Why Al Qaeda Didn’t Kill Her and the Pakistani Military Did?
By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad, Pakistan
The confidence of the slain Pakistani prime minister’s aides is amazing. You can’t change their minds. Mrs. Bhutto, they say, was definitely killed by bullet wounds and not the fracture in the skull, as confirmed by Pakistani doctors at a major government-run hospital.
Today, her husband, Mr. Asif Zardari, has indirectly accused the government of killing his wife. He provocatively referred to the Musharraf-allied PML-Q party as the “killer” party, playing on the alphabet ‘Q’ that comes in the word ‘killer’ in Urdu.
The government “is trying to divert the investigations into Bhutto's killing,'' Farhatullah Babar, late Mrs. Bhutto’s spokesman, told Bloomberg television. How does he know? Well, “Mehsud [the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist] had already denied he planned to assassinate Bhutto.”
Another spokeswoman, Sherry Rehman, said she was with Bhutto when the attack happened and saw the bullet wounds.
These accusations weaken government’s position and reinforce the theory that Islamabad murdered her.
As a Pakistani citizen, I have not seen the wounds on Mrs. Bhutto’s body and I could not have vouched for Islamabad if not for the astounding and strong statement by the spokesman of the federal Interior ministry.
If the PPP accusations are true, and the doctors’ report is wrong, let’s exhume Mrs. Bhutto’s body and have an autopsy, an angry Brigadier Javed Cheema, the Interior Ministry spokesman, told a couple of noisy Pakistani reporters and one British journalist at his daily briefing yesterday.
Sounds logical.
Mr. Zardari made a stupid remark today when he said, “I know how autopsies are done here and I would not have allowed” the violation of his wife’s body.
Everyone knows how autopsies are done everywhere in the world. You cut open the body to do it.
If he were suspicious, he could have asked for the procedure to be done at a hospital of his choice. Mr. Zardari referred to his sister, who is a medical doctor, to drive home the point that he knows better. Well, he could have asked for his sister to be part of the team of surgeons conducting the autopsy. This can still be done now, if he agrees to exhume the body.
But the real problem is that the allegations of the PPP spokespersons hide an ulterior motive. They want to prove at any cost that Mrs. Bhutto was killed by the Pakistani military. And if that does not wash, then, at least, prove that the Pakistani government is ‘passively’ responsible for her murder because the government failed to protect her enough.
Never mind that there was no way of protecting Mrs. Bhutto when she herself rendered all protection around her useless by exposing herself through the bullet-proof and blast-proof car she was riding.
The PPP officials are adamant on not giving any credibility to an otherwise very credible ‘external’ postmortem report released by the doctors.
The immediate problem with this policy is that these PPP spokespersons are stoking unrest across the homeland instead of showing leadership to end anarchy on the streets, fueled by a mix of emotional and criminal elements.
The long-term trouble with these confrontational statements is that they are playing right into the hands of anti-Pakistan elements within the international media, and specifically the foreign media, who are keen to implicate the Pakistani military, an institution that already has many enemies in our region. And this is as good a time as any to settle scores and burn the ship.
Let me first address how casually the PPP and its international supporters have dismissed the Al Qaeda connection in her murder.
1. Mrs. Bhutto is on record having accused Al Qaeda of wanting to kill her during the 1990s, when she accused the Bin Laden of financing her political rivals in Pakistan.
2. Al Qaeda-linked terrorists were suspected to be behind the 17 July 2007 suicide attack in Islamabad where a PPP political rally was targeted as part of a chain of suicide attacks following the Red Mosque standoff between the Pakistani government and Al Qaeda-linked terrorists who had overtaken a religious school.
3. Mrs. Bhutto landed in Pakistan promising to allow US forces to operate in the Pakistani tribal areas, something that Islamabad has strongly refused to allow. Who was she indirectly targeting if not Al Qaeda? Did she or her backers believe there would be no backlash against this?
