Security has been red alerted in Islamabad and Rawalpindi in view of information of 7 suicide bombers entering the twin cities, said the Interior Ministry sources.
The police authorities have been informed in writing about the intelligence agencies information that 7 suicide attackers had entered the twin city, sources said.
They have been directed to step up security at all the important places and people.
The police have started to chalk out a fresh security plan while monitoring is being carried out at sensitive places besides strict watch is being maintained for suspected individuals.
Source: Geo News
December 29, 2007
GWYNNE DYER
Benazir Bhutto did five years of hard time in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, after her father, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was overthrown and hanged by the worst of Pakistan's military dictators, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
But she was a woman who liked her privileges and her luxuries, and she was never a very effective politician.
I got to know Benazir Bhutto a bit in the mid-1970s, when she had finished her degree at Harvard and was doing graduate work at Oxford University. She actually spent much of her time in London, in a grand flat she kept just off Hyde Park.
If you knew a lot of people in town who took an interest in Middle Eastern and subcontinental affairs (I had been studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies), and you weren't too old or too boring, you were likely to end up at her flat once in a while, at what some would call a salon, but I would call a party.
A fairly decorous party as those things went in '70s London, to be sure, with everybody showing off their sophisticated knowledge of the region's politics and nobody getting out of hand, but definitely a party.
The hostess was well informed and quite clever, and she obviously had money coming out of her ears.
We knew her dad had been prime minister of Pakistan before Zia overthrew him, of course, but she was neither a serious scholar nor a budding politician.
She seemed more American than Pakistani in her style and attitudes, but beneath the Radcliffe and Harvard veneer she also seemed like thousands of other young upper-class women from Pakistan and India who were floating around London at the time. They called one another by girlish nicknames like "Bubbles," they didn't take anything very seriously (including their studies), and they seemed destined for a life of idle privilege.
Then Benazir Bhutto went back to Pakistan in 1977, just about the time that Zia had her father sentenced to death in a rigged trial.
He was hanged in 1979, and Benazir was thrown into jail for five years.
But when she came out after Zia died, she was already the head of the party her father had founded, the Pakistan People's Party, and by 1988 she was prime minister.
She was only 35.
She was prime minister twice, from 1988-90 and 1993-96, and was removed from power both times on corruption charges.
The charges have never been proved in court, but the evidence of kickbacks and commissions, especially to her husband, Asif Zardari, whom she foolishly made investment minister, is pretty overwhelming. But that was not the real problem.
The problem was that she never seemed to have any goal in politics, apart from vindicating her father by leading his party back to power.
At the start she was hugely popular, but she wasted her opportunity to make real changes in Pakistan because she had no notion (beyond the usual rhetoric) of what a better Pakistan would look like. Pakistan is already pretty good for her sort of people, so it should not surprise us that there was almost nothing to show for her years in office.
If she had become prime minister again, which was a quite likely outcome of the current crisis, there is no reason to believe that she would have done any better this time. Her assassination just makes it harder to solve the crisis at all.
Benazir Bhutto's party, the PPP, has no alternative leader with national visibility. The other major opposition party leader, Nawaz Sharif, is equally compromised by his past failures, and is currently planning to boycott the elections scheduled for Jan. 8.
Ex-general Pervez Musharraf, who had himself "re-elected" president in October and imposed emergency rule in order to dismiss the Supreme Court judges who would have ruled his "election" illegal, is totally discredited and unlikely to last much longer.
The most probable outcome is a new period of military rule under a different ruler, simply for lack of a good alternative. It is pathetic that a country the size of Pakistan should have so few inspiring or even promising candidates for high political office.
The vast majority of Pakistan's politicians, and of the people who run pretty well everything else in the country apart from the armed forces, are drawn from the 3 or 4 per cent of the population who constitute the country's traditional elite.
It is a very shallow pool of talent, made up of people who have a big stake in the status quo and a huge sense of entitlement.
Look east to India, west to Iran, or north to China and, by comparison, Pakistan's political demography is absolutely feudal.
So long as that remains the case, it is absurd to imagine that democracy will solve Pakistan's problems.
I admired Benazir Bhutto's courage and I am very sorry that she was killed, but she could never have been Pakistan's saviour.
*Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Source: The Spec
[Election Commission spokesman Kanwar Dilshad has just announced that the date of the poll will be decided on Wednesday, after consultations with all the political parties]
Parliamentary elections are set to be postponed for weeks in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Pakistani officials said Monday.
A senior government official said that he expected a six-week delay in the elections now slated for Jan. 8, despite calls from Bhutto's party, other opposition politicians and world leaders for the polls to be held on time. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the information.
