Afghanistan And Pakistan In Obama Year One: Missed Opportunities

www.eurasiareview.com/


Written by FRIDE
The Obama administration’s first year was characterised by somewhat enhanced transatlantic cooperation on Afghanistan, but a coordinated transatlantic policy on Pakistan remained elusive by the start of 2010. The United States and many European countries made the case for more money and troops for Afghanistan to sceptical publics. In 2009, the increased resources for Afghanistan faced muted – if any – opposition on both sides of the Atlantic. Economic troubles at home have pushed the Afghanistan war, Pakistan and most other national security issues lower on the list of public policy debates.



The US and several European countries sent more money, troops and diplomats to Afghanistan to address growing instability there. One symbol of the increased attention was the growing number of special representatives or envoys for Afghanistan and Pakistan. A few months into his job, US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke stated that he had at least two dozen counterparts around the world, many of them from Europe. The US and Europe, particularly through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), held multiple conferences and met regularly throughout the year. These efforts were aimed at garnering additional resources and aligning tactics on an integrated civil-military strategy.

The United States committed to sending about 50,000 additional troops this year; allies including European countries will add about one fifth of the amount that the United States is sending. When the troop increases announced in 2009 are fully implemented, US troops will make up about 70 per cent of the total foreign troops in Afghanistan, up from 50 percent in 2006 – pointing to a further ‘Americanisation’ of a military presence that was already predominantly American. Linked to the increased military presence is a civilian ‘uplift’; additional contingents of diplomats and development assistance specialists aimed at improving governance and enhancing economic development.

Although the United States and European countries increased resources and enhanced policy coordination in 2009, they also missed key opportunities, particularly the August 2009 presidential and provincial elections. The 2009 elections were marked by widespread fraud and raised questions about whether the international community has legitimate partners committed to good governance and anti-corruption in the Afghan government. It also raised questions about the capacity of the international community to provide effective assistance on electoral administration.

The parliamentary elections scheduled for 2010 risk a replay of the 2009 elections without significant reform in Afghanistan and in the international bodies offering support for elections.

REVIEWS AND RENEWALS

As the NATO alliance’s first ‘out-of-area’ mission beyond Europe, the Afghanistan war represents a test of transatlantic capacity and political will to combat threats such as terrorist networks. Since the 1999 Washington Summit, NATO allies have looked to redefine the alliance’s mission and purpose, and many lessons have been learned during the course of the Afghanistan war. In the past year, Europe and the US have worked to reduce transatlantic differences over Afghanistan and move beyond the divisions created by the Iraq war.

President Obama’s outreach to Europe on Afghanistan began during the 2008 election campaign and continued though the early days of his administration. In March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the foreign ministers of NATO and Vice President Joe Biden met with the North Atlantic Council to discuss new strategies for Afghanistan as part of the policy review initiated by Obama. After Obama released the results of his first strategy review in late March, he travelled to Europe in an effort to gain NATO support and European pledges for additional resources to implement the new strategy. The April 3–4 NATO summit was designed in part to demonstrate NATO unity behind the new strategy.

The Obama administration’s outreach appears to have won the support of most of the political leadership in Europe, even if it has not done much to change public opinion of the Afghanistan war in Europe. Last year was the deadliest year of the conflict for the United States and Europe, and public opinion will likely remain divided and mostly negative in the coming year, as chances of increased casualties grow. At the start of the Obama administration’s second year, five major challenges exist for maintaining transatlantic unity on Afghanistan policy:

Maintaining troop levels and overall military cooperation. The 2009 pledges for additional troops made by European countries in large part compensate for the announced troop withdrawals by the Netherlands in 2010 and Canada in 2011. Significant US troop increases combined with a continued reluctance on the part of European countries to send more is leading to a further ‘Americanisation’ of the foreign military presence in Afghanistan.

Operational exceptions – countries limiting where, when, and how their forces are used – will remain a source of tension. General McChrystal has said that despite pledges to eliminate these ‘national caveats’, certain self-imposed restrictions continue to limit operational flexibility. Some American soldiers in Afghanistan joke that ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, stands for ‘I Saw Americans Fight’ or ‘I Stay Away from Fighting’. Another transatlantic challenge may be equipment shortages; particularly equipment for transport and attack such as helicopters. In the past NATO has at times chartered commercial helicopters for logistical supply flights.

Developing a unified and coordinated training effort for Afghan security forces. Years of effort to develop the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP) have produced disappointing results. In May 2007, the European Union (EU) accepted a NATO request to take the lead in training Afghanistan’s police and established the European police (EUPOL) training mission.

The April 2008 summit saw the creation of the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A). NTM-A has a single commander for the NATO Training Mission and the US-led Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, and the United States and many European countries committed to sending additional funds and trainers to train the ANA and ANP in 2009. Implementing and executing this effort in a coordinated fashion will be a major challenge.

Creating a coordinated approach on democratic reform, governance, rule of law, and anti-corruption. In 2009, the US and Europe recognised the significant challenges that remain on institutional development efforts. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledged that supporting legitimate and credible institutions that provide decent governance and justice was central to the mission. But an effective and coordinated policy on these fronts still does not exist.

The EU created the Election Observation Mission (EOM) to monitor the presidential and regional elections in August 2009, and the EOM sent an estimated 200 observers to the elections.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars of international support for Afghanistan’s election administration, major flaws such as an uneven electoral registry remained. Without significant reforms both in Afghanistan and to the international effort to support elections, the 2010 parliamentary elections could face a crisis of legitimacy similar to the one witnessed in the 2009 presidential and provincial elections.

The US and European countries have developed a sophisticated, multi-layered approach to enhancing governance and supporting efforts to root out corruption.

Ensuring that the implementation of these policies goes smoothly will be difficult, particularly with enduring tensions between international representatives and leaders in the Afghan central government regarding the nature of decentralisation.

The international community continues to develop plans to build a comprehensive system of rule of law. The Italian government leads the effort to support a professional judicial system. One continued source of tension between Europe and the US may be over how to handle Afghan prisoners.

Supporting a synchronised economic development strategy. The January 2010 London conference represented an attempt to showcase the effort to better coordinate political, diplomatic, and economic development steps and avoid duplication of effort. The new NATO Senior Civilian Representative Mark Sedwill, Britain’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, was appointed to improve the international reconstruction effort.

Although this position is not new, Sedwill is charged with making sure that aid money actually gets to the people of Afghanistan and is coordinated with the military strategy. Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are civilian-military units of varying sizes designed to improve the Afghan economy through infrastructure development and support for service delivery. These PRTs operate throughout the country; more than two dozen exist in Afghanistan. However, there is no single model for how these PRTs are composed and operate. They tend to be led by military personnel, though an effort is underway to increase the number of technical experts and the civilian contingents represented.

Coordinating transatlantic economic development efforts in Afghanistan and having a coherent civilian strategy linked to the military efforts remains a challenge. Major issues such as dealing with the narcotics trade – which is relevant to economic development, governance, and reform – require special attention. Making sure that the overall civilian effort in Afghanistan is coordinated is not only a transatlantic challenge but also includes several other countries that operate bilaterally or through the United Nations. The pullback of UN personnel in reaction to attacks in Kabul in autumn 2009 represents an additional challenge to having sufficient qualified personnel in Afghanistan.

Advancing a comprehensive diplomatic approach in Afghanistan and the region. Inside Afghanistan, the efforts to reintegrate mid- and low level Taliban fighters as well as international diplomatic support for Afghanistan’s peace and reconciliation processes will require continued transatlantic cooperation. Although there has been talk about developing new diplomatic mechanisms such as establishing a ‘Contact Group’ consisting of all nations that have a stake in the security of the region, a comprehensive regional diplomatic approach has yet to materialise.

Transatlantic differences over questions such as how best to deal with Iran in this broader regional diplomatic context could possibly emerge in the coming year.

REACTIVE CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Across the border in Pakistan, a volatile situation grew even more dangerous as terror attacks against civilians and the government increased to unprecedented levels. Rancorous clashes for power among leaders in the civilian government escalated into a crisis in March. Although diplomatic intervention by key European governments, the United States, and other outsiders defused this crisis, tensions between the major political factions endure. The Pakistani military conducted several operations inside Pakistan to tackle certain extremist groups representing a threat to the Pakistani state. But concerns remained about the Pakistani military’s ties to certain elements of the Taliban. An assessment produced by General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, reaffirmed the long-standing concerns that the Pakistani security establishment supports some of the insurgents working to undermine the Afghan government.

The US and Europe have only just begun to build the foundations for a viable strategy to address Pakistan’s multiple security challenges. Continued military assistance and intelligence cooperation remained central to the relationship with the Pakistani government, and the US provided additional funds for counterinsurgency training and support in the last year. The US passed the Kerry-Lugar legislation, which triples non-military development assistance to Pakistan, places a higher priority on enhancing democratic governance, and sets conditions for military assistance.

But the Obama administration is only beginning to develop an implementation plan for delivering that assistance, even as it continues to have trouble spending money for previous programmes in Pakistan. A $750 million programme focused on the Federally Administered Tribal Areas approved in 2007 had only spent about 10 per cent of its funds by the end of 2009. Like the United States, several European countries identified democratic governance, rule of law, and economic development as fundamental to success, but a fully coordinated strategy encompassing efforts by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as well as bilateral assistance programmes remained elusive.

The US and a number of European countries committed more money, personnel, and attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they took important steps to increase coordination on Afghanistan. Past differences within the NATO alliance over managing the strategy in Afghanistan have subsided with more coordination efforts, but significant policy implementation challenges remain ahead. Pakistan remains one of the world’s most complicated security challenges – and policies remain stuck in reactive and crisis management mode.

In 2009, the US and Europe did not achieve strategic progress on the ground in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; instead they prevented a loss and laid the foundations for a more comprehensive effort in both countries. To win back the support of sceptical publics, European countries and the United States must achieve tangible results in the coming year or risk losing further public support.

IN SEARCH OF A VIABLE STRATEGY

In contrast to the enhanced coordination on Afghanistan, the United States and Europe have yet to develop a viable strategy for Pakistan. A fairly strong consensus exists on the nature of the challenges in Pakistan and general prescriptions for dealing with those challenges. There is broad recognition that the threat perceptions of the Pakistani security establishment – particularly its overriding concerns about India – negatively impact broader regional security and have a spillover effect in Afghanistan. In addition, there are few debates about the massive institutional and economic development issues in Pakistan.

The US and Europe have outlined general strategies for boosting the civilian government in Pakistan and supporting democratic reform: the challenge is coordinating military assistance to Pakistan, conducting diplomacy with Pakistan and the region and implementing economic and institutional development programs with a meaningful impact.

Pakistan represents a more complicated challenge than Afghanistan. It is five times more populous than Afghanistan; it has a security establishment with one of the largest militaries in the world, which has intervened in its politics numerous times; and it possesses nuclear weapons.