4. Mr. Musharraf is also an Al Qaeda target. Imagine him violating all the security cordon around him to come out through the sunroof and wave to a chaotic and unruly crowd surrounding his car. Who would be to blame if he did this?
5. Pakistani authorities compromised crucial intelligence procedures by uncovering the fact that they did break into Baitullah Mahsud’s communications, a man known to use sophisticated communication equipment. [Some Pakistani security experts suspect he receives support from anti-Pakistan elements in Kabul.] Mr. Mahsud has declared a ‘defensive jihad’ against the Pakistani government and a Musharraf ally and his son were almost killed in a suicide attack in a mosque only a week before the assassination of Mrs. Bhutto.
6. In addition to Al Qaeda, there are Pakistani extremist groups operating on the fringe in Pakistan. Mrs. Bhutto made provocative statements linking herself to the US policy in the region. That’s more than what President Musharraf dared to do. The ranks of her enemies swelled manifold just in the past few months than ever before.
7. And last, Pakistani military, the world’s seventh largest military machine with a proven record, is not run by amateurs. It makes no sense that this military would have Mrs. Bhutto killed less than a mile from the Pakistan Military headquarters and attract all finger pointing to itself, especially when it is already blamed for hanging her father. If the military wanted her dead and blame it on Al Qaeda, the best time to do it was 26 Dec. and not a day later. She was in Peshawar on the 26th, closer to the tribal areas and the border with Afghanistan. Blaming it on Al Qaeda would have sounded more convincing there.
Immediately after the tragic assassination, an organized campaign has been launched to malign the Pakistani military. Unknown news organizations have sprung up on the Internet, with names like ‘Inform Press, and ‘Media Reporters’, and ‘WhizNews’, shooting off thousands of emails carrying stories alleging a ‘sophisticated’ conspiracy behind the assassination of Mrs. Bhutto and linking it to the Pakistani armed forces.
Since no prominent newspaper would dare publish something like this without evidence, broadsheets are being used.
The New York Sun, for example, a broadsheet in New York City, ran a story on Dec. 28, quoting an unnamed “American intelligence officer” saying that PML-Q and MQM bribed “a renegade commando unit” of the Pakistani military to assassinate Mrs. Bhutto.
However, after an elaborate description of the conspiracy, the story writer was quick to add: “This [American intelligence] official, however, stressed this was just a theory at this point.”
Yeah, right.
Nice way of dodging responsibility for spreading lies. But the cockamamie story did not end here. The writer went on to add, “Other theories include that the assassins were trained by commandos or were from other military services, or the possibility that the assassins were retired Pakistani special forces.”
… or maybe Al Qaeda, please? No, the purpose here is to indict Pakistan. The Al Qaeda link does not serve that purpose.
In other words, any theory that indicts the Pakistani State and government and the nation’s armed forces is welcome. But not the Al Qaeda link cited by Islamabad.
These anti-Pakistan elements are not ready to buy that. So the Al Qaeda, which had mounted the stunning 9/11 attacks killing 3,000 people, somehow is not good enough to kill a woman exposing herself to an assassin’s bullet, surrounded by a chaotic mob.
Unfortunately, another aide of the slain former Pakistani premier, the New York-based Mr. Husain Haqqani, tried his best to add an aura of credibility to this concocted report published by the New York Sun.
The New York Sun quotes this PPP aide as follows:
“A close associate of Bhutto for more than two decades, Hussein Haqqani, yesterday said he believed Pakistan's security services were complicit in the assassination of his friend. "I don't think they were complicit, as in, they did it, I mean this as they allowed this to happen. Of course that includes the possibility of actual complicity. I think her security needs and concerns were not addressed," he told the Sun. Mr. Haqqani said he thought it was a possibility that [PML-Q and MQM] had penetrated the security services.”
The ulterior motives here are clear. Islamabad will have to be very careful. The purpose of all these calls for an international probe is to ultimately pin the blame on ISI, the Pakistani military and President Musharraf. That’s the endgame. WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM
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