USA Blamed - Bhutto Death?

For some reason the WSJ had this article printed in whole form - via Google

Growing Fury At Musharraf Deepens Crisis
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV in Karachi, Pakistan, PETER WONACOTT in Peshawar and JAY SOLOMON in Washington
December 31, 2007; Page A1

Pakistan's political crisis escalated as the party of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said it would run in next week's parliamentary elections and urged supporters to channel outrage over her death into opposition to President Pervez Musharraf's regime.

Following its dynastic tradition, the Pakistan People's Party also filled the leadership void created by Ms. Bhutto's death by naming as party co-chairmen her husband, Asif Ali Zardari -- who faced corruption and murder charges and spent several years in jail -- and her 19-year-old son. "My mother always said: Democracy is the best revenge," the son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, said at an emotionally charged news conference in the family's ancestral village.


Before the Dec. 27 suicide attack on Ms. Bhutto, her secular, relatively pro-Western party was seen as a potential ally of Mr. Musharraf, who recently was elected to another five-year term as president and who has vowed to restore democracy to Pakistan and to fight the spread of Islamist extremism.

But the PPP's new leadership indicated yesterday that the party, seared by the tragedy, has now become a formidable enemy to the embattled Mr. Musharraf. "Cooperation with him is out of the question now," said Taj Haider, a senior PPP official and former senator. "What we are doing is accusing Gen. Musharraf of murdering Benazir Bhutto."

Ms. Bhutto's husband, Mr. Zardari, yesterday repeatedly referred to the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), a party affiliated with Mr. Musharraf that controlled the outgoing government, as the "murderers' league." He also demanded a United Nations commission of inquiry into his wife's death that would be modeled after the U.N. investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. That commission had the power to interrogate senior government officials in Lebanon and Syria.

The Pakistani government has angrily rejected such calls for an international inquiry. Its Interior Ministry spokesman said that foreign investigators wouldn't understand the Pakistani mentality and aren't needed in solving a "common criminal case."

The government says Ms. Bhutto was killed by an al Qaeda-linked group led by Baitullah Mehsud, a tribal leader from the Waziristan region on the Afghan frontier. Through a spokesman, Mr. Mehsud denied any involvement.

U.S. officials said they have held regular discussions with Ms. Bhutto's aides, as well as the Pakistani government, on providing assistance to the investigation into the attack. The U.S. stands ready, these officials said, to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to provide any forensic or investigative help requested by the Pakistani government.

"Given the suspicions involved, having some sort of international component could help in quieting" Pakistan's political environment, said Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman. He added, though, that such a move could only go forward if there were "consensus" among the various Pakistani political factions.


Video of the moments before Benazir Bhutto's assassination was released along with more details of the shooting and blast.
The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said that future U.S. aid to Pakistan could be conditional on Islamabad supporting an international probe and that the White House must "ensure that the coming election is free and fair."

As conspiracy theories abounded in Pakistan, even the exact manner of Ms. Bhutto's death has become the subject of heated controversy between the PPP and the government. The Interior Ministry maintains that a shockwave from Thursday's blast knocked Ms. Bhutto's head against a lever on her car's sunroof, inflicting a fatal skull fracture. But Mr. Zardari and other PPP officials insisted that she was killed by the assassin's bullets before the explosion, as she left a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, a city near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Harnessing suspicions of government involvement has become the key campaign plank of the PPP ahead of the national election Jan. 8 that is set to install a new prime minister to share power with Mr. Musharraf. The issue of Islamist extremism has virtually disappeared from the public debate.

Meanwhile, the prospect that a massive sympathy vote would give the PPP a landslide election victory has caused an abrupt about-turn in other Pakistani parties' positions on the election, a centerpiece of Mr. Musharraf's plan for transition to civilian democracy after eight years of military rule.

The party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif -- which just two days ago declared it would boycott the election -- indicated yesterday that it will take part in the vote if PPP also participates.

In contrast, Mr. Musharraf's allies -- until now the most vocal backers of the Jan. 8 election -- have started to call for a delay. Tariq Azim, information secretary of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), told reporters that his party has already suspended campaigning, and that he expects the Central Electoral Commission to postpone the vote by "up to three or four months." The commission, which has said that voter rolls in many areas were destroyed amid looting in the days after Ms. Bhutto's death, is scheduled to meet on the issue today.

PPP officials yesterday cautioned against any moves to prevent the Jan. 8 vote from occurring on schedule. "If they postpone it once, then they can keep postponing again and again," said Mr. Haider, the former senator. Should the government embark on this path, he added, the PPP will respond "on the streets," with massive unrest.

Even some supporters of Mr. Musharraf agreed, saying that a national vote could help defuse tensions and end the continuing violence. "Preparations are made. Everything is ready," said Muhammad Intikhab Khan, a senior official in the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) and a candidate for provincial legislature in the Northwest Frontier Province. "Everything will cool down afterward. We shouldn't give suicide bombers a victory."

? Rallying Cry: The party of slain Benazir Bhutto said it would run in Jan. 8 elections and declared its strong opposition to President Pervez Musharraf.
? New Leaders: The party named Ms. Bhutto's husband and son as its leaders.
? What's Next: Authorities are set to decide whether to postpone elections. Some Musharraf allies, seeing a sympathy vote for the Bhutto party, have called for a delay.Many candidates have pumped personal fortunes into plastering their faces on billboards and leaflets around the country, and few have the desire to bear those expenses once again if the election is postponed.