Election Commission Secretary Kanwar Dilashad told reporters that a decision on the timing would be announced on Tuesday, but a recommendation "has been sent to the government for a delay." The opposition has accused the commission of favoring President Pervez Musharraf's backers
"We will make an announcement on Tuesday morning," election commission spokesman Kanwar Dilshad told AFP. He declined to give the length of the delay, which was confirmed by three senior officials.
A cabinet official said it would be at least a month, after election offices were ransacked and voter lists burnt in the wave of unrest that shook Pakistan following Bhutto's killing.
"Certainly it will be pushed back for at least four weeks if not more," the official said.
Separately, a government official told AFP: "It is out of the question that the elections will be held on January 8 because of the widespread unrest that has directly affected election staff and vote preparations."
An official on the election commission, which held an emergency meeting on Monday in the capital Islamabad, said: "No doubt, the elections are going to be delayed."
Meanwhile, the government says the country suffered colossal damage in the turmoil following Ms Bhutto's death.
A cabinet meeting was told that losses to the railway system alone amounted to about $200m (£100m), with carriages and locomotives destroyed and signals damaged.
The ruling PML-Q party has said the 8 January vote should be delayed for several weeks, on the grounds that the vote would "lose credibility" if held under current conditions.
But the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) - now led by Ms Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari and his son, Bilawal - says it wants the elections to go ahead as planned.
The BBC's Chris Morris in Islamabad says the PPP wants elections as soon as possible, in order to take advantage of what could be a big sympathy vote.
The other main opposition party, led by Nawaz Sharif, has said that it is also in favour of holding the elections on 8 January, after dropping plans for a boycott and calling for a national unity government.
Foreign election monitors cautioned, however, that a full observation mission would be impossible if the polls went ahead next week because the unrest had caused them to delay preparations.
"We cannot follow our standard methods if the date stays Jan. 8," said Mathias Eick, a spokesman for the European Union-led mission, saying the best it could manage was a limited assessment.
The political uncertainty caused the stock markets to tumble on the first day of trading since the killing. The benchmark Karachi Stock Exchange's 100-share index plunged 694.92 points, or 4.7 percent, to 14,077.16 in its biggest single-day loss in points and percentage, while the rupee hit a six-year low.
Watch BBC News video of the Aftermath of the Protests in Sindh that could Delay the Elections [CLICK HERE]
Sources: Reuters, AP, AFP, BBC News
Sun Dec 30, 2007
By Kamran Haider
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A grim twist of fate saw Pakistani doctor Mussadiq Khan struggling to save the life of a Pakistani leader struck down by an assassin, just as Khan's father had done 56 years ago.
Khan battled in vain to save the life of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto when she was brought to his hospital in Rawlapindi on Thursday following a gun and bomb attack as she left an election rally at a city park.
Khan's doctor father, Sadiq Khan, was on duty at his Rawalpindi hospital in October 1951 when Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was brought in after he was gunned down at a rally in the same park where Bhutto was attacked.
Liaquat Ali Khan was also killed and the park was later named Liaquat Bagh after him. Bagh means garden in Urdu.
"It's God's will," Khan told Reuters when asked about the coincidence of father and son attending to two Pakistani leaders attacked in the same place.
Khan said Bhutto was almost dead when she was brought in.
"She was not breathing. She had no blood pressure, no heartbeat. We did a full resuscitation. We worked hard but unfortunately we could not revive her."
"I did my best but I didn't succeed. What can I say? ... She was a great leader. She was our leader."
Khan's two sons are also doctors. He hopes there will be no more coincidences: "God forbid it doesn't happen to them."
* Dr. Mussadiq Khan is also the Principal of Rawalpindi Medical College
Source: Reuters
Kamila Shamsie
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer
I find myself replaying chronology over and over, reflecting that both I, and the Pakistan that exists today, grew up with Benazir Bhutto, political figure. Although 1947 may be the nation's official date of inception, the civil war in 1971 means that the current form of Pakistan is only two years older than I am, with its existence coinciding with the first stage of Bhutto's political education as the daughter and chosen political heir of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
I'm little beyond a spectator in this story of the co-mingling narrative of Bhutto and Pakistan, of course, but as I listen to much that is said, and has been said, in the world these last days and months about both Bhutto and Pakistan, it strikes me that the co-mingled narrative is one that demands three-and-a-half decades of close attention from its spectators if it is to truly reveal its complexities and interlacings.
If you drop in only at the most operatic crescendos - a hanged father; a military dictator who history turns into the closest ally of the guardians of the free world; exile; a triumphant return; faltering democracy; exile again; another military dictator who history turns into the closest etc ...; rising militancy; another triumphant return; a close escape, then no escape - well, then perhaps you get an extraordinary five-act drama, but what you don't get is that rather more murky and tangled story of history as reflected through and acted on by a single individual.
In fact, too often of late it seems even the condensed and simplified version of the story of Bhutto and Pakistan is being replaced by a text message length version doing the rounds: secular, pro-Western woman is sole hope for country which is enveloped by forces of darkness, so they kill her.