Pakistani policy remains reactive to events on the ground and tactical in nature – dealing with issues such as responses to the problems of internally displaced people from internal conflicts in the north and western part of the country consume much time and attention. A coordinated civilian and diplomatic strategy integrated with military assistance and calibrated to support political and governance reform remains incomplete.

The ‘Friends of Pakistan’ initiative has helped to foster greater international focus on economic development strategies for Pakistan, but has not yet produced a coherent strategy that exercises leverage and creates incentives for comprehensive reform. The United States and Europe are only in the early stages of creating a comprehensive strategic policy to address Pakistan’s multiple security challenges.



Brian Katulis is Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article was originally published under the title, "Transatlantic Policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan in Obama Year One: Missed Opportunities," in the Policy Brief Nº 42 - FEBRUARY 2010 (PDF), published by FRIDE. This policy brief is part of a joint project by FRIDE, CEPS and the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the original version of this policy brief was presented at the joint FRIDE, CEPS and Heinrich Böll Foundation event ‘One year of Obama: Have transatlantic differences narrowed?’, which took place in Brussels on 2 February 2010.

Pakistan’s defence budget and the Greek example

By —Jan Assakzai
www.dailytimes.com.pk
The country’s economic planners use the same method as the Greeks. The usual strategy Islamabad adopts is managing the deficit with borrowed money, contributing to the debt nightmare (both external and internal) and adding to the current financial crisis
Given the hike in defence spending in the budget for 2010-2011 presented by the federal government, the present economic crisis and means for its solution are synonymous with the Greek crisis in many ways. Both countries have more or less similar geo-political settings that have been instrumental in shaping their security and economic responses.
Pakistan has deep insecurities with respect to its much larger (in terms of territory, population and economy) neighbour and historic rival, India. Thus it has increased its already outsize defence budget by 17 percent. Likewise, Greece has also been locked in hostile relations with its powerful neighbour Turkey, and stepped back from the brink of war several times. Turkey is larger than Greece in its size of territory, population and economy.
Pakistan spends more on defence as a percentage of GDP than many countries, including UK, France, China and India (which maintain a regional reach and which also see for themselves the need to be ready to hold out against the vastly superior Chinese Army and possible US naval threat). Similarly, Greece spends more on defence as a percentage of GDP than any other EU member states, including UK, which maintains a global defence outreach, and Poland, which sees itself as holding out the powerful Russian threat.
It is true that both the countries had to face harsh budget deficits. Before the 2008 crisis, Greece’s budget deficit stood at 6 percent of GDP, which however, was later controlled when austerity measures were put in place to bring spending under control.
Historically, Pakistan has managed to survive by securing an outside sponsor. Such sponsors have sought to contain their regional rivals by taking advantage of Pakistan’s strategic location.
To this end, the US, under the arrangement of CENTO and SEATO pacts, backed Pakistan in their bid to keep Soviet Union confined in Central Asia, and then in Afghanistan. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, that arrangement had ended. Of late, the US and the EU again supported Pakistan under a new arrangement to contain non-state actor like the al Qaeda.
Therefore, Pakistan has managed to borrow money from international donors, including the IMF and the World Bank due to its geo-political importance to the West, particularly the US. For example, General Petraeus, the head of the US Central Command for the US forces in the Middle East, is believed to have called the IMF earlier this year to help out Pakistan in its budgetary difficulties.
Against this backdrop, even today Pakistan cannot plug the gap left not only by defence spending but also by meagre social spending and corruption, as Pakistan does not have internal resources to meet its deficit. The country’s economic planners use the same method as the Greeks. The usual strategy Islamabad adopts is managing the deficit with borrowed money, contributing to the debt nightmare (both external and internal) and adding to the current financial crisis.
Pakistan, like Greece to Turkey, has been proposing to India for defence cut to abate the arms race in South Asia. However, India is reluctant to accede to these proposals, as New Delhi is expanding its geo-political prowess, which means that it has to consider China, the US naval presence in the Indian Ocean and the greater Middle East in terms of general security concerns.
A growing number of India watchers in Washington and London believe that India seems to have outgrown its security concerns regarding Pakistan and the US. This is why Islamabad and New Delhi almost reached agreement on the contours of a settlement of the Kashmir issue under the rule of General Musharraf. In spite of this, later incidents, particularly the 2008 Mumbai attacks, halted the progress of talks between the two countries.
Similarly, Greece recently held a joint summit with Turkey, proposing a 25 percent cut in defence spending. The likelihood of this, nonetheless, is very low because Turkey is a rising regional power and is seeking to address its general security concerns in Caucasus, Black Sea and the Middle East. Turkey has also outgrown its security concerns with Greece. This is why it has been showing conciliatory gestures to Greece. Reduction in defence spending for Greece has become a top priority, as the IMF’s bailout package means Athens has to adopt draconian austerity measures.
Therefore, it has to accept whatever comes its way from Turkey, though this will not necessarily be palatable for either its public or its military. But years of poor economic strategy cost Greece its pride and self-esteem and provoked the anger of its people. It had to choose between draconian austerity measures and bankruptcy and it chose the former.
On the other hand, the present arrangement whereby the US and the EU are backing Pakistan in their bid to contain al Qaeda is unlikely to last forever. The US is desperate to extricate itself from Afghanistan. For the US, and the West in general, Pakistan is a tactical ally, despite Islamabad’s glee with regard to the much-trumped strategic talks with the US.
As far as the future of US willingness to provide budgetary support to Pakistan is concerned, it depends upon whether the future’s net geo-political gain from Pakistan is greater or lesser than the present net investment Washington is making. In contrast, Greece seems to have outlived its geo-political utility for the US and NATO.
Considering Pakistan is using the same economic model as Greece, it is just on borrowed times from its powerful western allies who could even make it easier for Islamabad to swallow the bitter pill of any possible harsh austerity measures, including the defence cuts, by manipulating its economic vulnerability.
Thus Pakistan’s economic future and security imperatives are beholden to the judgement call of the US (and West in general) as to when Pakistan has outlived its geo-political utility for them. So it is a matter of when, not if. A dreadful scenario for policy makers but seems far more realistic than ever. For me, I think I will go and hide under the table for now.
The writer is a London-based analyst hailing from Balochistan. He can be reached at janassakzai200@gmail.com

Arab world frozen in time?

By Kai Bird
CNN
Arab modernity. Why is it that at the beginning of the 21st century the Arab world seems stuck in time? Why are most Arabs still ruled by kings or military dictatorships? And specifically, why has the most populous Arab nation, Egypt, been governed by one man for nearly three decades?

President Hosni Mubarak, a former general, came to power in the aftermath of Anwar Sadat's assassination in October 1981. He has ruled Egypt ever since under a state of emergency.

Last week, Mubarak's regime extended for another two years a Draconian emergency law that permits police to detain individuals indefinitely, prohibits unauthorized assembly and severely restricts freedom of speech.

We Americans should care about this state of affairs. Mubarak's regime exists in part because our tax dollars subsidize this dictatorship to the tune of several billion dollars a year. We also support the Saudi royalty. And although President Obama and previous presidents have often spoken eloquently about the need for democratization, Egypt's elections are anything but democratic. Why does nothing change?

I spent virtually my entire childhood in the Middle East, and though it is not my home, I worry about it as if it were my home. I mourn for it, I fear for it -- and I also greatly fear it. Modernity, if not ever completely defeated, seems to have been put on hold throughout much of the Arab world. A worn-out, 82-year-old pharaoh still reigns in Egypt. Royalty still rules in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Islamists still seem to be winning hearts and minds in a political vacuum.
The fact is that the Egypt of my adolescence in the 1960s was a more democratic and secular society than today. My father was an American Foreign Service officer stationed in Cairo from 1965-67. An army colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was Egypt's virtual dictator. But Nasser had at least been elected president in 1956. He was a wildly popular and populist politician throughout Egypt.

Sadat was never as popular as Nasser. He had catered to the Islamists in the aftermath of Nasser's death, thinking they were not dangerous, and ending up being killed by them. Neither he nor Mubarak could have survived a truly democratic election.

Nasser became an autocrat, but at least he offered the Arabs a secular vision. Even today, Nasser remains emblematic of a lost era when hope still existed among Arabs of all classes and tribes for a modern, secular and progressive Arab nation.

Suave and articulate, Nasser exuded a quiet intelligence. His colleagues knew him to be incorruptible. He had no personal peccadilloes, aside from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. He loved American films. His good friend the newspaper editor Mohammed Heikel claimed that Nasser loved watching Frank Capra's syrupy Christmas tale, "It's a Wonderful Life." His favorite American writer was Mark Twain. He spent an hour or two each evening reading American, French and Arabic magazines.

His closest political enemies at home were the Muslim Brotherhood, political theocrats who then attracted an insignificant following. Today, the Muslim Brotherhood would undoubtedly win any democratic election in Egypt.

But back in the 1960s, most young Arab men aspired to a secular modernity. They wanted to be engineers or doctors or lawyers -- and they admired, like Nasser did, American culture.

I lived in Cairo's upscale suburban community of Maadi, about eight miles south of the city on the eastern bank of the Nile River. I am startled to realize now that another resident of Maadi was the young Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In 1965, the future doctor and No. 2 leader of al Qaeda was attending Maadi's state-run secondary school. He was exactly my age. And like me, al-Zawahiri used to watch Hollywood films on an outdoor screen at the Maadi Sports Club.

Al-Zawahiri once aspired to a career in public health. His ambitions were the same as most young Arab men in the Nasser era. Even then he was a practicing Muslim. And his religious sensibilities did not become politically radicalized until after Nasser ordered the execution of the Muslim Brotherhood's leader, Sayyid Qutb, in 1966. But I would argue that al-Zawahiri and other young men would never have taken the road to jihadist terror had it not been for the June 1967 war.

Sadik al-Azm, the Yale-educated, Syrian philosopher, described Nasser's defeat in the June war as a "lightning bolt" and a "shock" to the Arab ethos. Nasser's humiliation spelled the defeat of the idea of a secular path to Arab modernity. Nasser's once powerful notion that the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East could unite under the banner of a progressive Arab nationalist movement was now discredited.

Over time, political Islam moved into this political vacuum. Al-Zawahiri himself wrote in his 2001 memoir that the "Naksa" -- the June 1967 defeat -- "influenced the awakening of the jihadist movement."

Al-Zawahiri today is hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, or dodging drone missile attacks in Pakistan. Someday he will be a dead man, along with his pitiful co-conspirator Osama bin Laden. The jihadists don't have any thing real to offer the Arabs of the 21st century. They can't put bread on the table in this era of globalization.

Al-Azm believes the jihadists have already lost: "There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline. ... September 11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge."

I hope so. But if Al-Azm is right, the new generation of young Arab men and women must find hope for their lives elsewhere. And so long as tired old kings and pharaohs smother their rights to democratic elections and free speech, the jihadists will still offer a desperate alternative.

