Anyway, the commission will be headed by Chile’s ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Muñoz, assisted by former Indonesian public prosecutor Marzuki Darusman and the former Irish policeman Peter Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald actually has some experience in this sort of thing, as he was heavily involved in the UN’s investigation into the February 2005 bombing-assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Strangely, though, back then Fitzgerald and his UN staff were on the scene in Lebanon to begin their inquiries only eleven days after the crime was committed, and he issued his report the following month. I wonder what his private thoughts must be about the considerable delay involved here.

There’s another, more subtle problem present as well. Presumably, as was certainly the case in Lebanon, an important reason for this UN measure is the generally-accepted skepticism that the Pakistani authorities themselves could ever conduct a thorough and impartial investigation. The “whodunit?” here is simply too politicized; if you ask the government in power at the time (headed by former general Pervez Musharraf), you get the answer that the Pakistani Taliban were the culprits, but the current government (headed by President Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s widower) instead points the finger at Musharraf. Yet the Nieuwsblad article notes that commission-member Darusman has already indicated that it will rely on the current Pakistani government to bring forward suspects.

In all, then, this whole UN effort looks like a farce – one-and-a-half years is surely long enough for any murder-trail to go stone-cold. But the article also reminds us that, for whatever reason, the Pakistani authorities at the time made sure to hamper any proper collection of evidence, no matter how prompt, by thoroughly hosing down the site of the assassination just as soon as the bodies and the wreckage of the vehicle in which Ms. Bhutto had been riding could be removed.

                          

“Lies in ruins”? That is not Burcharth’s opinion, but rather that of a couple of American academic experts that he interviewed, including Politics Prof. Steven van Evera of MIT: “It took five years to soothe the revolt in Iraq. In the meantime Osama bin Laden has rebuilt his strength in Pakistan. . . . This is completely unacceptable.” What is more, since 2001 Pakistan has received $10 billion in US aid in exchange for an implicit promise to take action to root out the Taliban and other Islamic militants sheltering within its borders – a promise which has now been implicitly devalued through that new, “secret” assertion from President Bush’s office that US forces will feel free to move into Pakistan to undertake that task themselves.

In Search of a Trophy

Why did it happen that Bush signed that particular order just relatively recently, in July? Well, what has been the big development in that part of the world over the past summer? That would be the fall from power of Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, who announced his resignation (in the face of impending impeachment) to the nation in a televised address on 18 August. Clearly the Bush administration was well aware of Musharraf’s weakening position well before things came to that; and where it had been willing to rely on Musharraf ever since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 to hit the Islamists in the tribal border areas – including not undermining him by violating the Pakistani border with NATO forces – it finally ran out of patience when it became clear that either Musharraf would soon be gone, or he would at least be a much less-powerful figure, under siege from his enemies in the new Parliament.

In a very pleasingly comprehensive manner, in his article Graham Usher lists three main reasons why Bush took the significant step of issuing that order in July:

1. He is genuinely afraid of losing the struggle in Afghanistan. Just as NATO will seems to be flagging, with withdrawals of coalition troops seeming a much better bet than further contributions because of flagging political will in the home countries, so is the pressure increasing from a stepped-up volume of cross-border incursions into the country from Pakistan. Something needed to be done to reverse this momentum.
2. The trust between the CIA and the ISI (that’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the main Pakistani intelligence agency) is shot by now. One big, big annoyance leading to Bush’s new policy was the growing sense American military authorities had that tipping off the Pakistani’s to an incursion into their country only resulted in that information being passed along to those targeted by it. And then it seemed rather clear that the ISI had played a leading role in last July’s bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.
3. Finally, there is also the issue of George W. Bush’s continual attempts to fashion a suitable “legacy” before he has to leave office. As Usher quotes one source: “Bush wishes to capture a real al-Qaeda top-figure in the tribal areas. He would love to be able to say to the American voters that the Iraq problem is solved and the Afghanistan problem is on the way to becoming solved. Only the Pakistani tribal areas stand in the way.”

The problem here, though, is that this new policy is very high-risk because of the tremendous pressure it puts on the new Pakistani government, and particularly on the new president, Asif Ali Zardari. In the wake of the American cross-border attack that killed 20 people, Pakistan’s Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kiyani warned that his forces would fight back against such attacks. The new prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, endorsed that stand. Only Zardari has yet to react; perhaps he owes the Americans too much, in terms not only of the continuing aid-money, but also because of the influence they exerted to make Pervez Musharraf go away peacefully last August in the first place.

This is dangerous in view of the fact, asserted by Usher, that the Taliban in those tribal provinces are now supported by the broad majority of Pakistani public opinion – including that of the Army’s lower ranks. It seems President Zardari is now merely the fig-leaf barely obscuring Pakistan’s fundamental and thorough-going refusal to get on the “right” side of NATO’s and Afghanistan’s war with the Taliban – and how long can we expect that he will last?

                          

Philippe Grangereau, Washington correspondent for the French newspaper Libération, sheds some valuable light on this question in his article The White House Is No Longer Kissy-Kissy with Musharraf, although he relies primarily on analysis coming from Arif Jamal, “an expert on Pakistan at NYU,” who has written a book about Pakistani jihadists.

If you think about it (and/or pay attention to developments), this cooling-down of the Bush administration’s relationship with Musharraf isn’t really much of a surprise, in view of the close ties Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (abbreviated as ISI) enjoy with “Islamic militants” (to include the Taliban), that the American intelligence establishment has finally picked up on. In general, this turns out to mean substantial if covert Pakistani support for precisely those Islamist parties that NATO is fighting against to try to make a stable country out of Afghanistan; specifically, it means nasty incidents worked up by the ISI and its friends like the bomb-blast at the Indian embassy in Kabul of last 7 July, which killed 54 people including the Indian defense attaché.

Jamal – as conveyed into French by his scribe Grangereau – makes a number of cogent points about this situation. First of all, the number-one strategic priority of the Pakistani military is what it has been ever since partition in 1947: to recover the state of Kashmir, which it regards as justly belonging to Pakistan, in its entirety. To pursue this, Islamic militants are precisely who you want to have working on your side, even if they then expect your covert support for some of their other projects elsewhere. Secondly, Musharraf is not the most powerful Pakistani figure anyway. That is instead General Ashfaq Kiyani, Army Chief of Staff. Jamal speculates that, if Musharraf is heading towards impeachment, then that must be because General Kiyani supports the move, because it would not be allowed to happen without that support. In any case, he contends that the Americans wrote off Musharraf a year and a half ago, when Benazir Bhutto started preparations to return to her country and contest elections.

In this light, then, the complete lack of anyone in absence taking up Musharraf’s cause comes as no surprise. Rather, it is General Kiyani who is under Washington’s microscope as the US determines whether to support him or not. In view of the fact, as Jamal informs us, that he is even more supportive of Afghan jihadists/Taliban than even Musharraf was willing to be, the answer would seem to be obvious; but then again, the alternative to supporting the General may very well be political chaos in this vital Muslim nuclear power, in view of the demonstrated problems which the new governing coalition that arose after elections earlier this year has shown in trying to get its act together.