‘The other problem is when I ask locals what they need they don’t come up with projects,’ he said. ‘Either they are very vague or they ask for things like mobile phones, laptops and motorbikes.’ He added that it took the local head of education just ten minutes to remind him of Maiwand, the battle on the borders of Helmand where British forces suffered one of their worst ever defeats back in 1880, losing half a force of 2,600.
Three days before the ambush, I had watched the triumvirate in action at a school in Gereshk. Colonel Charlie Knaggs, the British task-force commander for Helmand, Susan Cronby from the Foreign Office and Wendy Phillips from DFID had all flown in for a shura, a meeting with local elders.
After Colonel Knaggs had given his spiel about coming as friends and wanting to help the people of Helmand, the two women made speeches to the shock of the men in this very conservative society. Several men jiggled worry beads noisily while they spoke and one cleaned out his ear with a cotton bud. Afterwards an old man in white with a long white beard got up and accused the women of being spies. ‘If your government was really serious about ending insecurity here, it would do something about Pakistan where the terrorists all come from,’ he said.
The elders were then shown into another room where a projector had been set up. In a stunning indication of the chasm between thinking in London and the reality on the ground, someone has come up with the idea of making a film to show locals which comprises five minutes of the underwater BBC series Blue Planet, followed by a message from the Governor of Helmand and the coalition forces, followed by five more minutes of Blue Planet. The tribal leaders of Gereshk sat in utter bafflement, matched only by my own, as images of whales and dolphins were projected on the wall. ‘Let’s turn this off, shall we?’ said Major Blair, looking embarrassed.
Even if the British do start development, it may be just too late. Disillusion with the government of President Hamid Karzai has never been so high. The Taliban have reorganised, possibly with the help of both the Pakistani military intelligence and al-Qaeda, to use the sophisticated tactics I experienced first hand in Zumbelay.
No longer are they just a few dozen ragtag fighters here and there. Now groups often include hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars and radios. All over the south they have set up shadow administrations and kill any Afghan who is even indirectly associated with the government, such as teachers. About 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and some 900 already this year.
The Taliban are also winning the propaganda game. Within hours of our return to Camp Price, the Afghan Islamic Press in Peshawar had put out a statement claiming the Taliban had killed seven British soldiers in Zumbelay.
Far from losing any men, the brave paras from C company had killed about twenty Taliban. Yet the Ministry of Defence put out nothing. If Justin and I had not been there, you would probably never have read about it.
Two weeks after the Zumbelay ambush the MOD announced it was increasing troop numbers from 3,600 to 4,500 and sending more helicopters.
Major Blair was awarded the DSO for his leadership at Zumbelay.
Sergeant-Major Bolton, Captain Alan McKenzie and Lance Corporal Luke McCulloch of the Irish Guards all received Mentions in Dispatches. Tragically Luke was killed in fighting with Taliban two months later. He was 21.
‘It was what we feared, but dared not to happen’
Sunday Times, 21 October 2007
THE SOUND CAME FIRST. A low, ominous bang, like the sound of a large metal door clanging shut.
I was standing in the middle of Benazir Bhutto’s open-top bus, talking to Aitzaz Ahsan, her long-time legal adviser. We stared at each other in horror. This was what we had all feared but somehow, crazily, dared to hope wouldn’t happen.
Someone shouted: ‘Down!’ But there was no need. A wall of orange flame came over the left side of the bus and blasted us all to the floor.
The twanging music that for nine hours had been blaring out, welcoming Bhutto home after eight years in exile, stopped. For a moment there was ghastly silence.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay – it’s a burst tyre,’ said Agha Siraj Durrani, an amiable giant of a man who, as the closest friend of Bhutto’s husband, had spent the whole journey scanning the crowds for potential threats. But we all knew what it really was.
Then the sirens and screams started. I was sure there would be another one and that it would be worse. Within a minute, it came.
Again the bang, much louder and nearer this time, and once more from the left. Orange flames shot up all around us, rocking the bus and sending pieces of shrapnel raining down.
In the left-hand corner at the back of the bus, I could see two young men lying dead in pools of blood.
There were probably twenty of us on the bus when the attack happened in Karachi on Thursday night. Around me were some of Bhutto’s closest lieutenants. She had told them not to come, not wanting to place all the party’s leadership at risk. But there were also relatives and friends.
Bhutto herself had gone downstairs fifteen minutes earlier to a bulletproof compartment to relax her feet, swollen from standing for so many hours. We had no idea if she was still alive.
‘We have to get off the bus,’ I shouted. We knew we were the targets. Everything was lit up as if it was day instead of six minutes past midnight, and there seemed to be bodies strewn everywhere. A nearby tree was on fire, as were a police van and a car. Flames were coming from the side of the bus. I was terrified the fuel tank would explode. I climbed over a body and made for the ladder, where people had started clambering down. Someone yelled: ‘Don’t – it’s too exposed.’
There was the sound of pistol fire. One man jumped off the side. I was about to do the same when Victoria Schofield, Bhutto’s friend from her Oxford days, pulled me to a chute. She jumped down to be caught by a guard at the bottom, and I followed her, not caring about the fourteen-foot drop.
