On the Grand Trunk Road (54 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
“The Americans were trying very hard,” Senator Mushadid Hussain recalled. “I think they pushed too hard on Benazir. We try to press the right buttons to please our American friends, but the ground realities here can be very different.” On her side, Bhutto wondered, as she wrote in her book, whether Musharraf was “merely stalling for time to try to consolidate power.” As her return to Pakistan approached, Bhutto’s tentative faith in Musharraf seemed to decline, as did his in her—a development that only increased her fears of assassination.
On October 16, two days before she left Dubai for Karachi, Bhutto wrote to Musharraf. She named at least one former and two current Pakistani officials as likely suspects in the case of an attempt on her life. Two days after the attack on her convoy in Karachi, Bhutto appeared at an emotional press conference and disclosed this letter’s existence, but she declined to name the trio she had accused “as long as I’m alive.”
One of the names on her list, she confirmed for me privately a few days later, was retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who had been director-general of the ISI during her first term as prime minister until she dismissed him from the post. Gul said in February 2008 that when he heard that his name had been included by Bhutto “it was a bolt from the blue.” He filed suit against her. “I want to clear my name,” he said. “I would never destabilize Pakistan. I have been prepared to lay my life down for Pakistan.” As for Bhutto’s death, “The deal was brokered by the Americans, and she paid the price.”
The second person named by Bhutto was Brigadier Ijaz Shah, the present director-general of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, the country’s equivalent of the FBI. (Shah could not be reached for comment.) The third was Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, a civilian politician and an important ally of Musharraf’s, who was then the chief minister of Punjab. Bhutto felt that these three adversaries “would to go any length to stop me,” as she told me. Yet she did not appear to possess—or, at least, she did not cite—specific evidence that any of them might be involved in a conspiracy to kill her.
Musharraf was infuriated by the letter, according to Elahi. “The president talked to her and said, ‘Why have you done this?’” Elahi recalled. By this account, the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, became involved, and “went to see Benazir and said, ‘Don’t do this. They are not involved.”’ (The ambassador declined to comment.)
The actual threats against Bhutto after she returned to Pakistan, Elahi told me, came not from him or anyone else in the Musharraf government but from loose terrorist cells—including, he said, several suicide bombers originally from Egypt, Sudan, and Uzbekistan, who were later identified by Pakistani investigators. Bhutto, however, interpreted the bombing of her convoy in Karachi as confirmation that parts of the government were involved at least on the periphery of plots to kill her. Her thinking was not irrational: the police teams sent to protect her homecoming were inadequate, and in the area where the attack occurred the streetlights had been turned off—perhaps due to one of the city’s chronic power failures, but perhaps not. In the weeks after the attack, Bhutto held numerous press conferences and granted dozens of interviews, in which she repeatedly accused Musharraf of failing to protect her.
If some of her specific allegations appeared to be groundless, her basic claim—that the government-provided security was inadequate—seemed inarguable. Electronic equipment that might disable remote-controlled bombs did not work, according to Bhutto’s aides; requests for permits that would allow her bodyguards to carry weapons were denied; requests for permission to hire American- or British-trained security guards went unanswered; and the demands for additional police vehicles to escort her through city streets were not met.
On October 26, Bhutto wrote on her BlackBerry an e-mail to Mark Siegel, a longtime friend who sometimes represented her in Washington: “Nothing will, God willing happen. Just wanted u to know that if it does in addition to the names in my letter to Musharaf of Oct 16nth, I wld hold Musharaf responsible. I have been made to feel insecure by his minions.” None of his government’s refusals to deal with her security requests, she wrote, “cld happen without him.”
In Washington, Siegel and Husain Haqqanni, a former adviser to Bhutto who teaches at Boston University, pressured the State Department to intervene on her behalf. “I can assure you that our very specific concerns about Benazir’s security needs were repeatedly brought to the administration,” Siegel said. “We felt that we were being patronized and basically told that Benazir was paranoid and had nothing to worry about—and that Musharraf had told them that he’d make sure Benazir was all right.”
In December, Tom Casey, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, denied to reporters that the Bush administration had failed to take Bhutto’s security seriously enough. “It is simply untrue, and I simply do not understand why anyone, anywhere would assert that the United States did not have concerns, minimized those concerns, or was not very active in trying to insure that she was provided with whatever kind of security support she required.” A State Department spokesman reiterated Casey’s remarks, but would not elaborate.
Meanwhile, Musharraf’s struggle with the Pakistani Supreme Court over his right to serve another presidential term had reached a climax—with Musharraf concluding that he would be blocked from continuing in office if he didn’t get rid of the chief justice. On November 3, Musharraf imposed a national state of emergency, suspended the constitution, and stacked the Supreme Court with friendly judges; six days later, he placed Bhutto under house arrest. A few weeks later, under pressure from the Bush administration and other allied governments, Musharraf fulfilled his pledge to resign as army chief; he also lifted the emergency and scheduled elections for January 8.
During this unsettled period, opinion within the Bush administration about Musharraf’s future became increasingly divided. President Bush supported Musharraf unwaveringly. Pentagon and CENTCOM officials, however, questioned whether Musharraf retained the political legitimacy essential for success in the counterinsurgency campaign that they now believed would last for five or more years. “In the future, the U.S. is going to need to be very careful about what we support, as opposed to whom we support,” the senior Defense Department official told me in mid-December. “What role President Musharraf will play in the future ought to be more a matter for the people of Pakistan than for us. We’re probably better off over the long term if we support the ideal of a moderate, democratically elected government rather than any one individual.” As for Bhutto, the Bush administration seemed to support her return to Pakistan not because it had any particular faith in her capacity to lead but because the People’s Party was needed to prop up Musharraf politically. Or so it often seemed to Bhutto’s aides.