Pakistan Military in Spotlight After Times Square Plot

"When in doubt, do nothing" could have served as the Pakistani military's unofficial motto until now on the tricky question of tackling militant strongholds in the tribal badlands of North Waziristan. But doing nothing may no longer be an option, now that the Obama Administration is blaming the failed Times Square bomb attack on the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). Washington has long cajoled the Pakistani army to extend its campaign against militants on its own soil into North Waziristan, where the TTP leadership has set up shop amid a viper's nest of militant groups that include al-Qaeda, but the generals have until now demurred, claiming a lack of resources. Following reports that Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad was trained by TTP elements in North Waziristan, the pressure on Pakistan from Washington has sharply increased, leaving the Pakistani military leadership in an increasingly uncomfortable position.On Friday, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, met with Pakistan's Army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, reportedly to coax Pakistan into moving into North Waziristan. And on Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sternly warned of "very severe consequences" for Pakistan if an attack similar to the one tried in Times Square were to prove successful.Pakistanis are already embarrassed at the fact that Shahzad was not only born in Pakistan and is alleged to have been trained there, but is also the son of a retired senior military officer. More alarming still is the apparent move by the TTP, until now a domestic insurgency directed at the Pakistani state, to target a U.S. city in retaliation for drone attacks in Pakistan. That leaves Pakistan's political and military leadership to find a response sensitive to both the needs of a key ally and the concerns of a skeptical public.Wary of U.S. motives at the best of times, Pakistani public opinion was rankled by Clinton's warning. Even liberal newspapers committed to fighting militancy warned of the statement's unintended effects. "Ms. Clinton's comments are unfortunate and will rekindle suspicions here that America is no real friend of Pakistan," said an editorial in Dawn, Pakistan's leading newspaper. The fear is that those who oppose the campaign against jihadist militancy will turn Pakistani ire at Clinton's perceived bullying to their advantage in the battle for Pakistani hearts and minds.But while an offensive launched under pressure from the U.S. could antagonize the Pakistani public, there could be an even greater backlash should the U.S. decide to take matters into its own hands. This year alone has seen at least 32 U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, principally at targets in North Waziristan, and that program - which infuriates many Pakistanis - is set to continue. While the authorities may be able to absorb the political fallout from the increasingly accurate drone strikes, their real worry is that Washington might decide to send its own ground forces into North Waziristan. "[The presence of U.S. troops] would be truly disastrous," says Aftab Sherpao, who served as Interior Minister under former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf. The mere presence of foreign soldiers, he believes, would inflame public opinion to dangerous proportions, weakening the hand of the civilian government and the army. In September 2008, the only known case of an American boots-on-the-ground operation triggered a chorus of outrage, led by General Kayani himself.Even if the U.S. refrained from expanding its own actions on Pakistani soil, the generals and politicians also fear that failure to act could jeopardize the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in civilian and military aid from Washington.Given the risks that follow from doing nothing, Pakistan will have to take action. "The army realizes that it must go into North Waziristan," says retired general and analyst Talat Masood. "They have been looking at this option for quite some time, but they have been hesitant as they are overstretched." Tens of thousands of Pakistani troops are already fanned out across the northwest and the tribal areas in an effort to consolidate gains made in recent offensives. "Washington should appreciate that we have covered a lot of area," insists Sherpao, the former Interior Minister. "There have been operations in Swat, Bajaur, Mohmand and South Waziristan. We cannot move troops from the eastern border because there's no comfort as far as India is concerned." As the military's decision to test-fire two ballistic missiles at the weekend demonstrates, India remains its principal focus.The Pakistani military has long drawn a distinction between the Taliban, and related insurgent groups, using its soil as a base from which to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan and those waging war on the Pakistani state. The Afghanistan-oriented groups have been allowed to operate largely unmolested in keeping with Pakistan's desire to recover lost influence in Afghanistan, while the military has gone after the TTP. But as the army pushed into the TTP's strongholds in South Waziristan, the group moved north, into territory controlled by Hafiz Gul Bahadur - a militant leader who enjoys a fragile nonaggression pact with the Pakistan army. "It's a very complex area," says Masood, "particularly because there are elements there that are not so hostile to the Pakistani military." By that he means the Haqqani network, an al-Qaeda linked Afghan Taliban group deemed one of the most dangerous confronting the U.S. in Afghanistan but viewed as a strategic asset by Pakistan's intelligence services. "The army will prefer to take a limited operation, one that is confined to the Mehsud areas," says Masood, referring to TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud.But North Waziristan is only one part of the jihadist infrastructure that enables terror attacks beyond Pakistan's borders. As Shahzad's alleged story - making contact with militant elements in Karachi before heading off to North Waziristan for training - demonstrates, there are jihadist groups seeded throughout the country, and they're strengthening their cooperative ties with one another.Dismantling that infrastructure will take years, say Pakistani analysts and politicians. "You can't start operations against all these groups simultaneously," says Sherpao. "You have to proceed step by step. You have to consolidate your gains first, then move on to the next target." But the Shahzad case, says Sherpao, should serve as a wake-up call. "The political and military leadership have to sit down now and devise a serious response," he says. "Otherwise, it will become very difficult."

Who murdered Benazir Bhutto?

www.timesonline.co.uk
Christina Lamb
Benazir Bhutto was brought back to Pakistan from exile as part of an international deal. Then she was killed — and all traces of evidence were immediately swept away. Our award-winning correspondent follows the clues to her killers in London, Karachi and Washington
Across fields of cotton and baked mud in the village of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh in southern Pakistan rises a white marble mausoleum with Mughal-style cones that shim-mer in the heat. Inside lie four bodies — a father and his three children — all murdered over a 30-year span. The father was hanged by a military dictator, one son poisoned and one son shot, both by unknown assailants. The daughter was still building the mausoleum when she, too, was assassinated. Her killing was captured on live TV, yet who did it remains a mystery, as well as how.

Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan’s most important political figure, the leading female politician in the Islamic world, an Oxford and Harvard graduate who was the West’s best hope of tackling terrorism. Yet 2½ years on, and despite a $5m United Nations commission of inquiry, her murder remains unresolved.

Almost every Pakistani has a theory about who did it; practically nobody expects to find out. Pakistan’s history is dotted with unexplained political assassinations, but this time there was an unexpected twist. Bhutto’s widowed husband ended up as president, with all the government apparatus at his disposal. One might think that for once there was a good chance of establishing a culprit. Instead he had called in the UN to investigate, claiming “This thing is bigger than us.”

I had my own reasons for wanting answers. I’d known Bibi, as friends called her, since 1987, when her kind wedding invitation to a 21-year-old led to me falling in love with her country and starting a life as a foreign correspondent, covering both her spells as prime minister. I was with her on the truck in Karachi the first time they tried to kill her: two bombs killed 150 people, but she survived.

Ten weeks later, just after 5pm on December 27, 2007, they succeeded. As Bhutto left an election rally in Liaquat Park, Rawalpindi, she stood up through the sunroof of her armoured car to wave. Moments later she was dead, blood gushing from a wound to her temple, as a suicide bomber exploded himself in the crowd.

Bhutto’s action had been foolhardy when she knew there were people out to kill her, and her death sadly unsurprising in a family that has sacrificed everything for politics. What was less explicable was what happened next.

“Everything was manipulated,” says Athar Minallah, a leading lawyer who sits on the board of the Rawalpindi hospital where Bhutto was taken. “The evidence was washed away and no autopsy or investigation allowed. As a lawyer I can’t come to any conclusion, but it’s all too sinister to believe there wasn’t mala fide in this.”

In the 20 years I knew Benazir I had been both captivated by her and infuriated by her, once even deported by her. But I had also personally witnessed the lengths gone to to stop her by what she called “the Establishment”, the old guard of Pakistan’s military and intelligence, which at the time of Bhutto’s death had ruled the country for 32 of its 60 years. Despite being warned off by friends in the Pakistani media, I travelled from London to Dubai, Karachi to Kabul, Waziristan to Washington, asking questions from those involved, many of whom had never spoken out before.

If ever there was a death foretold, this was it. Bhutto’s days were numbered from the time she decided to end eight years in exile in Dubai and return home, following a deal with President Pervez Musharraf backed by the US and Britain. Under the deal, corruption charges against her, her husband and senior members of her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) would be dropped, enabling them to contest elections. In return they would allow Musharraf to remain president. But neither trusted the other, and the military ruler had sworn he would never allow her back in power.

“We might as well have painted a bull’s-eye target on her head,” admitted a British Foreign Office minister involved in the negotiations.

Her closest friends begged her not to go back. “I said, ‘You’ve been prime minister twice, why do this?’ ” said Peter Galbraith, a former UN envoy to Afghanistan, who had been a friend since 1969, when a primly dressed Bhutto arrived at Harvard aged16 and went to dinner at his parents’ house.

Mark Siegel, a Democrat strategist who co-wrote her last book, said goodbye to her in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington. As he turned back to wave, he recalled the scene in The Graduate of a rain-soaked Anne Bancroft standing bereft after realising that her lover, Dustin Hoffman, is in love with her daughter. “I had this terrible feeling,” he said.

In London before her return, Bhutto told me she knew the risk. “I know there are people who want to kill me and scuttle the restoration of democracy,” she said. “But with my faith in God and the people of Pakistan, I’m sure the party workers will protect me.”

She then flew to Dubai to say goodbye to her daughters, Bakhtawar and Asifa. On October 16, the day before she was due to fly to Pakistan, she was warned by UAE and Saudi intelligence of a plot to kill her. She immediately wrote to Musharraf naming three suspects: Pervez Elahi, then chief minister of Punjab; General Hamid Gul, the retired head of Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); and Brigadier Ejaz Shah, the former head of the Intelligence Bureau (IB). But there was no changing her mind. “The time of life is written and the time of death is written,” she insisted.

When the plane landed at Karachi and Bhutto came down the steps, she could not hold back the tears. Huge crowds had lined the streets. Waving from the top of a special bus, she was transformed, her face alive, so different to the Bhutto of the last few years in exile, gorging on ice cream and reading self-help books. I understood then why she had gone back.

But her security people were worried. The jammers promised by the Pakistan government to impede remote-control bombs were not working. Bhutto refused to go behind the special bulletproof screen in her bus that would separate her from her people. Eventually, she went to the armoured compartment on the lower deck to work on her speech. It was nearly midnight and we had been on the bus nine hours when the first blast came, throwing us to the ground. Moments later came a second, much larger, blast. There was silence, then screams, sirens and little pieces fluttering down like black snowflakes: bits of charred skin.

Bhutto had no doubt who was behind it. She emailed Mark Siegel on October 26: “Nothing will God-willing happen. Just wanted u to know if it does I will hold Musharraf responsible.”

She also called Musharraf. “He told her, ‘I warned you not to come back until after the elections,’ and threatened her, ‘I’ll only protect you if you’re nice to me,’ ” said Husain Haqqani, a former Bhutto aide who was living in the US and is now Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington.

