by Shuja Nawaz
Boucher saw a number of reasons for the mistrust. Musharraf knew that Bhutto was coming back, but in Boucher’s reading, ‘hoped she would not’. A particular bone of contention was the re-election of Musharraf before Bhutto’s return. Musharraf also felt that his PML-Q would do better than others expected it to do. Bhutto saw a downside to being seen to be too closely associated with Musharraf. She had to weigh this against the upside of her party’s potential election victory.
Against this backdrop, Bhutto decided to return to Pakistan and to run for elections. The Washington lap was to be her final move to consolidate her foreign support. She was eager to soak up whatever intelligence she could on the state of affairs in Pakistan as well as the level of US support for her efforts. After the speech on Capitol Hill, she invited me through her party loyalist, Senator Akbar Khawaja, to join her for coffee at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on 22nd Street NW, where she had two tables set up for meetings in the café at the ground level. She moved to the central table and with her came her husband and a few other local supporters, including Khawaja, an ex-World Bank staffer who had gone back to represent the PPP in the Pakistani Senate.
As usual, she was all business, shooting questions about the thinking inside the Pakistan military and their likely reactions as well as thinking inside the Beltway in Washington DC. Mr Zardari did not play an active role in the conversation, as he continued to take his phone calls. (At one point late in our conversation, she stopped our conversation and peremptorily suggested that Mr Zardari take his cell phone calls into another room, since she wished to ‘hold a serious conversation’.) Among other things, we spoke about her personal safety in Pakistan. 10 This was the subject of American warnings to Bhutto about her planned return to Pakistan.
While in Washington DC, Bhutto met a second time within the year with Musharraf ’s ambassador to the US, Maj. Gen. (retd) Mahmud Ali Durrani, courtesy of a Pakistani American couple, Rafat ‘Ray’ and Shaista Mahmood, who had cultivated political connections on both sides of the aisle over the previous few years. Durrani had earlier been Defence Attaché at the embassy in Washington DC, then military secretary to Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, and, as commander of the armoured division in Multan, had invited Zia to the fateful tank trials near Tamewali, close to Bahalwalpur, in August 1988, soon after which Zia’s plane crashed after take-off. Durrani retired a few years later and devoted himself to an effort to bring India and Pakistan together through a Track II peace process named BALUSA. Musharraf had called on him to represent Pakistan when Gen. Jehangir Karamat left his post in Washington. Bhutto appeared to take a liking to him and saw him as a useful conduit to Musharraf, with whom she had begun a secret dialogue.
Durrani had had his first meeting with Bhutto at the Mahmood home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, eight months earlier, after clearing the visit with Musharraf. He also recalls that over lunch for about twenty persons in September 2007, arranged by the Mahmoods, at the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel in Washington DC, Bhutto said to him that he was her ‘favourite ambassador’, probably because he was the only one of Musharraf ’s envoys who met her. The host, ‘Ray’ Mahmood, suggested to Bhutto: ‘When you become the PM you can make Ambassador Durrani the NSA.’ 11
‘We all laughed and this issue did not come up during the lunch or even later at the dinner we had together,’ said Durrani. He recalled that ‘on both occasions I informed Musharraf personally that I was meeting Bibi. 12 I also asked him if he wanted me to pass on any message to her. He told me that he was already in communication with her and there was no need for me to get involved.’ Bhutto’s wish eventually came to be fulfilled by Zardari in May 2008, who recalled the Willard conversation as a ‘promise’ by his then late wife, and invited Durrani to become his government’s national security adviser (NSA). 13 Durrani recalls that Bhutto came to sit across from him at the dessert stage of the lunch at the Willard and, among other things, asked him to tell Musharraf that ‘he should administratively remove all these false cases’ against her. Durrani demurred by repeating that Musharraf had asked him to stay out of the exchanges with Bhutto: ‘He doesn’t really want me to get involved.’ But Bhutto insisted: ‘No. No. No! He is like a brother to you! . . . Please communicate with him and tell him this is what I am saying.’ Durrani states she kept this up for nearly forty-five minutes. At one point, Zardari also joined in by saying, ‘You know there are false cases against me [too]. I need a break. I’ve been in difficulty.’ 14
Bhutto arrived in Karachi to a tumultuous welcome and took many hours traversing down the main Shahrah-e-Faisal from the airport to Bilawal House. But security was poorly organized by her party and even poorly provided by the authorities. Musharraf was signalling his displeasure with her breaching of what he thought was an implicit contract that she would not come before the elections. The promised scanners for use by her vehicles against remote-controlled bombs did not work. Streetlights were switched off en route. A major bomb attack on her convoy took place that resulted in the death of 115 persons and wounding of 200 on Friday, 19 October. Bhutto escaped by chance as she had gone into the depths of the armoured truck for a breather at the time of the explosion.