Even during the emergency in November, Bhutto never broke with Musharraf entirely, and when he confirmed that national elections would be held in January, she decided that the People’s Party would participate, despite the forthcoming campaign’s obvious constraints. Once Bhutto committed herself, the question of her personal security took on renewed significance. Her competitors on Election Day would be Musharraf’s political followers; they controlled the local governments and police forces whose services Bhutto demanded for her protection. Despite the risk, she knew that holding big rallies might increase support for her party at the polls. Punjab province was a particularly important battleground. Bhutto had previously asked permission to hold a rally at Liaquat Bagh, in Rawalpindi, one of the province’s largest cities, but Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, then the chief minister of Punjab, and a political rival, told her that it was too dangerous.
“As you have already blamed me, I will not allow you that here in Punjab,” Elahi recalls telling Bhutto, referring to her accusatory letter. Musharraf asked him, he said, to “accommodate” Bhutto’s wish to hold a rally—and “I said no.” Some 350 houses surround Liaquat Bagh, Elahi told me, and the park is “too dangerous to cover. So I stopped her.” Bhutto traveled to Lahore and attempted to stage a rally there, but Elahi again refused permission, citing information that “three Egyptians, suicide bombers,” had entered the city. “The Americans also informed her,” he recalled. Bhutto insisted on going forward; she was placed under house arrest. “I said, ‘You’re not coming out unless you stop this thing.’” By December, a caretaker administration had replaced Elahi’s government, at which point, he said, “my responsibility was over.” The entire struggle with Bhutto over her security “was all political,” he said.
The Bhutto family mausoleum, designed in the grandiose style of a Moghul-era tomb, rises over the flat rice and cotton fields of the interior Sind province, near the Bhutto family’s ancestral lands, irrigated by the Indus River. Renovation, begun more than a decade ago, is still going on, and the mausoleum’s facade is partly obscured by scaffolding. Inside, concrete poured across sections of the floor is rough, apparently awaiting additional work, so that in one area the grave sites of some lesser family members appear as misshapen lumps. Benazir has been buried next to her father’s crypt, which lies under a roof supported by polished marble columns. Since her murder, buses and vans have often filled the dusty parking areas around the site, as thousands of people—the Sindhi women, farmers, laborers, teachers, and shopkeepers who made up the core of her support in the People’s Party—have come to pay respect to the most recently fallen Bhutto.
A few miles away, in the village of Naudero, Asif Zardari occupies a family compound of colonial-era farmhouses and bungalows. Zardari, who is now in his mid-fifties, has lost some of the swagger of his youth, but with his well-pressed robes, trimmed mustache, and jet-black hair combed straight back, he still has the intimidating air of a South Asian ward boss.
After his wife’s death, Zardari asserted control over the People’s Party. As authority for this gambit, he has cited a “political will” that Bhutto composed on October 16, the day she wrote to Musharraf naming her potential murderers. This document, according to Zardari and other party leaders, named him as her successor. Zardari has not published the will, but he has shown it to party leaders familiar with Bhutto’s handwriting, and they have confirmed its authenticity.
Zardari asked his son, Bilawal, who is nineteen years old and a student at Oxford, to become chairman of the party with him, although this was not something that Benazir had specifically instructed him to do. Bilawal agreed, and added “Bhutto” as his middle name to complete this branding initiative. He appeared briefly at a press conference with his father to announce the succession arrangements. Zardari said that he will not run for political office but will work behind the scenes, as a caretaker, until Bilawal is ready to assume is political inheritance.
In Naudero in December 2008, where he had been holding planning sessions for the elections (they had been rescheduled for February 18), Zardari received me in one of his bungalow’s sitting rooms; dozens of visitors and mourners had congregated outside. I asked why he had chosen to share power with Bilawal. “I know the East,” Zardari said. “We know our People’s Party. We know where the intellect stops and Bhuttoism starts. This is a thought process started with the father, who chose martyrdom, rather than life,” and it continued with Benazir, “who chose martyrdom, rather than hide in a house, or hide abroad.” Such sacrifice “is what the party believes in,” he said. “That is Bhuttoism.” He went on, “I, in my wisdom, and in the wisdom of my party colleagues—we decided that we needed more than me to keep the party together.” As for Bilawel, Zardari said, “He decided. People think that today’s nineteen-year-olds, or nineteen-and-a-half-year-olds, are young—are children—but they’re not.... They know what is good, they know what is bad in the world. They may be inexperienced, but otherwise they’re old enough to understand.”
It is not clear what will be left of the People’s Party by the time Bilawal may be prepared to lead it. If the February elections are free and fair, the party may well enjoy a wave of sympathy. To keep the party unified over the long run, Zardari will have to overcome a number of centrifugal challenges, including ethnic and leadership fissures.
Leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party and Musharraf have exchanged heated accusations about who bears responsibility for Bhutto’s murder. The vitriol has a familiar ring. Pakistani politicians may be the world’s leading violent-conspiracy theorists, and a culture has developed in which no malevolent hypothesis is too wild, no sinister motive too preposterous to be aired. In Bhutto’s case, some of the initial controversy has involved such matters as whether she died of gunshots or from the concussive impact of the bomb explosion. More significant issues—such as why the government-provided security was so inadequate, despite Bhutto’s repeated pleas for improvements—have been subsumed, at least temporarily, by a climate of suspicion and political maneuverings in advance of the elections.
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