Two days before Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan, she wrote to General Pervez Musharraf alleging that certain administration officials along with some “remnants” of the Zia ul Haq era were out to get her. Their names were not publicised because she was negotiating with the same administration. It is only after the October 18 attack on her life that she publicly said she suspected the hand of three persons. But no one has been named in the FIR. Since then the media has gone mad trying to join the dots.
It now transpires that there are more than three people allegedly haunting Ms Bhutto. These are the chief minister of Sindh, Arbab Rahim, whose political career will end if Ms Bhutto returns to power. He has treated the PPP roughly and may expect the same treatment from them when he is down and out. Then there is General (retd) Hamid Gul, formerly DG-ISI, an avowed radical Islamist-jihadi who approves of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He has long harboured political animosity against Ms Bhutto and the PPP and recently against General Musharraf for thwarting an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. But he is without a party and has no formal links with any terrorist organization. On their heels is Brig (retd) Imtiaz Billa Ahmad, of “midnight jackal” fame in the ISI under Gen Hamid Gul in 1989 and the then DG-IB under Nawaz Sharif. His whereabouts since 1999 are not known when he was briefly detained by the Musharraf regime. Then there’s Waseem Afzal, ex-NAB right hand of Saifur Rehman, the notorious Nawaz Sharif henchman, who investigated the corruption charges against Ms Bhutto and Mr Asif Zardari well into the Musharraf era and was only recently decommissioned from NAB on the urging of Ms Bhutto and shunted to a low key job as secretary to the Punjab Governor. He is the hunter who fears becoming the hunted. Brig (retd) Ijaz Shah, currently DG-IB, also served as station head of the ISI in Lahore in 1999. But he is hardly likely to foment terrorism under the nose of his boss and friend against a potential political ally. A senior police officer in Sindh, Manzur Mughal, currently DIG Ops, who once abused Mr Zardari when he was in prison, has also figured in the revelations.
On the face of it, all of them have a strong anti-BB/Zardari motive. But it is inconceivable that any of them might be involved in a terrorist conspiracy to kill Ms Bhutto. So Ms Bhutto has tried to make political capital by pointing the finger at the administration. For simple-minded people, this makes sense because the sitting government is always presumed to stalk the opposition. In the PPP’s case, it also helps to brush aside the charge of its leader being pro-establishment among the anti-establishment rank and file, thereby evoking sympathy and empathy for Ms Bhutto.
Whodunnit? The footprints of the Al-Qaeda-Taliban Network are all over the place. The Network includes elements of the old jihadi sectarian organizations like the Jaishe-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi whose businesses were shut down by General Musharraf after the peace initiative with India in 2003. This Network has a definite and powerful motive: Ms Bhutto, like General Musharraf, is aggressively pro-America; and worse, she is now trying to prop up General Musharraf, against whom the Network has already made three assassination attempts, apart from one each against Aftab Sherpao, the home minister, and Shaukat Aziz, the prime minister. It is fighting the army in the tribal areas and elsewhere in the north. It benefits from chaos and instability in Pakistan so that it can seize control of large swathes of land and create safe havens for itself. This Network also has the technical and human capability to do the job. Its spokesmen, from Ayman Al-Zawahiri to Baitullah Mahsud and others have openly called for war against General Musharraf, Ms Bhutto and other “American agents” and it boasts scores of motivated suicide bombers for its purpose across the country.
The problem is that most Pakistanis are reluctant to point at The Network because they are personally religious and politically harbour The Network’s virulent anti-Americanism in their own hearts. How can a religious group which is rightly resisting America’s crusade against Muslims, they reason, be against anti-establishment Muslim leaders like Ms Bhutto whom they revere or support? In fact, the anti-Bhutto, anti-Musharraf opposition, whether religious or mainstream or nationalist-secular or regional ethnic, is in a state of opportunist denial about the aims and objectives of The Network in Pakistan. This makes the task of identifying and combating it impossible. Indeed, following the October 18 attack, misplaced supporters and sympathizers of The Network among Pakistanis, including some prominent media persons, have actually gone so far as to deny that it could have had a hand in the attack on a popular woman because it would have led to a peoples’ backlash against The Network.
It is time to call a spade a spade. This is true for Ms Bhutto and General Musharraf as much as it for the opposition parties, media and lay Pakistanis. While they are at each other’s throats, The Network is slowly penetrating the body politic of Pakistan and poisoning it.