But here is the more complicated version: to understand that co-mingled story you need to understand so much more. You need to understand, for instance, nearly six decades of deals, double-deals, broken-deals between the military and the politicians; you need to understand the intricacies of inter-provincial politics in Pakistan, particularly the extent of power concentrated in the Punjab and how that played a part in the story of the Bhuttos from Sindh; you need to understand the feudal structure of which Bhutto was a product and replicated itself in the composition of her political party that concentrated such power in her hands that after her death no one knows how the party will continue or who will take charge (ironically for those who make the democracy versus fundamentalism argument, the only major political party to carry out regular internal elections is the right-wing religious party Jamaat-e-Islami).
You also need to understand how marginalised the Pakistan-Afghan border area has been in the political history of Pakistan, and how post-9/11 policies disrupted a long-standing tacit understanding that the centre and the frontier would remain largely disengaged from each other; you need to understand all the distorted manifestations of religion sown in the Zia years and never uprooted by any succeeding leader - not Benazir, not Nawaz, not Musharraf; you need to understand the secrecy and terror that surrounds the intelligence agencies; you need to understand that reports from parts of the country such as Waziristan strike most Pakistanis as news from a foreign land, one we've never visited and know little of; you need to understand the failure of governments both civilian and military to provide education, health and security to the majority of its citizens. And that's just the beginning of the list.
Let me add just one more item. Any version of the story that says that Pakistan was created as an ideological Islamic state in 1947 and then fast forwards 60 years to suicide bombings as though to say that one inevitably leads to the other ignores the plain awful choices and grotesque events of history that caused history to unfold as it did.
It still surprises me sometimes to discover how many people engaged with world events remain unaware of how little support Pakistan's religious parties had prior to 9/11 (in the 1993 elections the three religious alliances received less than 6.7% of the ballots cast, with the 1997 elections boycotted by the Jamaat-e-Islami, and only the JUI-F managing to secure any presence in parliament with a meagre two seats.) Today, those parties have a much stronger following - directly due to the events of the last six years - but they still trail far behind Bhutto's PPP, Nawaz's PML(N), and the Musharraf-allied PML(Q)at the national level. Trying to understand Pakistan through the sole prism of Islamic fundamentalism, let alone Islamic militancy will not get you tremendously far.
It may sound as though I'm winding up to say, if you understand all these different aspects to the story you'll see things in Pakistan aren't really as bad as they seem. I wish I could. But this has been a year of ever-accelerating horror and violence during which suicide bombings have become weekly, sometimes daily, events that were almost unheard of until a couple of years ago, while those forces of civil society that seemed the counterpoint of light to the darkness have been stamped on, shackled or eliminated entirely. My point here is to place the horror and violence into a vastly complicated web, in which responsibility for the desperate state of the nation does not merely belong to al-Qaeda affiliates and is not the result of having a populace who overwhelmingly support and encourage nihilistic practices and militant extremism.
When I think of how many people have played a part in bringing the nation to this point, I can't help thinking about a documentary I saw a couple of years ago about the demise of the film industry in Pakistan. At the end of it my sister turned to me and said, "It's amazing. Everyone interviewed is so passionate and so articulate, and analytical - and every single person blames absolutely everyone else without accepting any responsibility themselves."
'Ah,' I replied. 'That's Pakistan.'
· Kamila Shamsie is the author of Broken Verses.
Source: The Observer
It's wrong for the West simply to mourn Benazir Bhutto as a martyred democrat, says this acclaimed south Asia expert. Her legacy is far murkier and more complex
William Dalrymple
Sunday December 30, 2007
The Observer
One of Benazir Bhutto's more dubious legacies to Pakistan is the Prime Minister's house in the middle of Islamabad. The building is a giddy, pseudo-Mexican ranch house with white walls and a red tile roof. There is nothing remotely Islamic about the building which, as my minder said when I went there to interview the then Prime Minister Bhutto, was 'PM's own design'. Inside, it was the same story. Crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room; oils of sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have looked at home on the Hyde Park railings hung below garishly gilt cornices.
The place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a particularly flamboyant Latin-American industrialist, but, in fact, it could have been anywhere. Had you been shown pictures of the place on one of those TV game-shows where you are taken around a house and then have to guess who lives there, you may have awarded this hacienda to virtually anyone except, perhaps, to the Prime Minister of an impoverished Islamic republic situated next door to Iran.
Which is, of course, exactly why the West always had a soft spot for Benazir Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments - one of us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.
'London is like a second home for me,' she once told me. 'I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through Harrods and WH Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours. I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes, I used to drive all the way up from Oxford just for an ice cream and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin.'
It was difficult to imagine any of her neighbouring heads of state, even India's earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like this.
