We want Growing pakistan........

Obama’s Murderous Guest

(1) Besides ruining my country, I believe my aunt’s husband, President Zardari, orchestrated my father’s murder. Is Obama really going to offer him billions more?

(2) Something rotten arrived in Washington DC in May 2009. President Obama shook hands and staged Oval Office photo ops for the first time with the man who many believe stole billions from the Pakistani treasury, and whom I have publicly accused of orchestrating the murder of my father, Murtaza Bhutto, an elected member of Parliament until he was killed in 1996.

(3) My father was a vocal critic of both Pakistan’s former PM, Benazir Bhutto, and her husband, current President Zardari. He called Zardari and his cronies “Asif Baba and the 40 thieves”, and spoke out against the targeted killings of opposition members and activists by the state’s police and security forces. In the end, my father was slain in an extrajudicial assassination. The fact that he was seen, in a traditionally patriarchal society, as the heir to the Bhutto legacy did not make him any safer as Benazir’s second government began to lose power and international repute.

(4) In Washington, the man who helped this happen asked for money and the chance to cling to his dwindling power. Obama, in turn, asked for results. That’s going to be a problem. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the situation in my country a threat to universal peace. Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy for Pakistan, has said the government is capable of fighting terror, but he also calls the South Asian region “Af-Pak”, so he is probably confused. President Obama has not offered much of an opinion yet. He has noted that the civilian government has failed to provide its citizens with the most basic services. But he has also suggested that some hard cash might help the Zardari government through its problems. No, it won’t.

(5) Pakistan has been at war with its own people for a long time now – given the daily politics of persecution that the state machinery inflicts on its own citizens, perhaps it’s only natural that we move on. Now this government has to go. It’s either them or Pakistan.

Clip_21(6) President Zardari is a man with a colorful history. He is known by many endearing epithets here in Pakistan: Mr. 10 Percent (a reference to kickbacks), Mr. 50 Percent, the First Spouse (twice), and President Ghadari or Traitor in Urdu. I might not be the right person to tell his story, given that I believe he was involved in my father’s murder. But, then again, I just might be in the best position to warn President Obama about him.

(7) Last summer, as an odious bill called the National Reconciliation Ordinance expunged from his prison record the four murder cases pending against him – my father’s included – as well as various national and international corruption cases, Zardari prepared himself for power. He did so not only by wiping his criminal slate clean, but also by distancing himself from medical records that showed him to be “a man with multiple and severe physical and mental-health problems”, according to the Financial Times of London.

(8) When Obama met Zardari in Washington, he met not only with a dangerous man, but with an unelected official. Zardari never stood for elections in Pakistan. He has no constituency, no vote of support from the people, no democratic mandate. The “Opposition”, the Pakistan Muslim League, is run by Zardari’s enemy, Nawaz Sharif, also unelected – Pakistan, a nation of 180 million people, is at the mercy of two unelected men. President Obama has to decide this week whether he wants to foster democracy in Pakistan, or whether he wants to have a pliable government in power – a government, it bears noting, that is so inept it managed to grow a local insurgency.

(9) Lest we forget, when Zardari took power last September 2008, Pakistan did not have an indigenous insurgency. Now, a year into his rule, the insurgency not only exists in Pakistan, but controls the NWFP, frighteningly close to the Afghan border. The reason Pakistan’s government cannot fight the insurgency is not because Pakistan does not have the money to fight terror. We do, plenty of it. By my last count, we have received some $ 12 billion in military aid over the last eight years. (It may not have gone where it was supposed to go, however. It might have ended up in someone’s Swiss bank account – no names, but we can guess.) And it’s not because Pakistanis are rabid fundamentalists elated by the arrival of an indigenous. That’s not it at all. Pakistan is a religiously diverse country – we have a history of Buddhist, Sikh and Hindu heritage.

(10) The reason is the leadership: Asif Ali Zardari (PPP), Yusuf Raza Gilani (PPP), Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (Army), Asfandyar Wali Khan (ANP), Altaf Hussain (MQM) and Fazal-ur-Rehman (JUI-F)]. It’s just not working. In the year that Zardari has been President, Pakistan has become a third front in the War of Terror. We are not safer, our neighbors are not safer and we have not made any strides toward fighting fundamentalism.

(11) As much as America finds President Zardari repellent, we in Pakisan do, too. But you made him our President and now you are about to give him billions of dollars in aid. We cannot foster any democratic alternatives to Zardari while his government gets bucket loads of American money. Local activists, secular parties and nascent opposition groups can’t fight that kind of money – it’s impossible to compete with a party that has access to billions of dollars. Pakistan is at a crossroads. We are either going to save our country from its descent into fundamentalism and lawlessness, or we are going to have Zardari as President, bolstered by American aid and support. The ball is in President Obama’s court today. Let’s hope he makes the right decision.

(12) U.S. predator drones -missile attacks on innocent Pakistani civilians of FATA and NWFP, keep internal refugee population growing. Under the guise of this new war on the NWFP, being fought jointly by the American and Pakistani armies – the largest and seventh largest in the world, respectively – the Obama Administration’s modus operandi is looking remarkably Bush-like. Afghanistan is the new Iraq, Zardari is the new Musharraf, and, according to America’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Obama is bringing Cheney’s boys back into action in the form of General Stanley McChrystal, who is heading the new Afghan war push. It’s all a little macabre.

(13) According to the New York Times, the US Congress is suddenly worried about Pakistan’s nukes. It’s not the first time. Two years ago, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute suggested launching a Special Forces operation to dive into the country and safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Last month, Hillary Clinton made a surprisingly good point: America spends a great deal of time worrying about Iran going nuclear, but perhaps Iran’s nuclear weapons are not the problem.

(14) Yet depending on the date, America’s attitude toward Pakistan’s nukes ranges from nonchalant to nervous breakdown. On May 4, Obama expressed grave concern about the potential of Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, calling the threat one of the Administration’s “highest priorities”. Then on Sunday, Obama said he is confident that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is safe. And now, says the Times, Congress is in big huff over Pakistan “rapidly adding nuclear arms.”

(15) Why? I thought America and Pakistan are friends. Look how well everything worked out between the two countries in the 1980s. In the 1980s, the last time America ventured out into the wilds of Afghanistan to fight, the Congress funneled millions of dollars through the Pakistan Army and intelligence services, the ISI. Congress gave clout to the ISI when it put the ISI between millions of dollars and the original Afghan-Mujahideen, who coincidentally turned out to be the Taliban.

(16) Today, the ISI, a dangerous force, exists as an independent state within the increasingly weak Pakistani state. The ISI is a many-headed hydra. Pakistan’s Army does not respect the right of the Pakistani people to choose their own governments. The Pakistani Army is currently at war with its own people. Afghanistan has not flourished as a safe and progressive country. Afghanistan is still a lawless and dangerous country that the Taliban cannot be forced out of. Except now we in Pakistan also have a Taliban. They help each other out sometimes. And everyone in Pakistan is not living happily.

(17) Recently, President Zardari has proved his steadfast commitment to fighting terror by creating a gargantuan internal refugee population that is perfectly attuned for fundamentalists seeking to capitalize on the Pakistani state’s lack of care for its own citizens.

(18) If that’s the criteria for America turning a blind eye toward nuclear empowerment, why stop at Pakistan? The possibilities are endless.