Instead of stepping up her security, it was reduced. She was even told not to travel in vehicles with tinted windows, as this was against the law of the local government.

She appealed to the American and British officials who had helped negotiate her return. “I called everyone,” said Haqqani. “I even got the US ambassador in Pakistan, Anne Patterson, to visit her.” It did not go well. “Patterson wasn’t nice to her,” said Bhutto’s cousin and confidant, Tariq Islam. “She harped on, ‘You must not talk against Musharraf.’ The Americans never trusted her. It was a marriage of convenience.”

In November, Bhutto returned to Dubai for a few days. Her daughters believe she knew then she would not see them again. “She kept on telling us life is in God’s hands,” said her youngest, Asifa, interviewed for Bhutto, a film about her mother’s life that opens in June. “It was going to be my 18th birthday in January, and she said she wanted to wish me happy birthday in advance,” said her older daughter, Bakhtawar. “I said, ‘Don’t wish me in advance, wish me then.’ ”

The next morning, after her mother left, she found a be-ribboned box containing a silver jaguar head on a pendant. A note wished her “Happy birthday, all my love, Mummy”.

Back in Pakistan, on December 26, the day before the Rawalpindi rally, she addressed a public meeting in Peshawar and a suspected suicide bomber was caught trying to get in. That night her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, called her, begging her to let him campaign in her place. “I pleaded with her, ‘You stay home and I’ll go do the rallies. You’re the mother.’ But she said, ‘What can I do? I have to go and meet my people.’ ”

In the early hours of December 27, she was visited by General Nadeem Taj, the head of the ISI, the agency that in the past had done all it could to stop her becoming prime minister, from printing propaganda leaflets to creating a new political party. What he told her is unknown. Despite the late night, Bhutto was up early sending emails, including one to Peter Galbraith asking him to contact his friend, the Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, to send some of his jammers.

Back at her Islamabad home for a light lunch, she called her political secretary, Naheed Khan, to sit with her. Naheed had worked for her for 23 years and accompanied her through beatings, tear gas and arrests. Bhutto told her some American politicians would be coming that evening. Convinced that Musharraf was planning to rig the elections, Bhutto had collected information of a secret ISI rigging cell based in a house in Islamabad, which she planned to present to the Republican senator Arlen Specter and the Democrat congressman Patrick Kennedy.

Around 2pm, the two women climbed into her armoured, white Toyota Land Cruiser with an entourage of five men, including Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who had led her party while she was in exile, and Senator Safdar Abbas, Naheed’s husband and also a long-time aide.

As they left manicured Islamabad for the dusty streets of Rawalpindi, passers-by waved at the motorcade. In front was a blue police van and a black Mercedes containing her security chief and other officials. Behind were two pick-up trucks of her bodyguards.

Once they reached Rawalpindi and saw people massing, Bhutto stood up as usual. “ ’Pindi was hard for her,” said Naheed. Her father was killed in ’Pindi jail and she was too much excited. It was a huge gathering, we weren’t expecting, and such a charged crowd.”

As they drove out of the back of the park with dusk falling, the gates were opened. The crowd flooded out and gathered round her chanting “Jiye Bhutto” [long live Bhutto], “wazir-i-azam Benazir” [prime minister Benazir]. She stood up, climbing on the seat so that she could be seen.

Then they heard shooting. “Suddenly I felt some pressure, she had fallen on me,” said Naheed. She sobs as she recalls cradling Bhutto’s bleeding head. “She was completely unconscious, her blood seeping over me. That scene is still going on in front of me two years on,” she said.

All those in the car, and her spokeswoman Sherry Rehman, in the car behind, insist that Bhutto fell first, then a bomb went off. “As soon as she ducked down, after three to four seconds there was a bomb blast,” said Naheed. Safdar checked Bhutto’s pulse. “There was nothing.”

A bodyguard shouted “Move the car!” but the left tyres had burst in the blast. The backup car had mysteriously disappeared, so the bodyguard carried her into Sherry Rehman’s 4x4 and they rushed to Rawalpindi general hospital.

“I thought she was already dead,” said Zahid, the driver, showing the back seat of the Jeep where the bloodstains are still visible. “She was unconscious and bleeding from the left side of her neck and top right of her skull.”

At the hospital, doctors tried to resuscitate her. Sherry Rehman describes the chaos of bloodied, injured and dead victims being brought in and party workers crowding the building. Rehman found Naheed and Makhdoom Fahim in a state of shock. “The hospital wanted us to get the body out,” she said. “The whole place was heaving with people. Makhdoom and I created a diversion by driving out so they could get the body out without supporters realising. It didn’t occur to us to demand the medical report. I was sure she was shot, I heard the shots, then our heads being shoved down in the drill we’d had since Karachi, then the boom of the bomb. We never thought anyone would contradict this.”

In Dubai, Bhutto’s family had been watching on television. “All we knew was something had happened,” said Zardari. “I said, ‘Arrange a plane.’ When I came back into the room, the TV was announcing she was dead.” Bhutto’s body was placed in a makeshift plywood coffin and taken to the nearby military airbase of Chaklala.

Around 1am, the family arrived, and both they and the coffin were flown to Moenjodaro in the southern province of Sindh, to drive through the night to Bhutto’s ancestral home town of Naudero. In keeping with the Muslim tradition, she was buried the next day.

On December 30, just three days after her death, Zardari summoned a meeting of the party’s central executive committee. He asked their son, Bilawal, to read out a handwritten letter from Bhutto to the PPP. It stated: “I would like my husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to lead you in this interim period until you and he decide what is best. I say this because he is a man of courage and honour.”

Zardari told me afterwards he had no idea she had drawn up such a will. “The day her remains came to Naudero, a person came from Dubai and said, ‘I have this document Madam left with me.’ ” He said he did not know the person.

It was dated October 16, two days before Bhutto returned to Pakistan. “That was the day she’d been warned not to go back,” Zardari said, “and she wrote that letter to Musharraf showing apprehensions about certain people.”

In a shrewd move, Zardari named their son, Bilawal, as co-chairman, adding Bhutto to his name to make him Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, and said he would take over the leadership when he was old enough. Bilawal was then only 19, and starting his second term at Christ Church college, Oxford. He freely admitted he was more interested in Facebook and movies than politics.

Still in shock, nobody on the party’s executive questioned the document. Afterwards, Fahim, the party’s former leader, who had expected to take over, told me he was astonished that Bhutto would hand the party over to Zardari. Known in Pakistan as Mr Ten Per Cent, his alleged corruption was thought to be largely responsible for the demise of both Bhutto’s governments.

Torn apart with grief, Naheed was also too stunned to say anything. “She never mentioned it [the will] to me, nor had I seen it,” she told me.

Back in Islamabad, the Musharraf government appeared to be in panic. Within an hour of the attack the scene had been washed down with high-pressure hoses, wiping out almost all the evidence. Saud Aziz, then chief of Rawalpindi police, said he issued these orders after receiving a phone call from a close associate of Musharraf. The interior ministry said they were worried about “vultures picking up body parts”.

This was in stark contrast to what had happened after two assassination attempts on Musharraf in the same city, when the area had been sealed off for weeks.

With the country in chaos, there was an unseemly rush to announce the cause of death and to name an assassin. At 5pm on Friday December 28, less than 24 hours after her death, Brigadier Javed Cheema, the interior ministry spokesman, held a press conference. He said the hospital report showed Bhutto had been killed by striking the lever of the sunroof as she ducked to avoid the bomb. “There was no bullet or metal shrapnel found in the injury,” he said.

He also said intelligence services had intercepted a call from Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban, proving he was behind it. A transcript was later made available — though no audio tape — on which the militant leader is self-congratulatory and gives away his location. A week later, journalists including myself were called in to our respective embassies to be told that MI6 and the CIA had authenticated the transcript and were convinced Baitullah had carried out the attack. The former Pakistani cricket captain-turned-politician Imran Khan was incredulous. “The day after the murder they produce a tape of Baitullah saying, ‘I’m sitting here, tomorrow I’ll be having breakfast. Well done, boys.’ Is this a joke? The guy is being hunted down, on the run. Would he be talking like that?”

Baitullah insisted he was not responsible. “I strongly deny it,” he said via his spokesman, Maulvi Omar. “Tribal people have their own customs. We don’t strike women.”

In years of reporting on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, never once had I known them not take responsibility for something. Moreover, Bhutto had told me that after the Karachi attack Baitullah had sent a message saying: “Identify your enemy. I’m not your foe.”

Meanwhile, footage had emerged in which a clean-shaven man in dark glasses was clearly visible waving a gun and firing three shots. A TV station had filmed bullets lying on the ground. Other footage showed Bhutto’s chief bodyguard, Khalid Shahenshah, gesticulating strangely from the stage as Bhutto left.

Aside from Bhutto, 22 others were killed in the attack. Family members told Pakistani media that some had bullet wounds. But no autopsies were carried out, even though they are required by law.

I started my own investigation in the sprawling port city of Karachi on the basis that whoever had tried to kill her there on October 17 was probably the same person that eventually got her.

That bombing was Pakistan’s most lethal terrorist attack, yet I was shocked to find from the local police chief that there was no investigation under way. It wasn’t even clear whether it was a suicide bomb or a car bomb, though a retired army colonel who lived round the corner sent me photographs of a burnt-out car that had its chassis number scratched off so it could not be identified.

Many of those who died were “Martyrs for Benazir”, young party volunteers who formed a human chain round the bus and prevented the bomb getting nearer. One was 25-year-old Intukhab Alam. I went to see his widowed father, Mahmood Yunis, 70, in Muhammadi Colony, Liaquatabad, one of the poorest parts of Karachi. He cannot believe the government is not investigating Bhutto’s death. “My son was a small person, but she was a great leader,” he said. “No Zardari can take her place.”

Someone else with little time for Zardari is Benazir’s niece Fatima. It was eerie going to see her: she lives in 70 Clifton, the house of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, her grandfather and Benazir’s father. He was the first Bhutto to be murdered, hanged by his former army chief, General Zia, in 1979.

Fatima was just 14 in September 1996 when her father, Murtaza, the elder of Benazir’s two brothers, was gunned down on the street, along with six of his men. The murder scene was also washed clean before investigators could arrive.

Fatima and her stepmother, Ghinwa, Murtaza’s second wife, invited me to stay for lunch. They talked of the rivalry between Zardari and Murtaza, who they told me kept a cartoon of his brother-in-law genuflecting to the Sultan of Oman in the guest toilet. It is clear who his wife and daughter believe responsible for his death. “The orders could have only come from the highest levels,” said Fatima. Her Aunt Benazir was prime minister at the time.

Bhutto’s friends and family say she was devastated by Murtaza’s death. Her cousin Tariq Islam accompanied her to the morgue in Karachi. “We went to the cold room where his blood-soaked body was and she collapsed, put her head between his feet and cried and howled, ‘You’re my baby brother, don’t do this to me.’ ”

Bhutto, who was prime minister at the time, called in a Scotland Yard team to investigate and asked Islam to be the liaison person. “Even though it was her government, they were stymied at every turn,” he said. “They wanted to see the scene, but within hours it had been pressure-washed. They wanted to see the vehicle in which Murtaza’s body was flung and taken to hospital but were told it had been taken to a garage.”

