The problem with military juntas with Generals as leader is the army is always loyal to the government. Time for a good ol' Army/Navy game....
Woof!
Woof!
Bhutto follows her father
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Reading the papers, Gopher - remember it was the lawyers who led the most effective protests.
Pangloss
Folks, here is Hitchens on the issue:
Daughter of DestinyBenazir Bhutto, 1953-2007.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007, at 1:34 PM ET
Benazir Bhutto
The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.
Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.
Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent "comeback" tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of Aquino.
Who knows who did this deed? It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman's Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it's hard to construct any cui bonoanalysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.
She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. (He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.
Daughter of Destiny is the title she gave to her autobiography. She always displayed the same unironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan's nuclear program was. How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her playboy husband, Asif Ali Zardari. (The Swiss courts recently found against her in this matter; an excellent background piece was written by John Burns in the New York Times in 1998.) And now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together.
This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety. This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.
Pangloss
Daughter of DestinyBenazir Bhutto, 1953-2007.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007, at 1:34 PM ET
Benazir BhuttoThe sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.
Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.
Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent "comeback" tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of Aquino.
Who knows who did this deed? It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman's Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it's hard to construct any cui bonoanalysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.
She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. (He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.
Daughter of Destiny is the title she gave to her autobiography. She always displayed the same unironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan's nuclear program was. How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her playboy husband, Asif Ali Zardari. (The Swiss courts recently found against her in this matter; an excellent background piece was written by John Burns in the New York Times in 1998.) And now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together.
This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety. This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.
Pangloss
Last edited:
As much as I disdain Musharraf, the military there is trying to enforce a nominally secular state.
Pangloss
You're going to turn it into a women's issue? That's odd!
Women of the world unite against terrorism! There you go, Kreskin! There's a cause for you to champion! We'll just all sit in silent admiration as you blaze a trail through the mideast with your disco version of Queen's We are the champions. Cuz you know, everything's about women! :roll:
Not always! Sun Tzu said to the King, "Having once received His Majesty's commission to be general of his forces, there are certain commands of His Majesty which, acting in that capacity, I am unable to accept."
Folks:
Bhutto won two elections. Led the country. Remained popular. This was not, and is not, a country that feared female political power - she was a strong advocate for women's rights - and it is unlikely that is why she was murdered.
Not a feminist issue here.
Pangloss
Bhutto won two elections. Led the country. Remained popular. This was not, and is not, a country that feared female political power - she was a strong advocate for women's rights - and it is unlikely that is why she was murdered.
Not a feminist issue here.
Pangloss
Pangloss said:
I know that better than you. In fact, the ISI and other fascist forces have tried to suppress them and their rights of free speech.
Hitchens wrote that Bhutto had an Electra Complex --- the statement is so stupid that it does not merit a rely.
Investigated? Instigated? Just semantics, right? You say tomato, I say tomatoe. Neither here nor there until the semantics reach the court room. But I digress. Let's not take this thread off-topic, k?
Sorry, perhaps I could have chosen my words a little better. I was just saying what Pangloss later reiterated: It's not about women.
Well if it's so stupid then you can easily hit this one out of the park.
So do it. Make us all smarter. I'd say thank you.
Pangloss
Bhutto was a true patriot who did believe in her heart that she was but one person who had to speak what was in her heart. I think she pushed the envelope but with the elections being so close in time she felt she had to reach out to the masses. I did read where illiteracy in that nation is astounding and that many will come to hear the spoken word but have no other means of getting any media information due to the fact they cannot read or write. I think the group who missed her during the last assassination attempt planned this successful strike too. I'm still concerned about the security of the nuclear weapons that nation controls and the attitudes of the existing government towards those who bode the west ill will. The media claims there are several in this government who are also very friendly with both the Taliban and the Al Queda groups. I still think Musharref only uses us for our foreign aid to help keep his regime propped up.
"Bhutto was smart, brave, dedicated and committed to democracy. She was also corrupt, opportunistic and not terribly different from most other politicians." Pangloss
Bhutto was greedy and dumb enough to get snuffed for it. She was dedicated and committed to Bhutto. Democracy these days is a myth perpetrated on the general public by the media owned and operated by the ruling clique of whatever nation the clique owns except Venesula which is a truer form of democracy, one we'll never have. She could not possibly have been dedicated and committed to democracy and corrupt and oportunistic at the same time. Or am I missing something? I could be. But no I don't think so.:smile:
Bhutto was greedy and dumb enough to get snuffed for it. She was dedicated and committed to Bhutto. Democracy these days is a myth perpetrated on the general public by the media owned and operated by the ruling clique of whatever nation the clique owns except Venesula which is a truer form of democracy, one we'll never have. She could not possibly have been dedicated and committed to democracy and corrupt and oportunistic at the same time. Or am I missing something? I could be. But no I don't think so.:smile:
Norm:
It looks like you've got the cliche-o-matic machine turned up to eleven.
". . .true patriot. . .believed in her heart. . .pushed the envelope. . .reach out to the masses. . ."
If you read the thread, you'll find most of what you wrote has already been written, and yeah, you're mostly right.
Those "media claims" are in truth facts - and Bhutto was right there, making deals with the Taliban and the madrassas.
Pangloss
It looks like you've got the cliche-o-matic machine turned up to eleven.
". . .true patriot. . .believed in her heart. . .pushed the envelope. . .reach out to the masses. . ."
If you read the thread, you'll find most of what you wrote has already been written, and yeah, you're mostly right.
Those "media claims" are in truth facts - and Bhutto was right there, making deals with the Taliban and the madrassas.
Pangloss
Last edited: