Bill's posts with tag: assassination
 All right, the woman is dead. She was killed. That's tragic for Pakistan for various reasons, not the least of which is they've made her teenage son the chairman of her political party. Wait - that's not tragic. That's low farce.
But the most farcical stuff, when you put aside the media inundating us all with how courageous and principled (yeah, right) she was, is the war of words going on in Pakistan over just how she shuffled off this mortal coil. According to the Pakistani government, she wasn't bombed to death or shot through the head (alternatively, shot through the neck; like Dr Watson's mysterious travelling bullet wound, where Bhutto was shot depends on who's doing the telling). She died, according to the Pakistani government version, accidentally - apparently she was ducking away from the explosion when she hit her head on a sun roof lever and suffered a fatal concussion. Outside of novels redolent with purple prose, I did not know such things happened.
It doesn't seem relevant to either side fighting over her precise mode of death that it doesn't matter how she died - she's dead in an attack, carried out by whoever (the government of Pakistan blames a Pakistani Taliban leader who has denied all responsibility and whom Bhutto's party absolves of blame). It's fair to say that even if she did bang her head on the sunroof lever, she wouldn't have done that without a gunman shooting at her from close range and a bomb going off right next to her. It's not as though she died in a traffic accident. So, the whole debate isn't just academic - it's ridiculous and sterile, like the post WWII arguments over whether Hitler had shot himself, or swallowed cyanide, or both simultaneously.
Now that Australia has just wiped the floor with the "Indian" cricket team, cricket isn't newsworthy any more, so I assume Bhutto and Pakistan are going to occupy my media space for weeks to come.
 Things just keep getting worse and worse for Pakistan. Poor Pakistanis.
If a raging civil war (in all but name) wasn't enough, they have a "President" who's a military dictator who's just shucked his uniform, suspended the free press, sacked all judges who didn't kowtow to him, made it about impossible for any serious political opponent to contest elections, and is ruling the country as a self-serving proxy for the US. And now the former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, has been shot dead (as of this writing I have no idea who killed her - it may well be the jehadis, but I wouldn't speculate without proof).
Bhutto was far from being either a good or honest politician. She was utterly corrupt, incompetent in office, and bereft of all political principles, apart from owing her position entirely to her dynastic origins - in all of this she was a typical South Asian politician. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, is known to have amassed so much wealth during her rule that he was known as Mister Ten Per Cent (he allegedly got a cut of 10% of every government contract). She hid from prosecution for corruption for years in Britain - until the Americans brought her back as a mask for their favourite, Pervez Musharraf to wear so he could cling to power by a power sharing deal. Bhutto betrayed her former competitor, fellow ex-premier, and comrade in arms against dictatorship, Nawaz Sharif, to provisionally accept the deal. Typically, she betrayed the Americans and Musharraf too, and backed out of the deal when she saw the winds were not exactly in Musharraf's favour.
Bhutto was hated by many Pakistanis for many reasons. She was a typical South Asian politician,as I said, arrogant, power hungry, totally corrupt, willing to make any deal to stay in power. She was also hated by the jehadis for being an American stooge - which she quite certainly was. That she was a woman was a minor irritant. South Asian nations are all anti-woman and have almost all had women leaders, after all.
Before talking about the effects of the murder of Bhutto (I read and heard contradictory accounts of exactly how it happened, but no doubt some kind of picture will emerge) - her killing is going to prove very beneficial for Pervez Musharraf in the long run, though damaging in the short term. He will certainly pitch this as another intolerable act of jehadi terror, and the Americans (who have proved remarkably gullible about him or else have deliberately permitted his covert support to the jehadis) will gather him to their bosom again. Whether he had a hand in her killing or not doesn't matter - he's going to benefit from it. He has already had Nawaz Sharif banned from contesting in elections. Now the only other political threat to him has been terminated.
What does this killing, really, mean? It leaves Nawaz Sharif isolated, Bhutto's party leaderless (like almost all South Asian politicians she permitted no alternative leadership to emerge) and the Pakistanis left with no alternative but the Musharraf dictatorship. I'll be amazed if dear old Pervez doesn't re-impose Emergency in Pakistan in a day or two just to make sure.
Also it means that women are going to think long and hard before entering politics in Pakistan again - and that surely can't be good for any country.
Poor Pakistanis, as I said. Really, they would have been better off to have remained in India...
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