by OWEN BENNETT-JONES
The late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, holding her son Bilawal, now the Chairperson of Pakistan Peoples Party, on a visit to the United States in 1989. PHOTO/Wikipedia
In her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, Benazir Bhutto named a man whom she believed had tried to procure bombs for an unsuccessful attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007:
I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned … a bomb maker was needed for the bombs. Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail … The officials in Lahore had turned to Akhtar for help. His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one.
Akhtar’s story reveals much about modern Pakistan. Born in 1959, he spent two years of his boyhood learning the Quran by heart and left home at the age of 18, moving to the radical Jamia Binoria madrassah in Karachi. In 1980, he went on jihad, fighting first the Soviets in Afghanistan and later the Indians in Kashmir. In both conflicts he came into contact with Pakistani intelligence agents, who were there trying to find out what was going on and to influence events. Helped by the high attrition rate among jihadis, he rose through the ranks and by the mid-1990s, after an intense power struggle with a rival commander, emerged as the leader of Harkat ul Jihad al Islami or HUJI, once described by a liberal Pakistan weekly as ‘the biggest jihadi outfit we know nothing about’.
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Pakistan’s suicide bomb factories, located in the tribal areas, rely on child recruits for a practical reason: they are more impressionable. Recruits for suicide attacks are given immaculate white clothes, copious amounts of food, above average accommodation and hours of gently imparted one on one indoctrination. The other students are forbidden to talk to them and are instructed instead to bow with respect every time a recruit walks by. With such a regime it can take a few months to persuade an 18-year-old young man to mount a suicide attack; but a 15-year-old can be persuaded to do it in six weeks.
Liaquat Park was named after the first prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated there in 1951. In what many believe was a cover-up, the police shot his killer on the spot. One of the doctors who tried to revive him at Rawalpindi General Hospital was a certain Dr Khan. Fifty-six years later, Dr Khan’s son Mussadiq was one of the doctors trying to revive Benazir Bhutto at the same hospital. He was equally unsuccessful. On the announcement of her death, the vast majority of Pakistanis assumed that the people who ordered her assassination were senior state officials and that they would never be identified.
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The general may have led a coup against a democratically elected government but his message resonated throughout Pakistan. The good mood didn’t last, however. As each month passed, his popularity drained away and his ambitions shrank. By 2007, eight years after his coup, he was older, wiser and politically weaker. Like many Pakistanis, he had no doubt that the corruption allegations against Bhutto and Zardari were valid. But in 2007 he also had to accept that Bhutto had a rock solid popular base and that if he wanted to remain in power he needed her support. Swallowing his pride, he agreed to an MI6 suggestion that he attend a secret meeting with Bhutto in Abu Dhabi in July 2007. The encounter kicked off a series of meetings which, as they became more serious and focused, were taken over by the CIA. The basic proposition was simple enough: if Musharraf dropped all the corruption charges against Bhutto and Zardari and allowed her to return from exile to contest elections, she would not oppose his remaining president. To the Americans it looked like a dream ticket: military muscle combined with democratic legitimacy. It could never have worked. ‘I don’t believe in trust,’ Bhutto said at the time. ‘People just have interests that sometimes coincide.’ Nevertheless, the deal was done and she returned to Pakistan, flying from Dubai to Karachi on 18 October 2007. She was greeted by a triumph on an imperial Roman scale. There comes a point when a crowd is so big it’s impossible to count it. Many reckon that more than a million Pakistanis were there to welcome her home.
For eight hours she progressed in a massive, armour-plated truck from Karachi’s International Airport to the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where she was due to give a speech. She stood on a deck on the top of the truck acknowledging the cheers of the crowds lining the road. The police deployed no fewer than nine thousand men to protect her but even so Zardari wasn’t satisfied. He organised a human shield consisting of more than two thousand volunteers known as the Jaan Nisarane Benazir, those willing to die for Benazir. Many were Zardari’s former jail mates; they surrounded her vehicle and kept pace with the procession.
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