Be careful what you wish for………

You just might get it. Washington DC wanted an election in Pakistan. Welcome to politics-Muslim style.

Like so many others, I watched the news in more than a little shock that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated.  The media have been endless speculating what this means for US policy and the “Long War”.  I will take the contrarian view and say, “Very little”. Like it or not this is an internal Pakistani matter and there is little choice but for the US to sit back and let this drama play out.

People forget that she was removed from office not just once-but twice. By two different Presidents for corruption charges.  French, Polish, Spanish, and Swiss documents have fueled the charges of corruption against Bhutto and her husband. Bhutto and her husband faced a number of legal proceedings, including a charge of laundering money through Swiss banks. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, spent eight years in prison on similar corruption charges.

A 1998 New York Times investigative report^[15]indicates that Pakistani investigators have documents that uncover a network of bank accounts, all linked to the family’s lawyer in Switzerland, with Asif Zardari as the principal shareholder. According to the article, documents released by the French authorities indicated that Zardari offered exclusive rights to Dassault, a French aircraft manufacturer, to replace the air force’s fighter jetsin exchange for a 5% commission to be paid to a Swiss corporation controlled by Zardari. The article also said a Dubai company received an exclusive license to import gold into Pakistan for which Asif Zardari received payments of more than $10M into his Dubai-based Citibankaccounts. The owner of the company denied that he had made payments to Zardari and claims the documents were forged.

Bhutto maintained that the charges leveled against her and her husband were purely political.^[16][17] “Most of those documents are fabricated,” she said, “and the stories that have been spun around them are absolutely wrong.” An Auditor General of Pakistan(AGP) report supports Bhutto’s claim. It presents information suggesting that Benazir Bhutto was ousted from power in 1990 as a result of a witch hunt approved by then-president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The AGP report says Khan illegally paid legal advisers 28 million Rupees to file 19 corruption cases against Bhutto and her husband in 1990-92.^[18]

The assets held by Bhutto and her husband have been scrutinized. The prosecutors have alleged that their Swiss bank accounts contain £740 million.^[19]Zardari also bought a neo-Tudor mansion and estate worth over £4 million in Surrey, England, UK.^[20][21] The Pakistani investigations have tied other overseas properties to Zardari’s family. These include a $2.5 million manor in Normandy owned by Zardari’s parents, who had modest assets at the time of his marriage.^[15] Bhutto denied holding substantive overseas assets.

Bhutto and her husband until recently continued to face wide-ranging charges of official corruption in connection with hundreds of millions of dollars of “commissions” on government contracts and tenders. But because of a power-sharing deal brokered in October 2007 between Bhutto and Musharraf, she and her husband had been granted amnesty.^[19] If it stands, this development could trigger a number of Swiss banks to “unlock” accounts that were frozen in the late 1990s.^[15][19] The executive order could in principle be challenged by the judiciary, although the judiciary’s future was uncertain due to the same recent developments.

Like it or not,  the US has made its bed with Pervez Musharraf. This was a marriage of convenience driven by geography-it is tough to invade a landlocked Afghanistan without Pakistani overflight rights. Especially when you don’t like Iran very much. That one fact has allowed Musharraf to get away with literally, murder. There are going to be a lot of questions about whether the government was involved in this-there have already been accusations that the government did not provide Bhutto adequate security. “We have a bad habit of always personalizing our foreign policy,” says P.J. Crowley, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “We’ve done it with Musharraf, and we did it with respect to Bhutto. We are very good at providing technical support to the Pakistani army. We are not good at building indigenous or effective local political processes or strong institutions of government.” Given the realities on the ground, the U.S. is likely to continue to throw its support behind Musharraf. “In terms of political leadership, Pakistan does not have a deep bench,” says Crowley.

In perverse way this could actually help the US-it gives Musharraf a clear cut reason to reimpose martial law and take a heavy hand on dissent. That in turn could shore up the US position against the Taliban since the election and Bhutto’s criticism of the government have made for chaos for about 6 months now. Then again-Musharraf has allowed the Taliban sanctuary in Waziristan-operating on the first law of thermodynamics: when the heat is on Afghanistan, it is not on Musharraf.

Unlike some, I’m not so worried about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. They are Pakistan’s insurance card-both with India and the US-and Musharraf knows it. They will keep them under close lock and key.  However whether this is just the opening salvo of a bigger descent into chaos is a good question. 

I’v always maintained, as James Fallows does,  that the current US “War on Terror” is  a catalyst that made a locally contained “tumor” metastisize elsewhere in the world “body”.  To my mind this proves my point. We will see what transpires in the upcoming months.