All about us, the road was littered with body parts and plastic sandals. The nearest bodies had to be those of some of the boys in white Bhutto T-shirts – the so-called Martyrs for Benazir – who had made a human shield around the bus, holding a rope and linking hands so nobody could get through. They had been waving and smiling at us through the nine hours.
I thought about all the people who had travelled for days to see their returning leader and who had been dancing and waving flags and hoisting up children, who would beam with delight when we waved from the bus.
Trying not to look at a severed arm with its palm facing upward, I ran down a side street, just wanting to get away from the carnage.
A crying woman in a pink shalwar kameez grabbed me and tried to lead me to an ambulance. Only then did I notice there were great splashes of blood all over my left shoulder and arm and spattered across my trousers. It was somebody else’s.
‘I’m fine. I’m not hurt,’ I said, shaking her away. Not till later would I realise there were bits of burnt flesh in my hair; and I would stand in the shower for hours under scalding water, trying to wash them – and that awful night – away.
A man with a moustache stopped me running and took me into his house, where I was soon joined by Rehman Malik, Bhutto’s frizzy-haired security chief, Farooq Naik, her lawyer, and Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who has led the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) during her years in exile. All three were spattered with blood.
Bhutto was fine, they said, and had been driven to Bilawal House, her fortified family home in Karachi. I wanted to phone my husband and son in London, wishing fervently I had not called home so excitedly earlier to say I was on Bhutto’s bus. But the batteries on all of our mobile phones were flat after so many hours in the convoy.
The man with a moustache giving us sanctuary turned out to be an army colonel, a bizarre twist in this land where politicians and the military have rarely worked together. He produced a battery charger, which we all fought over, and made us milky tea. He then drove us to Bilawal House.
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sp; Other survivors from the bus had gathered there, and we all hugged one another, crying with relief. Among them was Bhutto’s cousin Tariq, who had told me on the bus how his wife had begged him not to get on board and that he had always stayed in farming and avoided politics.
‘Our family is cursed,’ he had said. ‘All the Bhuttos who get involved end up dead: Benazir’s father, both her brothers…’
The military hanged her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1979; her brother Shahnawaz was poisoned in 1985; and her brother Murtaza was shot in 1996.
Benazir Bhutto, the survivor of this ‘cursed’ dynasty, was now sitting, pale but composed, in Bilawal House, watching BBC World’s live reports from the scene of the bomb attacks.
I sat on the arm of her chair and she told me how she had survived this attempt on her life.
Nursing her sore feet inside her compartment, she had been working on a speech she was due to deliver when the bus reached the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. With her was her political secretary, Naheed Khan.
‘I had been reading it to Naheed, and we’d just finished, but then I thought there were a few more points to add. I was saying we should add the point that I would ask the supreme court to allow political parties in the tribal areas – and as I said “tribal areas”, the first bomb went off.’
Both women were thrown to the floor. ‘First the sound, then the light, then the glass smashing,’ Bhutto said. ‘I knew it was a suicide bomb. My first thought was, it’s actually happened.’
As she spoke to me, we watched the death toll rise on the television screen. First, they said fifteen. We knew it was far more than that, for the street had been packed with tens of thousands of supporters. Suddenly, it shot up to eighty-nine, then more than a hundred. It was Pakistan’s most deadly bombing.
She told me she had not wanted to come back to Bilawal House. ‘I thought they would target this, too, and would be waiting, knowing if I escaped I would come here. But my security insisted.’
After a while, Bhutto went upstairs to wash her face. It was her first time back in the house for eight and a half years, and her old toothbrush was still in its glass in the bathroom. As she came back down, she stopped at the group of black-and-white photographs on the wall of her and her three children.
She touched them with her hand.
Bhutto’s journey home had begun about sixteen hours earlier at Dubai airport. Journalists and supporters of her party had flown there from London, and spirits were so high that the Emirates airline staff struggled to contain them on the flight. One PPP activist from Canada had ended up rolling round the aisle, drunk.
Bhutto arrived at the airport from the villa where she has been living in exile since fleeing Pakistan amid a welter of corruption charges.
She looked stunning, dressed in an emerald green and white shalwar kameez, the colours of the Pakistani flag, to symbolise national unity. Her jacket was finished with tiny white pearl buttons, and over her head was a trademark floaty white dupatta, which as usual rarely stayed on.
As she said goodbye to her two daughters and her husband, Asif, in the VIP lounge, she announced: ‘This is the beginning of a long journey for Pakistan back to democracy, and I hope my going back is a catalyst for change. We must believe that miracles do happen.’
Already, however, the warnings were coming in. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, had publicly told her not to come because of security threats. Bhutto said she had prior warning that suicide squads would try to kill her on her return. She said the telephone numbers of suicide bombers had been given to her by a ‘brotherly country’ and she had alerted Musharraf in a letter last Tuesday.
As her plane landed at Karachi airport, a message came from the government to her security adviser, Malik.
‘They told us it wasn’t safe and they would take her in a helicopter direct to Bilawal House,’ he said later.