Six weeks after the murder, a coup took place and Benazir was ousted as prime minister. Scotland Yard was sent home.

Zardari was detained for allegedly being involved in the murder, as well as a number of corruption cases. He was released from jail into exile in 2004 by Musharraf and acquitted on the murder charge in 2008 owing to lack of evidence.

Last December, 18 police officers also alleged to have been involved in Murtaza’s murder were all acquitted. Some had been highly promoted. “Shoaib Suddle, the police chief who was there on the night, was made head of the IB,” said Fatima. “Zardari’s defence lawyer in the case is now attorney general.”

Similarly, following Benazir’s death, nobody has lost their job despite clear lapses in security and failures to investigate. Bhutto’s security chief, Rehman Malik, who disappeared with the backup car, is now interior minister and Zardari’s closest adviser. “My enemies are talking nonsense that I ran away,” he said when I asked why he left the spot. “I wasn’t a security officer that I had to be there. I’m not a guard or a gunman.”

Musharraf’s interior secretary, Kamal Shah, is still in his post, though it was his ministry that put out the version of events Bhutto’s friends and family dispute. Saud Aziz, who ordered the roads to be washed, was transferred to Multan, the prime minister’s constituency, but was suspended last week following the UN report.

Then there is the unexplained shooting of Benazir’s bodyguard Khalid Shahenshah, who was also in the car the night of her killing. I tracked down his best friend, Mohammed Yarwar, a former US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent, who met me in a house full of caged snakes on a busy Karachi road. A student activist for the party, Shahenshah ran a grocery store in Connecticut and seems a strange choice as chief bodyguard. “We hung out in New York,” said Yarwar. “He had a connection with Zardari and got to know Benazir because he would drive her when she visited.”

Shahenshah was heading security at Bhutto’s residence in Karachi, Bilawal House, when, on July 22, 2008, Yarwar got a panicked call from one of his guards, who was outside his friend’s house. “He was screaming, ‘There’s firing going on!’ ”

The guard later told him that Shahenshah had arrived home and got out of his car outside the gate. A small car approached with three men inside who began firing. “They shot 62 rounds, of which seven bullets hit Khalid,” said Yarwar. The car was later abandoned. Yarwar denied rumours that it was a gangland killing. “There was no proper investigation,” he said. “People say he might have known something about Benazir’s death. If he did, he never told me: all he ever said was that she was definitely shot. But I don’t like it. I’ve quit the PPP. ”

Fear is tangible when I start asking about Benazir’s death, something the UN commission noted, describing themselves as “mystified by the efforts of certain high-ranking government authorities to obstruct access”.

In Rawalpindi I went first to Liaquat Road, where Benazir was killed. The spot is marked by a garish painting of her on a red background surrounded by what look like pink bathroom tiles. In front lay a dried-up wreath. Behind a few barricades was a cabin where five policemen were sitting around drinking tea under a lightbulb hanging from a wire.

When I started to take photographs they became animated, telling me to go away. They noted down my driver’s numberplate, after which he refused to take me anywhere else.

I hailed another cab to take me to Rawalpindi’s police headquarters and found the charming chief police officer, Rao Iqbal. When I asked what was the usual procedure after a bombing, he said: “Our priority is to get life back to normal and remove all the rubble, but after collecting the evidence, not before.” Why did this not happen after Bhutto’s death? “The orders may have come through the mouth of CPO Saud Aziz, but it was a government agency that ordered the washing, not a policeman,” he replied, adding: “In my view it should not have been washed.”

As a result, they collected only 23 pieces of evidence, in a case where there would normally be thousands. One of the pieces was her car, and that had also been washed of any evidence. The UN commission pulled no punches, stating: “The failure of the police to investigate effectively Ms Bhutto’s assassination was deliberate.”

Police did find the blown-off face of the suicide bomber, who they say was a 15-year-old boy, on a roof. And to my surprise they told me they have five suspects in custody picked up in 2008, and five more they plan to arrest. They believe they were recruited from madrasahs and part of a team sent to target Bhutto in different cities — but they did not seem to be interested in who had sent them.

The lack of evidence has made it very difficult to establish how Bhutto died. Under pressure, Musharraf called in Scotland Yard to investigate her death. They backed his government’s version that Bhutto died after hitting her head, rather than from an assassin’s bullet. Yet every single person in her car insists she fell before the blast.

I went to the hospital hoping to see Professor Mussadiq, who led attempts to resuscitate Bhutto. I was first refused entry, then told he was at the Holy Family hospital. When I got there, they told me he was not at work. Eventually I met one of the other doctors who attended her; he would only speak off the record.

“Our main concern was saving her life, not what caused the injury, because that is done in an autopsy,” he said. “We all thought she had been shot.”

Because she was an emergency patient, the medical team had made no official report, just clinical notes. They were horrified then when the interior-ministry spokesman held the press conference in which he cited their report, attributing the cause of death to hitting the lever of the sunroof.

“They were very perturbed,” said Athar Minallah, the lawyer who sits on the hospital board. “When they couldn’t revive her, they told the police chief three times there needed to be an autopsy. He was constantly on the phone to someone else and refused, even though by law it’s mandatory.”

If how Bhutto died cannot be properly established, it seems unlikely we will ever find out who did it. In August last year, Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban suspect, was killed by an American drone.

The person fingered by Bhutto, Musharraf, now lives in exile in London, accompanied everywhere by six Scotland Yard officers. Before Christmas I met him at a dinner at the home of a mutual Pakistani friend, where he lounged on the sofa, drinking whisky, smoking a fat cigar and handing out £50 notes to the singers.

When a reporter asked him if he had blood on his hands, he retorted that the question was “below my dignity”, going on to say: “My family is not a family which believes in killing people. For standing up outside the car I think she was to blame — nobody else. Responsibility is hers.”

The UN disagrees. “Ms Bhutto’s assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken,” states the report. Describing the government protection as “fatally insufficient”, they point out that there were few police present to guard her, and that those posted on roofs to watch for threats did not even have binoculars.

Ask most Pakistanis who killed Benazir and they ask who benefited. A Google search on Zardari turns up Zardari jokes, Zardari corruption, Zardari assets and Zardari killed Benazir as among the most common searches. Bhutto had told friends that she would not let her husband be involved in politics again. The plan was for him to stay in Dubai. They had lived separate lives for years. He argues this was because in 20 years of marriage, he spent 11 years in jail. But when he was released, instead of Dubai he went to New York, ostensibly for medical treatment.

Her closest friends say the will is in her writing, and they believe she wanted to keep the party in the family, in the South Asian tradition. “She thought it would split into factions otherwise,” said Bashir Riaz, who knew her all her life. But they are at a loss to explain why, when Zardari became Pakistan’s president in September 2008, he did not begin an investigation.

I put this to Zardari when I went to his house in Islamabad. “The stature of Bhutto called for an independent, transparent and above-board investigation so no accusation of bias could be made,” he said. “This is bigger than us.”

He showed me a framed copy of the will. “This was the joker in the pack,” he said. “Whoever killed her wanted a weak PPP minus Benazir. They thought they would get their own choice.”

His interior minister, Malik, claimed the government are now investigating and will soon release their own report. “We are after just one more person, then the circle will be complete,” Malik said.

“I don’t want nine people strung up to avenge her death — it’s the whole system,” said Zardari. “Only when we’re prospering and we’re Singapore will she be avenged.”

Fine words. Last week, Pakistan’s parliament voted to repeal a constitutional amendment used by military dictators to give themselves sweeping powers. But it remains a nation besieged by bombings and power cuts where militant leaders go free, even holding public rallies, and intelligence agencies make people disappear. When a government delegation went to Washington last month it was clear that the army chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, was the real power. This is the same army whose generals suggested to Zardari last time Bhutto was prime minister that he replace her because they didn’t like saluting to a woman.

Why Pakistan's Military Is Holding Back in North Waziristan

It took just a few months for the Pakistani military to clear the Swat Valley's lush, mountainous tribal terrain of its Taliban usurpers last summer, using some 30,000 troops to dislodge the guerrillas from the once-bustling tourist haven, 80 miles northwest of the capital Islamabad. Now, however, almost a year after winning the war, the same number of troops are still in place in order to hold Swat, rebuild it and prevent a Taliban resurgence — and that may keep Islamabad from going after the extremists in other parts of Pakistan's unruly frontier with Afghanistan.

The U.S. has often appealed to Pakistan to do just that, specifically against elements in North Waziristan. More than 200 miles south of Swat, the tribal territory is a base for militants targeting U.S. troops just across the border in Afghanistan; it is also believed to be a refuge for senior al-Qaeda leaders. Yet the Pakistani military has refused to go into North Waziristan because it says its forces are already stretched thin (the bulk of the country's troops are stationed along the eastern border with India, the nation Islamabad still considers its primary foe).

Opening up a new front in North Waziristan now, Pakistani military officials say, could undo the gains achieved in areas like Swat by diverting troops from areas they must continue to control. As one officer said, "To hold the ground, you have to be on the ground." The heavy security footprint, the Pakistanis argue, is aimed at avoiding the U.S. military's experience in Iraq, where some areas like Mosul north of Baghdad, once cleared, saw troops draw down only to have militants return and necessitate the re-insertion of American forces to clear them out again. (Will Pakistan's victories over the Taliban last?)

Indeed, the Pakistanis say, while they have largely cleared militants from Swat, which is in the North-West Frontier Province, as well as the South Waziristan and Bajaur areas along the Afghan border, the army remains engaged in battles in the Khyber district not far from Swat and nearby Orakzai, where the army claims almost daily double-digit Taliban kill figures (numbers that cannot be independently verified).

The Pakistanis also argue that there's more to holding an area than just boots on the ground. As part of its counterinsurgency strategy, the Pakistani military says it is taking the lead in eliminating the factors that helped the area fall to the extremists in the first place: poverty and bureacractic ineptitude and corruption. In Swat, it has set up joint civilian-military liaison cells, which bring together representatives of the military, provincial government and tribal elders. "There are so many reasons that we fell to them [the Taliban] and they took over, so many reasons," says Bakhd Zada, a tribal elder from Devlai, a town of some 30,000, 13 miles from Mingora in the Swat district. "There's poverty, lack of knowledge, and we were misguided," he says. "We need to educate the people and we need job creation. You know when you are empty minded and you have nothing to do, that is a place for demons to develop."

Lieutenant Colonel Akhtar Abbas, army spokesman in Swat, says the military is taking its cue from the populace. "We listened to them, we tried to solve their problems," he says. "They're our own brothers and sisters, we're not like the Americans in Iraq."