President Pervez Musharraf said the attack represented ‘a conspiracy against democracy’. The White House also condemned the attack. Meanwhile, in Dubai, Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari, told ARYONE World Television: ‘I blame government for these blasts. It is the work of the intelligence agencies.’ 15
Soon after, Musharraf suggested that Bhutto should confine her campaigning to the use of broadcast media. Bhutto would not have any of that. She wanted to re-energize her supporters across the country and was determined to continue on her march across Pakistan. The regime imposed all the bureaucratic hurdles it could to prevent her from connecting with supporters, including restricting public gatherings of four or more persons under the draconian Section 144, a vestige of colonial rule, and barricading her behind rolls of barbed wire—all in the name of protecting her. But as later events and investigations were to indicate, it did little to prevent her from being attacked and may even have condoned or assisted her attackers, if Bhutto’s supporters are to be believed. Musharraf was alleged to have threatened Bhutto when he spoke with her on the telephone during her Washington visit in 2007. 16
Her quest took her to the north, to Rawalpindi, where she planned a huge gathering on 27 December 2007 at the famous Liaquat Bagh, a historic site just across the River Leh and at shouting distance from the General Headquarters of the army in Rawalpindi cantonment. Pakistan’s first prime minister had been assassinated there in October 1951. Her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had delivered many memorable speeches there too, including on 3 December 1971, when full-scale war began with India.
Bhutto referred to Rawalpindi as her ‘second home’ in her speech before a massive gathering that was waving a sea of the PPP’s signature red, black and green tricolours. She presented herself as the legatee of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and a ‘sister’ of the people of Rawalpindi as she went through a litany of the charges against Musharraf ’s regime in the preceding year: among others, the removal twice of the Chief Justice of Pakistan, the attack on the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad and the attack on her own convoy in Karachi. She recognized the successful return to Pakistan of former prime minister Sharif and herself, as she whipped up her frenzied supporters with the battle cry that would prove to be sadly ironic in a matter of minutes after her speech was over: ‘This land is calling out for me!’ she yelled out hoarsely a number of times, as the crowd roared its approval of her father’s party’s promised goals of providing food, clothing and shelter (roti, kapda aur makaan) for the masses. 17
The sun set in Rawalpindi that day at 5.07 p.m., leaving behind a hazy twilight when Bhutto got into her bulletproof vehicle with a foldable escape hatch or sunroof to leave the site of her speech. She then stood up in the vehicle, poking out of the escape hatch to acknowledge her cheering followers. At 5.16 p.m., three shots rang out, followed by an explo
sion. She fell inside the vehicle, wounded and bleeding from the side of her head. Her staff quickly moved her to the nearest public hospital. According to a report prepared by the staff who attended her at the emergency department of the Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she was received by Dr Aurangzeb Khan and Dr Saeeda of Surgical Unit II: ‘A wound was present on the right temporoparietal region through which blood was trickling down and whitish materials which looked like brain matter was visible in the wound. Her clothes were soaked in blood.’ 18 The cause of death was determined to be ‘open head injury with depressed skull fracture, leading to cardiopulmonary arrest’. Various conflicting reports emerged after this attack regarding the nature of the attack and the cause of death. No autopsy was requested by Bhutto’s husband and none was performed by the authorities. The site of the attack was quickly hosed down and much of the evidence washed away.
The major agency involved in the handling of the assassination and its aftermath was Musharraf ’s Interior Ministry. Its spokesman, Brig. Javed Cheema, came on television the following day to present evidence that, he believed, linked the assassination to Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), playing a recording of an ‘intercepted’ conversation that purported to indicate that the TTP had contracted out the killing. Cheema informed the media that Bhutto had died from a fractured skull resulting from her fall against a lever of the sunroof of her vehicle. The government of the day wanted to solve the murder in short order and move on. The US embassy also believed that the government’s explanation was the right one. The jihadis were out to get her. But Zardari did not believe that. Sherry Rehman said that when they washed her body there were bullet wounds. 19
Much later, President Zardari wanted to send the case of Bhutto’s death to the United Nations for investigation, since he clearly did not trust the local authorities, even when his own party was running the government. He was cautioned against bringing the UN into the inquiry since Pakistan would lose control of the matter once it landed in the UN’s lap. Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammed Khan, who counselled against the move, was quickly sidelined and retired. According to the detailed reporting of Heraldo Munoz, the head of the UN team that investigated the death at the request of President Zardari, many questions remained unanswered about the government’s handling of the crime scene, the speed with which they produced the evidence against the TTP, and the behaviour of Bhutto’s own party staff before, during and after the attack. He cites reports of suspicious behaviour of Khalid Shahenshah, one of the security guards, while she was speaking at Liaquat Bagh, including making a signal with his fingers across the neck. Shahenshah himself was killed later in Karachi under suspicious circumstances.