Bhutto is nothing if not brave, and she was defiant in the face of what her supporters thought was a government attempt to stop her triumphant homecoming.
‘By then we knew that more than 1 million people, maybe 2 million, were on the streets,’ she said. ‘They had come from all over the country, taking days and spending what little money they have. How could I disappoint them, sneaking in the back door?’
The excitement among her supporters on the aircraft had reached near-hysteria, and the pilot was refusing to taxi off the runway and open the doors until they quietened. Bhutto herself had to broadcast a message from the cockpit.
Finally we came to a stop, the doors were opened and members of the media were allowed off first. Then came Bhutto. As she reached the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a phalanx of photographers, tears spilt from her eyes and she almost stumbled.
‘I was just so emotional to be home,’ she told me later. ‘It felt like this huge burden off my shoulders after so many years.’
Her wedding in Karachi in December 1987 was my introduction to Pakistan and led me to move there as a freelance foreign correspondent.
Over the next two years, I covered her fight against Pakistan’s last dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, and her struggle to become the country’s first female prime minister at 35, campaigning even though pregnant with her first child. Within twenty months of being elected, she was deposed.
Since then I have been back and forth, following her ups and downs as she became prime minister for a second time, only to be thrown out once more amid charges of corruption against her and her husband that were never proved.
Because of this, I know her closest aides. When they saw me among the hundreds of journalists at Karachi airport covering her return, they hauled me on to her bus, one of only two foreigners on board, getting groped by the crowds as I pushed my way to the steps.
Bhutto had always been a crowd-puller, particularly in her home province of Sindh, but I wondered if she would still have the kind of support I had witnessed twenty years ago.
Then she was untainted, a fresh-faced girl not long out of Harvard and Oxford and daughter of a man who had been seen as the first Pakistani to give a voice to the poor before Zia deposed and hanged him.
This time she was coming back as part of a deal with another dictator, Musharraf, even if she refused to call it that.
She insisted it was an ‘understanding for a transition towards democracy’. But everyone knew that as a result of the deal the government’s corruption cases against her had been dropped, allowing her to return and contest elections due to be held by January.
Moreover, this was a US-brokered deal that had involved frequent meetings with Richard Boucher, the US Assistant Secretary of State for south and central Asia, as well as 2 a.m. phone calls from Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, to break deadlocks.
Britain had also played its part, and Jack Straw was credited with bringing Bhutto in from the cold when he was foreign secretary.
‘As long as Washington and Whitehall are wedded to keeping Musharraf in power for their war on terror, she had no choice but to come back like this,’ said Malik, who led the negotiations on her side.
Polls commissioned by the US State Department, which showed that Bhutto commands never less than 30 per cent of public support, led America to see that the way forward in an increasingly unstable Pakistan might be to bring her back as the democratic face of a beleaguered Musharraf.
‘Each time military rule has failed, they have turned to a Bhutto to save the situation,’ says Husain Haqqani, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University and a former adviser to Bhutto and the military.
‘Her father in 1971, then her in 1988. This time, at least, there is a Benazir Bhutto available to save the situation. If the military and intelligence agencies don’t stop meddling in politics, next time maybe there won’t be.’
In a country where Osama bin Laden commands far higher popularity ratings than US President George W. Bush, would America’s role in her return work against her
? It seemed not: her supporters came out in their hundreds of thousands to welcome her home.
From the top of the bus, it was an amazing spectacle: red, black and green PPP flags waving and people cheering, dancing and holding banners showing pictures of Bhutto and her father. Car horns blared.
‘Only she can do this,’ said her mother-in-law, Mrs Zardari, as she looked out on the crowds from the top of the bus. ‘It makes me cry.’
The sun was already setting as we reached Star Gate, at the end of the airport road, and turned right onto the main Shar-e-Faisal highway towards the city. For the first time, we could get an idea of the size of the crowds packing the road, which stretched as far as we could see into the distance.
As we all looked out, there was a flutter of feathers above our heads. Somebody had released a clutch of white doves, which circled above us amid ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’.
One bird fell to the floor of the bus and hurt its foot. Bhutto cradled it and put it on her shoulder, where it perched for hours as she waved indefatigably to the crowds.
One thing was clear, however. The bus might have bulletproof sides, but we were standing in the open on top. We were travelling at a snail’s pace, and, with people all around – on the streets, up trees and lampposts, on top of buildings – it felt very exposed.
‘How can you possibly secure this?’ I asked one of the police officers on the top of the bus.
He looked up at the heavens. ‘It’s in God’s hands,’ he said.
Bhutto herself stood right at the front, not behind the bulletproof screen that had been constructed to withstand even a shot from a Dragunov high-velocity rifle (‘available as easily as sweets in the bazaar,’ according to Zulfikar Ali Mirza, who designed the bus).
Durrani, the best friend of Bhutto’s husband, was getting increasingly worried about how he could protect her.
The route of the convoy took it not only past a number of tall buildings but also under a series of footbridges and flyovers, which we had to duck to pass underneath. The crowds on top were so close that their hands brushed ours. Fortunately, nobody threw anything more harmful than petals and rosebuds.
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