In Swat, the military has surged ahead of an excruciatingly slow civilian bureaucracy. Soldiers are reconstructing roads, bridges, health centers, water systems and libraries across the valley. The Army has recruited and trained thousands of police officers, and rebuilt 217 of the 400 or so schools destroyed by the Taliban. It is also footing the bill, thanks to a nationwide voluntary contribution of two days' pay by the troops themselves, a move that raised more than 100 million rupees (almost $1.2 million). The military is also much more efficient. Lt. Col. Abbas points to the restoration of a historic hostel in Swat as an example: Civil contractors estimate it would cost 80 million rupees for the reconstruction. The army did it for 20 million rupees, of its own money.

Commissioner Fazal Karim Khattak, the administrative head of the provincial government in Swat and seven other nearby districts, rejects criticism that the government isn't doing enough, although he admits that there is a heavy reliance on the military. The destruction is so widespread, he says, that it's "not really possible" for the government to do it alone. "I would recommend that the army stays here in the same numbers for quite some time," he adds, "because the civilian institutions have been ruined so much that it will take some time for them to stand on their own feet."

Still, some people say they are wary of the army's intentions — and its omnipresence. They fear that a military accustomed to being in control is unlikely to relinquish power and give up its space to civilian institutions. Lt. Col. Abbas dismisses such concerns. "Pulling [the military] back is the decision of the political government. Whenever they require us, we're here. If they say we are no more required, again we're happy," he says. "But since we're sitting here in the valley, we are reconstructing." And not going after the extremists in North Waziristan.

Pakistan - A nation under attack

American drones overhead, Taliban troops on the offensive, and the horrifying rise of child kidnapping - Pakistan is in pieces, writes Robert Fisk, in a devastating portrait of a country thwarted by violence and corruption

Pakistan ambushes you. The midday heat is also beginning to ambush all who live in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province. Canyons of fumes grey out the vast ramparts of the Bala Hisar fort. "Headquarters Frontier Force" is written on the ancient gateway. I notice the old British cannon on the heights - and the spanking new anti-aircraft gun beside it, barrels deflected to point at us, at all who enter this vast metropolis of pain. There are troops at every intersection, bullets draped in belts over their shoulders, machine guns on tripods erected behind piles of sandbags, the sights of AK-47s brushing impersonally across rickshaws, and rubbish trucks and buses with men clinging to the sides. There are beards that reach to the waist. The soldiers have beards, too, sometimes just as long.

I am sitting in a modest downstairs apartment in the old British cantonment. A young Peshawar journalist sits beside me, talking in a subdued but angry way, as if someone is listening to us, about the pilotless American aircraft which now slaughter by the score - or the four score - along the Afghanistan border. "I was in Damadola when the drones came. They killed more than 80 teenagers - all students - and, yes they were learning the Koran, and the madrasah, the Islamic school, was run by a Taliban commander. But 80! Many of them came from Bajaur, which would be attacked later. Their parents came afterwards, all their mothers were there, but the bodies were in pieces. There were so many children, some as young as 12. We didn't know how to fit them together."

The reporter - no name, of course, because he still has to work in Peshawar - was in part of the Bajaur tribal area, to cover negotiations between the government and the Taliban. "The drones stayed around for about half an hour, watching," he says. "Then two Pakistani helicopter gunships came over. Later, the government said the helicopters did the attack. But it was the drones."

An Islamabad garden now, light with bright oak trees and big birds that bark at us from the branches, beneath which sit two humanitarian workers, both Europeans who have spent weeks in the Swat valley during and after the Pakistani army's offensive against the Taliban. "There were dozens - perhaps hundreds - executed by the army. They were revenge killings by the soldiers, no doubt about it. A number of people we had reported to us as arrested - they were later found dead. What does that mean? The Americans and the Brits were aware of this, of course they were, and they intervened with the government. But what does this say about the army? In one village, two bodies lay in the street for two days - it was a way of showing the local people what would happen to them if they supported the Taliban. What does this say about the army? Can they control Pakistan like this?"

Some 70 per cent of the Pakistani army come from Punjab, and 80 per cent of retired army officers come from Punjab. In a few days, Punjab will pay for this.

But lest the Taliban appear in freedom-fighter mode, here is a different account of the Swat valley by one of Pakistan's most eloquent journalists, Owais Tohid, reporting from the city of Mingora. Read, as they say, and inwardly digest. "Splotches of red blood still stain Ziarat Gul's memory: his sister was gunned down by the Taliban and her body placed at the chowk [square] where I stand... A year ago, Gul's sister, Shabana, was shot three times by the bearded and turbaned men." Shabana was a singing and dancing girl, of whom there are many in the tribal areas; they perform at weddings, while the men play harmoniums and the stringed rabab.

Back to Owais Tohid. "Her body was then strewn with currency notes, CDs of her performances, and her photographs. Pooled in blood, nobody was allowed to her body until the next day. Gul, his father and two cousins were the only ones to offer funeral prayers and bury her the next morning..." Shabana's friend Shehnaz, a famous dancing girl, was a witness to the murder: "I switched off the light and peeped through a hole; I could see the door was broken. Shabana sat on the floor and Taliban carrying Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers stood around her. Some carried swords. I heard Shabana beg them to spare her life. She was pleading, 'Don't kill me, don't kill me.' But then one of the Taliban said, 'We warned you ... we even offered you our mujahid to marry, but you continued to dance...' Shabana continued pleading..." Shehnaz heard the gunshots.

I wonder if all these tales are true. Alas, they are. Not far from Peshawar last month, a dancing troupe was returning from a party in Hindko Damaan, when armed men surrounded their vehicle at 3am. Afsana, one of the girls, had her two sisters, Salma and Sana, alongside her in the car, and her stepfather, Azizur Rahman. Her brother, in a following car, argued with the gunmen, who were demanding money. So they shot Afsana dead. She had just divorced, and danced to earn money for her family. Three other girls have been murdered outside Peshawar in the past fortnight.

But the drones dominate the tribal lands. They killed 14 men in just one night last month, at Datta Khel in north Waziristan. The drones come in flocks, and five of them settled over the village, firing a missile each at a pick-up truck, splitting it in two and dismembering six men aboard. When local residents as well as Taliban arrived to help the wounded, the drones attacked again, killing all eight of them. The drones usually return to shoot at the rescuers. It's a policy started by the Israeli air force over Beirut during the 1982 siege: bomb now, come back 12 minutes later for a second shot. Now Waziristan villagers wait up to half an hour - listening to the shrieks and howls of the dying - before they try to help the wounded.

The drones - Predators and Reapers, or "Shadows", as the Americans call them when they follow US troops into battle - have acquired mythical proportions in the minds of Pakistanis, a form of spaceship colonialism, imperialism from the sky, caught with literary brilliance by A H Khayal in the daily newspaper The Nation, when he asked where the drones come from: "The masses are piteously ignorant. They just don't know that the drones are not material creatures. Actually, they are spiritual beings. They don't need earthly runways for taking off... They live in outer space, beyond the international boundaries of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"When they feel hungry, they swoop down and kill innocent Afghani women and children. They eat the corpses and fly back to their spacial residences for a siesta. When they again feel hungry, they again swoop down and kill another lot of innocent women and children. Having devoured the dead bodies, they fly back to their bedrooms in space. It has been going on and on like this for years."

Indeed it has. But where do the drones come from? When President Hamid Karzai flew into Islamabad last month, the entire Pakistani cabinet turned up to welcome this fraudulently elected satrap of the United States. Many are the Pakistanis who found this a natural circumstance. Was not their own President, Asif Ali Zardari, another of Washington's corrupt satraps, his minions heading to Washington only two weeks later to plead for a vast increase in the $7.8bn (£5.1bn) of aid which Congress voted Pakistan last year? "There was a time when America did not trust you," Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousuf Gilani, lectured the upper house of his federal parliament. "You were their ally, but they did not trust you. Now they are trusting you and holding a strategic dialogue."

It was enough to make the average Pakistani squirm. After Hillary Clinton arrived last November to berate the students of Pakistan on their anti-Americanism - and to hint that their government must surely know the location of al-Qa'ida's top men in the tribal lands - the Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, set off to Washington last week with his chain-smoking army commander, General Ashfaq Kayani, with the biggest begging bowl in Pakistani history. President Barack Obama wants an exit strategy in Afghanistan and realises - at last - that only Pakistan can provide this. But he also wants to support India as a bulwark against China, and the Pakistanis know that Delhi's agents are trying to control Afghanistan.

But what struck Pakistanis about Karzai's visit was not his cloying remarks about the fraternal love of the Afghan and Pakistani people - "India is our close friend but Pakistan is like a twin brother," he piously observed - but his astonishing statement that the devastating missile attacks against Pakistan by pilotless US drone aircraft were not being launched from inside Afghanistan.

"We are not responsible for these attacks," he said. "They are being carried out by a powerful sovereign country, namely the United States, which is also a close ally of Pakistan. They [the drones] don't fly from our territory but in our airspace, and it is beyond our capacity to stop them." Karzai looked subdued, apologetic, meekly sympathising with Gilani over the growing number of civilian casualties.

Karzai was (for once) telling the truth. The drones launched from the Kandahar airbase are attacking the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban inside the international frontier. The drones attacking Pakistan come from - Pakistan.

In fact, the Americans launch them from a Pakistan Air Force base at Terbile, 50 miles west of Islamabad. US officers were also interested in using the Peshawar airfield - the same runways employed by the old U-2 spy planes, from which Gary Powers took off over the Soviet Union during the Cold War - and the Taliban spent weeks trying to discover the headquarters from which the Americans were directing the drones. They eventually decided that the US drone control centre was on the highest floor of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.

They were wrong. US officers did stay at the Marriott, but they were not air force personnel. This, however, was the reason the Marriott was attacked by a suicide bomber in 2007, and then again with a truckload of explosives on 20 September 2008 - not because President Zardari had just given his first speech to parliament a few hundred metres away, but because the Taliban were trying to destroy the "brain" behind the drones. At least 54 civilians were killed - most of them Pakistanis - and 266 wounded. The drone attacks continued, more than ever after Barack Obama became US President.

The war, however, is now directed at the Pakistani army - although the authorities try to portray the Taliban's targets as purely civilian. The assault on the police torture centre in Lahore on 8 March was merely a warning. Nine policemen were among the 18 dead at a building known for its night-time torture sessions - local inhabitants had complained many times about screams from the basement, not because of the abuse taking place there but because it made their homes a target for bombers. They were right. The worst suicide bombing of the year had already occurred at a volleyball field in Lakki Marwat, when the killer murdered 105 people - many of them policemen and Frontier Corps personnel. On 4 February, another suicide bomber - after a long surveillance operation by the Pakistani Taliban - struck a military convoy in the Koto area of the Lower Dir district. He killed three schoolgirls, a Frontier Corps policeman - and three US soldiers. Since 11 September 2001, more than 5,700 men and women have been killed in insurgent attacks in Pakistan. This is revenge for the army's offensives in Swat and Waziristan.

