Posted on 12/29/2007 5:37:27 PM PST by Aristotelian
The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage.
(snip)
The likeliest culprit is the al-Qa'eda/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathisers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on October 18.
She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir.
The fact of the matter is that Miss Bhutto's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it.
(snip)
A nominal socialist, Zulfiqar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact - like quite a lot else in Pakistan - Bhutto family property.
Daughter of Destiny is the title she gave to her autobiography. She always displayed the same un-ironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan's nuclear program was.
How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
He gets the WoT, too bad he misses the mark on other issues.
BumP..
It’s rough being a populist these days.
Are you referring, for example, to his view on Henry Kissinger as a war criminal?
Wheel of Time,or something like it!
War on terrorism ?
War on Terror.
It’spainfulto read these atheist idiots, and I don’t. I mean, what’s the foundation of their morality, Karl Marx, or Lenin? We don’t share a common denominator with them. Why be upset about this event, if you’re an atheist in a godless universe?!
This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qa'eda, and was willing to help lead a battle against them.She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism.
Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety.
Bhutto may have been the last chance for Pakistani democracy. You are correct about Hitchens -- he is spot on here.
In Hitchen's case, wacky old turd
How smug.
Yes. Thanks.
What I find odd about this is she provided a pattern that could be exploited to kill. It was almost like a death wish. She knew that she was on the top of a hit list and that they had the ability to send 100’s of murders at once against her.
WoT = Wheel of Terror, a popular TV show in Muslim nations where the contestants guess the number of letters in various bomb designs, explosives, equations for detonators, etc., hosted by al-Sajak and a masked woman built suspiciously like Helen Thomas.
SCARY TV show.
Well stated. Now the problem is preventing the Al-Qaida/Taliban axis, bankrolled in part by the Saudis, from gaining control of Pakistan nuclear weapons arsenal.
Re Saudi Arabia, General David Petraeus in an end-of-year briefing for journalists in Baghdad Saturday described progress by Iraq’s neighbors, saying attacks using Iranian weapons had declined and praising Syria and Saudi Arabia for curbing the flow of foreign fighters.
And with this piece he is very good.
bfl
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