of raw power from where she derived her own immense energy and political strength — was
matched by only one other person before her — her father.
In politics, you were either for her or against her. In death, one can only be for her. She is now the
daughter, the sister and the mother of every Pakistani man, woman and child.
She recently returned after an eight-year hiatus under the aegis of a controversial arrangement offered to
her by President Musharraf. An arrangement, in no less measure, encouraged and structured by
Washington. That her return, triumphant as it might have been, suffered from a fundamental weakness —
rightly or wrongly — of carrying the “Made in Washington” label. A label that exposed her immediately to
the ever watchful and furtive eye of religious extremists, purists and her political detractors who now saw
the Daughter of the East as not one of us but as one of them.
Her high profile return to a tumultuous welcome, marred within hours of her arrival by a suicide
bomber, left over 130 dead. An attack she narrowly survived herself. The agonised cry of the injured
and the maimed that rent the air that night was only to be the forerunner of a much darker day and
nights ahead. But the night passed.
To exacerbate matters, Washington’s blatant attempt at nation building with the noble intent of putting
Pakistan on the fast track to democracy coincided with President Musharraf’s own domestic problems.
Not the least of which was his imposition of an “Emergency” in the country. It backfired with
dramatic repercussions. Forced on to the back foot by a plethora of internal and external pressures —
President Musharraf (then General) shed his uniform- and announced January 8, 2008 as the date for
general elections.