The double suicide attack on two army vehicles in Lahore, the Punjabi capital, on 12 March was thus merely the most brazen assault on the Pakistani military. Both killers destroyed themselves next to two army trucks - killing 14 soldiers - in the garrison city, shaming the security authorities and provoking the local chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, to plead shamefully with the Taliban to spare his capital in future. Attack another city, was the implication. Sixty-one men and women were killed - most of them, of course, civilians - and hundreds wounded. Within 24 hours, another suicide bomber attacked an army checkpoint in the North West Frontier Province at Saidu Sharif, killing 14 people, most of them soldiers and policemen.

Even the military were surprised by the determination of the Pakistani Taliban to assault them. Four days after the attack in Lahore, the police found 1,500 kilos of explosives and two suicide vests in Iqbal Town in the Punjabi capital, along with Russian-made hand grenades and rifle ammunition. The next day, they discovered another 3,000 kilos of explosives in the same area. Amir Mir, the most accurate of Pakistani journalists amid the chaos of what is in fact a war, has calculated that 321 Pakistanis have been killed and more than 500 wounded in 15 suicide bombings across Pakistan in the first 70 days of 2010. This is up from 'only' 11 suicide bombings in the same period last year.

The Institute for Peace Studies in Pakistan has been recording every act of violence in the country since the 2001 attack on America, and concludes that just in 2009 12,632 men and women - civilians, soldiers, Taliban militants, even victims of inter- tribal battles - were killed. Of the dead, 3,021 were killed by insurgents, 6,329 in Pakistan army operations, 1,163 in army-Taliban battles, 700 in border violence, and 1,419 in other violence, including drone missiles.

The scorecard for death over the past four years - I'm afraid that death in Pakistan is today much like a tally - is truly awful. In 2005, a mere 216 Pakistanis were reported killed. In 2006, 907 Pakistanis died; in 2007, 3,448; in 2008, 7,997. By 2009, the total number of victims in just five years came to more than 25,000. When I twice visited Lahore, it felt like a city under martial law, thronged with troops and checkpoints, its bridges and ancient British ministries and schools laced with soldiers in steel helmets.

In just two weeks in March - far from Lahore - lawlessness reached epic proportions. On 14 March, four men were killed in the Khyber tribal area. In Quetta on 17 March, a retired policeman, a member of a "sectarian organisation", and two construction workers were shot dead or blown up. A day later, 10 men of the Mehsud tribe - quite possibly militants - were killed in a five-missile US drone attack. In a suburb of Peshawar on the same day, three Frontier Force soldiers and two policemen were shot dead. In Karachi that day, two political leaders, their lawyer and a taxi driver were shot. Within 24 hours, a prominent Quetta lawyer was kidnapped. By the end of the same week, the Pakistani Taliban publicly announced that it intended to murder the Pakistani Interior Minister, Rehman Malik. And there would be more attacks across the country, the Taliban said, in revenge for the American drone attacks. "Just wait for our reaction," the Taliban's spokesman, Azam Tariq, said.

The Pakistani military responded in the time-honoured way. The Taliban's attacks were "a clear sign of frustration and desperation" on the part of the militants. The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, declared from the safety of Washington that the drone assaults - and other attacks, unspecified - were "the most aggressive operation that the CIA has been involved in in our history. The CIA's offensive in the Pakistan tribal region had driven Osama bin Laden and his colleagues into hiding - where they have presumably been since 2001 - leaving al-Qa'ida "rudderless and incapable of planning sophisticated operations".

Pakistan surely deserves better than this nonsense. Embedded with the Pakistani military, writers such as Michael O'Hanlon in The New York Times remind their readers that America's $17bn in aid since 2001 comes to only half Pakistan's costs in the "war on terror", a battle to which the Pakistani army is now fully committed (or so he believes). This, however, does not explain the scores of soldiers who have surrendered to the insurgents over the past 12 months, nor the weird double-game being played by the Pakistani security services, who captured senior members of the Afghan Taliban only to find themselves condemned by Hamid Karzai's corrupt government for breaking up the secret communications between the Afghan government and its enemies. The US was "extremely gratified" by Pakistan's arrests, President Obama's envoy, Richard Holbrooke, says. In other words, the Americans would control contacts with the Afghan Taliban - not their local ruler, Hamid Karzai.

And all the while, the 'security' experts who dominate the American press have been sowing their suspicions through the dumbed-down intelligence world of the West. For while we bomb the tribal regions with our drones, we are told to fear the imminent theft of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Terrorists, we are told in a West Point journal, may take the country's atomic arms for use against us - note how this threat never seems to apply to our trusted ally, India - and mythical accounts are told of three separate attacks by "terrorists" (unnamed, of course) on Pakistan's nuclear facilities in the last three years. In the past we were told that Muslim "nationalists" might hijack Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Now the danger is supposed to come from "Islamists". In fact, the real danger is much closer to home.

Seventy per cent of NATO's ammunition, vehicles and food in Afghanistan still transits through Pakistan, along with 40 per cent of its fuel. The Taliban's attacks on these convoys - both the Pakistani and Afghan versions of the movement (for they are not the same) - have over the past two years netted some incredible dividends, which NATO has not seen fit to disclose. Gunmen have managed to steal three separate - disassembled but complete - military helicopters and a clutch of American Humvee armoured vehicles, one of which was used by the Pakistani Taliban's leader, Hakimullah Mehsud. At least 62 Humvees were burned out in just one raid near Peshawar in 2008.

And all this, you have to remember, takes place against the profound corruption of Pakistani society, from the shoe-shine boy to the president, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, whose own venality is so legendary that only rarely does it cause discussion. Only once in the last month has it been mentioned - when Zardari, addressing a conference on Sufism and peace, announced that he was not afraid of death, that he represented "nothing more than a speck in the universe" and would donate his body organs on his death. Within hours, five people - including my taxi driver, a hotel waiter, the owner of an Islamabad bookshop, a Pakistani humanitarian worker and a lawyer - made precisely the same comment to me: "Zardari will donate his body organs to the people - but not his dollars!"

Thank God, I suppose, for the Pakistani press, as brave, as disillusioned and as tough as any media folk in the West. The 'oil mafia' which siphoned off billions of rupees during Musharraf's rule, the four cabinet ministers living in government houses but claiming rent (shades of Westminster's very own), the massive financial irregularities in the Punjab education department, all have been exposed in Pakistan's newspapers. "The government," reported The News International on 11 March, "has removed yet another officer of impeccable integrity, the chief Commissioner, Islamabad, Shahid Mehmood, within 90 days of his posting, after he allegedly refused to accommodate the 'wishes' of certain political masters." Now that's what I call reporting. The luckless Mehmood, it turned out, had rashly frozen a land deal which involved a certain Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan.

Pakistanis - in other words, most of the 150 million men and women who live in penury in this nuclear state - simply no longer believe in the authorities who claim to govern them. When an increase in bus fares brought hundreds - and then thousands - of young people onto the streets of Islamabad's suburbs last month, the police opened live fire on the demonstrators. Western embassy personnel were confined to their bunkers - US diplomats are not even allowed to go grocery shopping at the best of times - and Zardari's government then announced that the protesters had been "imported", brought into the capital from "surrounding areas".

Where does a foreigner - a real one, like me - go to understand this beautiful, ferociously angry, ripped-up, intelligent, hopelessly overcrowded, war-smitten country?

Raza Kazim admits only to being in his eighties, but he has a perfunctory, almost irritatingly child-like way of twining his thin fingers together while trying to define his love of country, his belief in the worth of Pakistan. His is speaking over the throb of the air-conditioners, as an unprecedented spring heat warms up the Lahore trees outside his home. He brings in two frozen cans of Murree beer and is vexed that I won't join him. I can see why he led the first strike in his Indian school's history.

"I benefited vastly from the Raj," he says. "It wasn't a love-hate relationship - it was a love-adversarial relationship. My heart went out to the 'Quit India' movement, and I was coming from the peasantry. It was a time when peasants could be flogged for two rupees. I had a belief in freedom and in 1946, I took a leap of faith and feeling."

Some faith. Some feeling. Kazim is a kind of 'guru' - in the original meaning of the word, an elderly advisor/oracle for generations of Pakistani politicians - and his involvement in the Indian National Congress of British India, then in the Muslim League and later in the Pakistan People's Party, have turned him into the Malcolm Muggeridge - or perhaps Tony Benn - of Pakistan. A lawyer and ex-Communist whose philanthropy has produced the Sanjan Nagar School Institute of Philosophy and Arts, and the inventor of a stringed musical instrument intended to preserve South Asian classical music as a modern art form, he has two qualifications for Pakistani sainthood: he was kidnapped by military intelligence in 1984, and has been jailed five times between 1950 and 1985. His other quality is historical; he still thinks the date is 1947 and he smiles when he realises that I agree with him.

"August 1947 was a kind of competition between Hindus and Muslims," he recalls, the fingers beginning to twist around each other, the lamp-light reflecting his baldness as dusk brings out the big birds in the garden. "Who would give a better account of freedom? I never had a sense of India being divided. It was like the people were split into two teams. Who would score more runs off freedom?"

Freedom at midnight, I murmured. At what cost? "Yes, there was bloodshed in Bihar. There was bloodshed in Delhi, a lot of bloodshed in the Punjab - but that was action and reaction. Then it spread into the Deccan area. They (the new Indian state) took soldiers from the Punjab whose children had been murdered here and whose women had been abducted here, and sent them to the Deccan area where they bashed the heads of [Muslim] children against pillars. Yes, I know what happened in those trains.

"The political capital made out of these killings is another story - a bad story, but a different story. The events were capitalised. But bloodshed didn't begin with Pakistan. The first genocide of Indian history took place in the Punjab in 3,000 BC - it was a conflict between feudal and pastoral

Kazim had it easy. "On 13 September, 1947, I came on a plane to Pakistan as guest of the Indian communications minister. I came with my gramophone records, books and poetry, and two sets of clothes." It is a very post-colonial story. While the masses tore each other to pieces below, Kazim's plane soared above the bloodbath to drop him as a witness to the mass looting of the new Pakistan's most beautiful city, Lahore.

"People think of the properties taken from the Hindus and Sikhs, but the most important things were the jobs, the business, the vacancies, and grabbing those properties. The educated people looted and took things away in trucks - these were the people who were going to run the country. It became a sign of patriotism that you forged property papers to homes in India that you never had - this was thought to be a patriotic duty because the Indians had three times as many claims against us. The bureaucracy had been civil servants under the British system - they were middle-level bureaucrats in India, who had suddenly become senior bureaucrats in Pakistan." Mohammad Jinnah, the founder of the state, who died in 1948 - Kazim went to his funeral - "had a weakness for flattery. He didn't keep good company."