While Pakistan's military has repeatedly intervened in Pakistani politics in the past -- including the 1999 coup that brought Mr. Musharraf to power -- it has shown no signs of flexing its muscles as the current political drama has unfolded.

Ms. Bhutto's only son, the new PPP chairman, is too young to run in the election himself: Under Pakistani law, a candidate must be at least 25 years of age. He is likely to be little more than figurehead leader for the foreseeable future. A first-year student at Oxford University -- his mother's alma mater -- he said that he intends to remain in Britain and complete his studies. "When I return, I promise to lead the party, as my mother wanted me to do," he said in reply to a reporter's question at yesterday's news conference.

Visibly irritated, Mr. Zardari interrupted, asking journalists to abstain from questioning Bilawal: "He may be the chairman, but he is my son, and he is at a tender age."

Mr. Zardari said he won't be running in the elections himself, and won't be a candidate for prime minister. That job, he said, is likely to be occupied in the case of a PPP victory by Amin Fahim, the party's most senior official in Pakistan before Ms. Bhutto's return from self-imposed exile in October.

Like the Bhuttos, Mr. Fahim hails from an aristocratic landholding family in Pakistan's southern Sindh province. He is known for writing poetry inspired by the mystical Sufi current of Islam. While serving as PPP faction leader in the outgoing parliament, he forged consensus with Mr. Musharraf on some key legislative initiatives, such as the women's rights protection bill.


Real authority over the party, and over any PPP-dominated government, however, is expected to lie with Mr. Zardari. Known as "Mr. 10 Percent" for allegedly demanding kickbacks on public contracts while Ms. Bhutto served as prime minister in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Zardari is a divisive figure in Pakistan, and has little of his wife's broad popular support or charisma.

Mr. Zardari has always maintained his innocence, and Ms. Bhutto herself, in an interview last month, rejected accusations against her husband of illicit business dealings. She has said that those who didn't want to side with extremists in trying to tarnish her image used the corruption card instead.

But some former officials in Ms. Bhutto's government say her husband was, to an uncommon degree, involved in detailed business decisions while holding political office. While serving as a cabinet minister for his wife, he had a diverse portfolio that included appointing heads of utilities and negotiating purchases of commercial aircraft, these officials say.

The charges against him included masterminding the murder of Ms. Bhutto's brother, and tying a bomb to a Pakistani businessman's leg as part of an extortion scheme. He was never convicted of these charges, and has always maintained they were politically motivated.

In choosing its new leadership, the PPP had to fall back on Ms. Bhutto's closest relatives, says political analyst Abdul Khalique Junejo, because she had run the party throughout the years as a family fiefdom. "The party has no institutions -- it was a one-woman show," he said. As for Mr. Zardari, he added: "Before marrying her, he had no political standing. He is known just as her husband."

Before Ms. Bhutto's own ascent to party leadership, the PPP was led by her father, former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. After being removed from office, he was hanged by the country's military rulers in 1979 in the city of Rawalpindi -- the same place where Ms. Bhutto died last week.


The hallowed family name is such a key electoral asset that Ms. Bhutto's son, previously known just as Bilawal Zardari, added "Bhutto" to his surname as he assumed the party's chairmanship yesterday. Raised mostly in Dubai and Britain, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari spoke only in English at yesterday's news conference -- unlike his father, who dominated the proceedings and used passionate Urdu throughout.

"If you think of [the PPP] as a political party, it would be a surprise," said Frank Anderson, who served as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Near East division chief in 1991-94. "But if you think of it as a feudal manor, the huge Bhutto family business, then, yeah, the son is the next in line. If they did anything else, it would smack of democracy."

Indeed, such a dynastic succession is common among political parties on the Indian subcontinent. In Bangladesh, a country that seceded from Pakistan in 1971, the two main opposition chiefs are respectively the daughter and the widow of the country's two main independence leaders. In India, when Indian National Congress leader and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down in 1984, her position was assumed by her son Rajiv. Ms. Gandhi herself was the daughter of India's first prime minister. After her son was assassinated in 1991, the party's leadership eventually passed to his Italian-born wife, Sonia.

Such precedents were very much on the mind of mourning PPP activists in the Karachi suburb of Sachalgoth, as they gathered cross-legged on a rug around a TV set to watch the latest developments yesterday. "So what that Bilawal is so young? Rajiv Gandhi was also politically inexperienced when his mother was killed," said the suburb's PPP leader Taj Muhammad Wasan. "He will be surrounded by some very senior advisers."

--Zahid Hussain in Islamabad and Siobhan Gorman in Washington contributed to this article.

Argh, I read through that whole second article and it was mostly stuff that I already knew. The first is interesting, though, but come on, are you serious? What more could they do?

Reagaknight

Are you addressing me?

Am I serious? Or are Bhutto's aides serious?

If you already 'knew' all the article contained why bother to read or comment at all? Do you wish to approve and/or censor articles before I post them?

I am furious again the United States is being held up to a yet another mission - even though the U.K. security forces were also requested but the media concentrates on placing blame on the U.S.

Woah, I'm sensing some hostility here. I was talking about Bhutto's aides, as I hope you could glean from my post. I didn't know anything from the first article, so that was what I commented on. But the second seems to be a summary of events that have been widely reported, so I already knew most of the info and did not comment on it.

America's interests are best secured by a pro-Western, military dictatorship in Pakistan. Democracy would have produced a hardcore Muslim theocracy. Nope......Bhutto was not America's best friend in Pakistan, as many day-dreaming sentimentalists like to argue. :thumbdown: