Some thoughtful, if apocalyptic, views on the assassination from blogs
Many people will point to Musharraf, as being behind the assassination, but according to the BBC, someone shot Bhutto and then blew himself up. Suicide bombing is not the hallmark of the Pakistani military, but of the takfiris.
Bhutto had promised to fight the U.S.’s war of terror against the Taliban and takfiris in the tribal North West Frontier State, certainly reason enough for those folks to kill her.
Then there’s the ISI, the shadowy secret police of Pakistan, considered among the best in the world, with murky ties to Al Qaida, Taliban, and more. In reality, anyone could have done it.
With the death of Benazir Bhutto, we are now entering worst-case-scenario territory. A Pakistan that has devolved into Iraq-style globalguerrilla violence will create a huge node of instability, threatening India and Iran (not that I am losing sleep over that one) and pretty much guaranteeing that Afghanistan will not find stability for decades to come.
A destabilized Iran does no one any good and would simply spread the chaos. Nor does a destabilized Middle East. But we may get that anyway.
It has been easy for us to label all of this “Terror”.
I call it the Messy World.
Where there is a belt of so called states where the system shuts down all hope of social progress and produces millions of angry young men as a result. Where in the west, our huge bureaucracies impede any movement and our new belief system of Political Correctness precludes the development of an appreciation for the threat that is before us.
So here we are on the brink.
When extremists jack religion and use it for purposes of political manipulation and control then much madness can result, especially in the absence of any competing belief systems. Given the repressive nature of those regimes, which too often was backed by the US, political dissent was eliminated or marginalized, leaving the angry now no place to go but to Islamists.
“A destabilized Iran does no one any good and would simply spread the chaos. Nor does a destabilized Middle East.”
Chaos benefits those who profit from chaos: purveyors of essential commodities like oil, leaders who seek totalitarian control, and extremists whose message would otherwise be ignored. And who can argue that members of these three groups (among others) are not plentiful?
Certainly chaos does not benefit the citizens of the Middle East, the U.S., or the world. But it’s naive to expect those with the power to prevent or encourage chaos to have anyone’s interest in mind other than their own.
Benazir’s Freudian slip- Omar Sheikh “Murderer of Osama”
Benazir made an interesting Freudian slip in her Frost interview. She called Omar Sheikh the murderer of Osama rather than Daniel Pearl- the crime for which he is actually, being held in Pakistan. Similarly, Musharaff in his book made a curious faux pas, embarassing his British allies- describing Omar Sheikh as originally an MI6 (British) Agent recruited for the Bosnian imbroglio who later ‘went native’. Now, Benazir was P.M when Omar Sheikh masterminded the kidnapping of Western tourists in India- including Britishers and an American- clearly at the behest or with the co-operation of the Pakistani I.S.I.
These two Freudian slips, taken together, on the part of the two key figures who represent the West’s ‘acceptable face’ of Pakistan give us an insight into the psychology of Pakistan’s rulers as well as showing us the kind of games they play.
Take Mush’s remark first- the Freudian meaning is, yes Omar Sheikh was my agent, it was thru him my General Mahmoud Ahmad wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta shortly before 9/11/. However I am now your Agent. Answer me then, who does Omar work for? The double has been re-doubled because his control has been doubled. But, when terrorism is the agent, it follows that for the Hegelian Master/Slave struggle referenced by Fukuyama and other neo-cons thru Kojeve’s friendship with Leo Strauss- the polarity has been turned around. So now answer this, which is the agent and which the control?
Now Benazir, in her Frost interview, wanted to point the finger- for the assassination attempt against herself- at people precisely like Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed close to the mighty Mush. But her parapraxis in saying ‘Osama bin Laden’ rather than naming the Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl reveals that Omar Sheikh was her agent and- with hindsight, at least for a Western audience- she wishes she had used that agent against Osama- whose hold on Afghanistan was engineered by her ‘Uncle’ Gen. Babar during her own tenure as P.M.
The point here is that both Benazir and Mush- when presenting themselves for a Western audience- make Freudian slips involving Omar Sheikh- which show that they consider themselves Western agents who have or have not gone native. They themselves don’t know.
In the geneology of Pakistani politics, everybody- including Al-Qaeeda, including the Taliban- has a Western genealogy. All were originally Western agents who doubled or whose control doubled or both. Why? Well, the West had a double policy. That’s why it liked its agents to double. Ian St.John Philby- father of the Soviet double agent Kim Philby- was a member of the Indian Civil Service who became a double agent working for the Saudis. Or was he a quadruple for Aramco? An octuple for the Soviets? Who knows?
The West wants agents- native informers- who are both loyal and ‘authentic’ – this means they want double agents whose agency is caught up in an existential double bind. For Satre, in his ‘Roads to Freedom’- the way out in such situations is ‘Freedom as Terror’ being a sniper in a bell-tower still shooting though yourself under fire.
Add in the doubleness of Western policy objectives and you have agents especially recruited to double so as to seduce their own control into doubling- this is the praxis of a double policy agenda.
Benazir as martyr of democracy, Mush as ‘key ally’ in the war against terror- what madness next in this ‘hairat-e-aainah’- this bewilderment of mirrors?
ISI is considered one of the best in the world at what they do. One reason the Brits were successful for a long time at empire was because they were good at the double / triple agent game, and at subtlety, misdirection, inference, divide and conquer, etc. – all of which is totally lost on Bush and the neocons who wouldn’t know a subtlety if they tripped over it. If you directly attack an Aikido master, you’ll probably next be wondering why you are suddenly flying through the air with a broken arm.
Indeed, who is the puppetmaster and who is being dangled on a string.
In Unholy Wars, ABC News correspondent John Cooley details how the bin Laden base in Afghanistan that was bombed on direct orders of then president Clinton was built to CIA specs. That’s right, the CIA assisted in it being built when they were using the mooj against the Russians.
P.S. The base was built to withstand a direct missile hit.