I've heard this story before, albeit less eloquently told. Pakistan existed, but there was no sign of a developing society or the creation of a nation. "We have still not made a society," Kazim says. "People have to take something out of their personal lives and invest it in our society." There is a pause here, then Kazim's voice rises. "WE ARE STILL IN 1947!" Pakistan obtained its freedom under the Indian Independence Act - but there is nothing called the Pakistan Independence Act."

Another room now, in what Pakistani reporters still call a "posh" area of Islamabad. (When they bring themselves into their own stories, by the way, Pakistani journalists call themselves "scribes", rather than our self-denigrating "hacks"). But the air conditioner is just as noisy. Now it is another lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, hero of the 'Long March' of spring 2009 which eventually secured the reinstatement of Iftikhar Chaudhry as Chief Justice after the abdication of America's favourite dictator, the president-general Pervez Musharraf. Ahsan's new book, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan suggests that there were two culturally different regions of the land which the British called India, that there was a continuous social and political order in the Indus region - the bit that became Pakistan - that was quite different from that of the rest of India.

On Pakistani independence, the structure of state-Raj versus the citizen-native did not change. As Ahsan puts it bleakly, "the military officers who on 14 August, 1947, saluted the raising of the green standard with crescent and star had on the 13 August been saluting the Union Jack. They couldn't change in a day. Somebody else had fought for independence. The 'natives' remained and continued to be denied democratic rights until 1970."

Thus - and Kazim would not agree with this - Pakistanis loved their judges rather than their soldiers, and admired them with a fair degree of cynicism. Rightly so. In 1954, the Governor General dissolved parliament - an act unsustainable in law - but the judges upheld the dissolution. In 1958, the military commander dissolved the assembly, abrogating the constitution. And the country's Supreme Court endorsed the imposition of martial law on the grounds that "a successful coup d'état is an internationally-recognised, legal method of changing a government." Judges reversed this opinion in 1972, ruling that there was no place for a military regime in Pakistan - but it did so only after the military regime had fallen.

Now the army - guardian of the nation of Pakistan, and America's second-best friend in the region (after the Indian army) - is under constant military attack, while obligingly allowing the totally corrupted (and corrupting) politicians to run the vehicle of state under the banner of 'democracy'. Everyone knows that the Inter- Services Intelligence - their leaders appear to be interchangeable with the regular army - continue to succour and guard and lead the Afghan Taliban. They will do so as long as America ignores Pakistan's conflict with India over Kashmir. American soldiers die because of Muslim anger at Washington's support for Israel, as US Commander General David Petraeus suggested last month. But American soldiers also die because of Kashmir. Pakistanis - and here is something which truly unites all of them - believe that America supports India, and that Kashmir is thus ultimately lost to them. So why should they allow America - and Indian money and political influence - to control Afghanistan?

It's sometimes difficult to find the line between aggression and fear in Pakistan. We in the West fear its nuclear weapons without even looking at a map of the country about which we obsess with such devotion.

Every major city - Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta - is close to the borders of India or Afghanistan. It is a both sump of poverty and a nuclear power, an intelligent nation - its people desire education with the same craving as the Palestinians - with a history that began and ended at the moment of partition, its datelines framed by military coups and imperial hand-outs and, now, by drone attacks and suicide bombers. The latter arrived with a peculiar shock in Pakistan. They started in Lebanon, moved to 'Palestine', then to Iraq and then to Afghanistan - and then to Pakistan. From the Mediterranean to the old Raj, this black-magic rite travelled with incredible speed. And now it has merged with the dirt and corruption and nuclear power of Pakistan.

I tried, in Pakistan, to define the sorrow which so constantly afflicts this country. The massive loss of life, the poverty, the corruption, the internal and external threats to its survival, the existentialism of Islam and the power of the army; perhaps Pakistan's story can only be told in a novel. It requires, I suspect, a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky.

But perhaps it is Pakistan's ability to do harm to itself that most struck me - symbolised, I fear, by the latest and most terrible affliction to strike it: child-kidnapping. Steal a little boy or a little girl, ask the parents for money, and kill the infant if they don't pay. When Sahil Saeed, the British-Pakistani boy, was taken, the police and the British embassy helped to bring him home. But journalists covering the story found that the family home was sometimes overwhelmed with other parents, like those of six-year-old Mahnoor Fatima, who was stolen from his family in October of last year and never seen again. "This shows the difference between rich and poor," Mahnoor's mother said. "No one even came to my house to console me... Everything is done here for the rich and the British, but nothing for Pakistanis and the poor."

Near Peshawar, a three-year old girl called Fariha was taken from a wedding party last month, her kidnappers demanding Sterling pounds 8,000 for her life. The parents couldn't pay. So Fariha was killed and thrown into a canal. Her father, a worker at a brick-kiln, later came to the Peshawar Press Club with the body of his daughter to demand punishment for her killers. In Faisalabad two days later, another kidnapped child, seven-year-old Samina Ali, was found dead in a drain after her parents failed to pay a ransom for her. They complained that the police later demanded £120 for handing over her body. A kidnapped boy, a six-year-old identified only as Sharjeel, was also found dead in a drain a few hours earlier.

In the first two months of this year, 240 people - almost all of them children - have been kidnapped in Pakistan. Only 74 have been recovered alive. There - not in the suicide attacks and the venality of politicians- lies the worst statistic in Pakistan.

10 words that rocked parliament house - I

The Frontier Post
M Sarwar Awan
“You brought disgrace to the entire house of National Assembly.” This was the 10-word sentence Justice Khilji Arif expressed while addressing Jamshed Dasti, an elected MNA and also holding the post of Chairman National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Sports, during hearing of a case of fake degree that should have shaken the building of the Parliament as this disgrace was brought by none other than the members of the always held ‘supreme’ National Assembly themselves. It was a time of shame for the whole lot of the entire House when the court after failure of the ‘honourable’ MNA to answer a few common questions usually taught to the beginners at the school or madrassah and that too relating to his Master Degree subject asked him to resign or be ready to go to jail. But here we forget one thing that the word ‘shame’ is no more found in the dictionary of the present so-called leaders sans some of the highly educated and disciplined parliamentarians. It was a thing of the past lost in the wilderness of greed years ago. If this young man have an iota of shame he would not have indulged in this cheat and fraud. It would be better if all the members of parliament who presented fake degrees and some how managed to win elections and play with the destiny of this poor and unfortunate nation should resign giving any respectable reason. The irony of the fate is that Dasti managed to get fake degree equivalent to MA and that too in Islamiyat from a religious madrassah. Further another MNA Nazeer Jatt and an MPA from Punjab, judging the fate of their cases, thought it better to resign instead of appearing in the apex court and facing the volley of questions by the highly respectable and senior members of the Supreme Court. The universities in foreign countries are already not accepting the degrees awarded by our universities. This event has very badly tarnished the image of the degrees possessed by our youth. Now first of all let us see the reason why a decay and an ad hoc situation is prevailing in our society. Every department is facing deterioration. The common people vote to elect their representatives to the National and provincial assemblies entrusting them the responsibility to make laws for the betterment of the country’s citizens and also using their vision and farsightedness to frame policies keeping in mind the present day modern developments and technology to enable them to compete with the people of the developed world. But unfortunately our elected assembly members always lacked vision and forsightedess which is amply reflected by the speeches delivered by them during debates in the assembly whether it be a debate on national budget, war on terror or any external or internal problem faced by the country. Except a few members, all the elected representatives have never forwarded a new proposal or given new suggestion to improve the status of the oppressed people of this country. The parliamentarians taking part in assembly debates spend their energies blaming the past governments saying that they ignored all the departments and nation was facing problems for the misdeeds and follies committed by the past rulers but they all forget that former rulers were not aliens but their kith and kin, their fathers and grandfathers. Another famous and effective excuse forwarded by the assembly members is that bureaucracy was creating hurdles in their way to work for the masses’ welfare but the fact is that elected members due to lack of knowledge and abilities fail to counter the bureaucracy. So in order to safe face these people make bureaucrats a scapegoat to hide their failures. In short they have thousands of excuses to prove their innocence and put the blame on the shoulders of others. The members of this unfortunate and hapless nation have been witnessing this blame game for the last 40 years. The elected members complete their tenure playing this blame game and trying to push the opposition to the corner. During the period, especially the democratic governments, such policies had been adopted which played havoc with industries and now we are witnessing not thousands but lakhs of unemployed people, we daily read news of suicides by the jobless people. Country men have been witnessing the development plans devised by the democratic governments starting from Junejo era up to the present democrats. No government has planned any long-term development plans but only such programmes have been devised which benefited a small number of people for a short time just draining the national exchequre. For example, the Junejo government introduced three and five marla schemes in the name of poor and homeless people. Further a so-called plan to promote education and especially to make older people literate Taleem-i-Balghaan was announced and so millions of rupees were wasted. Now come to the present government. The present democrats from the day one are distributing taxpayers’ money in the name of Benazir Bhutto. These useless plans are short-lived. Some people term this exercise as election bribery. These programmes portray the short-sightedness of the leaders. One can safely say that more than five centuries ago Sher Shah Suri who ruled India for a few years was more intelligent and had vision who used the national exchequre with great care. Historians say that people were finding it hard to get jobs. Some of his advisors told him to distribute the money lying in government kity but he refused to do so. Sher Shah ordered construction of Grand Trunk Road starting from Peshawar to Calcutta. In this way a grand road was constructed, joblessness ended to an extent, and untill now hundreds of cities have been set up along side the Road. Crores of people even now are benefiting from this one project of Sher Shah. One can say that money was well spent. Year after year has elapsed but we are still reading ministers’ statements prepared by PROs. These statements have no difference, one issued 30 or 40 years ago or issued now, are the same. These all facts indicate and prove inability, inefficiency and ignorance of the MPs about the present day developments taking place in the world and it is certainly due to illiterate lot of our parliamentarians as compared to the developed world. Now it is the time for the experts and technocats to frame policies, face the present day challenges and bring the country at par with the other countries in all fields and mere a degree whether it is of MA or BA would not be working. Now let’s come back to the MNAs and MPA who resigned from the assembly seats. Actually these assembly members have played fraud and cheated the nation of millions of rupees. The honourable judges of the Supreme Court have ordered new elections on the seats vacated by these MPs. These elections will certainly cost a lot of money collected through the taxes from the common people. The court only ordered these cheaters to resign and imposed no penalty on them. It would have been a nice step on part of the Supreme Court if these culprits had been made to pay back all the money they received as salary, allowances, all fringe benefits, TA/DA and tours abroad on the expanse of State exchequre. Further the money to be spent on the re-elections should also be received from these people because re-elections are being held due to their fraud and cheating. Here a question arises as to what is the criteria which the party committees or the party heads follow while awarding party ticket to a candidate to contest elections. Usually party heads allot election ticket to a member of the party known to him for years then how is it possible that he is not aware of the expected candidate’s educational qualifications. It will be better for the nation and country’s future that party heads awarding election tickets should be held responsible if they award tickets to candidates having fake degrees. It means that party head would be assisting a cheater to commit a fraud so he would be equally responsible for this fraud.