For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn't was possibly more attractive even than what she was. She wasn't a religious fundamentalist, she didn't have a beard, she didn't organise rallies where everyone shouts: 'Death to America' and she didn't issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors, even though Salman Rushdie ridiculed her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.
However, the very reasons that made the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that gave many Pakistanis second thoughts. Her English might have been fluent, but you couldn't say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently, but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse; apart from a few imperatives, she was completely at sea.
English friends who knew Benazir at Oxford remember a bubbly babe who drove to lectures in a yellow MG, wintered in Gstaad and who to used to talk of the thrill of walking through Cannes with her hunky younger brother and being 'the centre of envy; wherever Shahnawaz went, women would be bowled over'.
This Benazir, known to her friends as Bibi or Pinky, adored royal biographies and slushy romances: in her old Karachi bedroom, I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills and Boons including An Affair to Forget, Sweet Imposter and two copies of The Butterfly and the Baron. This same Benazir also had a weakness for dodgy Seventies easy listening - 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree' was apparently at the top of her playlist. This is also the Benazir who had an enviable line in red-rimmed fashion specs and who went weak at the sight of marrons glace.
But there was something much more majestic, even imperial, about the Benazir I met when she was Prime Minister. She walked and talked in a deliberately measured and regal manner and frequently used the royal 'we'. At my interview, she took a full three minutes to float down the 100 yards of lawns separating the Prime Minister's house from the chairs where I had been told to wait for her. There followed an interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way she wanted it to. 'The sun is in the wrong direction,' she announced. Her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by a white gauze dupatta. The whole painted vision reminded me of one of those aristocratic Roman princesses in Caligula
This Benazir was a very different figure from that remembered by her Oxford contemporaries. This one was renowned throughout Islamabad for chairing 12-hour cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours' sleep. This was the Benazir who continued campaigning after the suicide bomber attacked her convoy the very day of her return to Pakistan in October, and who blithely disregarded the mortal threat to her life in order to continue fighting. This other Benazir Bhutto, in other words, was fearless, sometimes heroically so, and as hard as nails.
More than anything, perhaps, Benazir was a feudal princess with the aristocratic sense of entitlement that came with owning great tracts of the country and the Western-leaning tastes that such a background tends to give. It was this that gave her the sophisticated gloss and the feudal grit that distinguished her political style. In this, she was typical of many Pakistani politicians. Real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan, in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge.
The educated middle class is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan, the feudal landowner expects his people to vote for his chosen candidate. As writer Ahmed Rashid put it: 'In some constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.'
Today, Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy, but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways, Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan's strange variety of democracy, really a form of 'elective feudalism', into disrepute and who helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists. For Bhutto was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first 20-month premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.
Within her party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her. When he persisted in doing so, he ended up shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside the family home. Murtaza's wife Ghinwa and his daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir's mother, all firmly believed that Benazir gave the order to have him killed.
As recently as the autumn, Benazir did and said nothing to stop President Musharraf ordering the US and UK-brokered 'rendition' of her rival, Nawaz Sharif, to Saudi Arabia and so remove from the election her most formidable rival. Many of her supporters regarded her deal with Musharraf as a betrayal of all her party stood for.
Behind Pakistan's endless swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of elitist interests: to some extent, Pakistan's industrial, military and landowning classes are all interrelated and they look after each other. They do not, however, do much to look after the poor. The government education system barely functions in Pakistan and for the poor, justice is almost impossible to come by. According to political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa: 'Both the military and the political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.'
In the West, many right-wing commentators on the Islamic world tend to see the march of political Islam as the triumph of an anti-liberal and irrational 'Islamo-fascism'. Yet much of the success of the Islamists in countries such as Pakistan comes from the Islamists' ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people such as Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo.
This elite the Islamists successfully depict as rich, corrupt, decadent and Westernised. Benazir had a reputation for massive corruption. During her government, the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world.
Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, widely known as 'Mr 10 Per Cent', faced allegations of plundering the country. Charges were filed in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States to investigate their various bank accounts.
When I interviewed Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Islamabad Red Mosque shortly before his death in the storming of the complex in July, he kept returning to the issue of social justice: 'We want our rulers to be honest people,' he said. 'But now the rulers are living a life of luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and can't even get basic necessities.' This is the reason for the rise of the Islamists in Pakistan and why so many people support them: they are the only force capable of taking on the country's landowners and their military cousins.
This is why in all recent elections, the Islamist parties have hugely increased their share of the vote, why they now already control both the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan and why it is they who are most likely to gain from the current crisis.
Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular and liberal woman. But sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the fact that as a pro-Western feudal leader who did little for the poor, she was as much a central part of Pakistan's problems as the solution to them.
· William Dalrymple's latest book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, recently won the Duff Cooper Prize for History
Source: Guardian Unlimited
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