The person in charge of the security for Bhutto was Rehman Malik, a former official of the Federal Investigation Agency and interior minister in Bhutto’s government. He was in a back-up car that immediately after the attack reportedly headed to Islamabad instead of following his wounded leader to the hospital. Later, as Minister of Interior (for the second time) in the Zardari government, he presented a bound report to Munoz dated 20 June 2009 and entitled ‘Summary of Investigation and Trial Conducted So Far for UN Fact-Finding Commission’.
‘I think your work will be made easy when you read this document,’ said Malik, adding, ‘This is very complete. This is your own report ready to be issued, of course, with the changes and additions that you may see fit.’ 20 Munoz concluded that Malik ‘never satisfactorily answered our questions about his role and actions during the moments surrounding Bhutto’s assassination’. Yet Malik was President Zardari’s confidant and the main interlocutor with the Commission. He had been convicted of corruption in 2004. Zardari used his ‘discretionary powers’ to pardon him after taking over as president and then made him Minister of Interior again. Why? Among other things, a senior US official dealing with Pakistan told me confidentially, ‘because he knew too much’.
Faced with incomplete evidence and changing stories by police officers, neither the UN nor Scotland Yard, which had been called in by the Pakistan government, produced any definitive results. Rumours ran rife. Some people pointed the finger at Zardari as the most likely beneficiary of Bhutto’s death. Others pointed to Musharraf. US Ambassador Anne W. Patterson thought, ‘Zardari believed in conspiracies. He honestly believed that Musharraf could have killed her [Benazir].’ 21 The US had the technological capability to track and isolate electronic communications, for instance, and would have been able to either corroborate or rebut the Musharraf claim that the TTP had ordered the hit. It did neither. As Patterson told Zardari, the US believed the story that Baitullah Mehsud was behind the Bhutto murder. 22 A later and very detailed examination of the Bhutto murder by veteran BBC journalist Owen Bennet-Jones was presented in his podcast, ‘The Assassination’, and generally supported the theory that the TTP may have been involved, although it is not clear if wittingly or unwittingly. Yet another dead end emerged in the history of major Pakistani political murders.
Bhutto’s untimely death forced Musharraf to delay the elections beyond 8 January 2008 to 18 February. The leaderless party of Bhutto faced a crisis in the middle of the campaign. Zardari, who had remained in Dubai when his wife had travelled back to Pakistan for the campaign, suddenly produced a handwritten document reportedly prepared by his wife naming him as the heir of the party command and control. A compliant PPP leadership team quickly accepted this evidence and his new role as the head of the party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. To add to the popular appeal of the Bhutto name, Zardari announced on 30 December 2007 that his nineteen-year-old son Bilawal would become party chairman and take over the party on completion of his studies at the University of Oxford in England. He added that the three children would add the middle name Bhutto to their given names. Hence, Bilawal Zardari became Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, only to be referred to as a norm as Bilawal Bhutto, so his name could be used for electioneering with the emotional slogan, ‘Kitne Bhutto maarogey? Har ghar sey Bhutto niklega!’ (How many Bhuttos will you slay? Every home will produce a Bhutto!) Bilawal said, ‘My mother always said democracy is the best revenge,’ as he took on the titular role while his father ran the party. 23
Zardari took to the hustings and used the death of his wife as a prominent feature of his campaign. He would often place a photo of Bhutto on the table or podium whenever he spoke publicly or to the media. Unwittingly, Musharraf had given the PPP a huge advantage in the electoral campaign, allowing it to garner the sympathy vote of the public on top of the PPP’s well-established vote bank as the party of the Bhuttos. At the same time, Zardari began establishing his own control over Bhutto’s party, appointing his relatives and friends to key positions and making the party’s central committee, populated by aging party faithfuls, into a rubber stamp for his views. In the process, he managed to alienate some diehard PPP followers, especially in the heartland of the Punjab where the elder Bhutto had established his stronghold.
Musharraf was quickly beginning to understand his own diminished position, even as president, now that he had somewhat reluctantly relinquished the command of the powerful army to his protégé, Gen. Kayani. The latter began introducing changes into the military system while attempting to turn the army from being a political instrument of the president to a professional body. Kayani ordered that all serving officers who had accepted civil positions should either resign from the military or return to their posts in the army. He also forbade any direct contact between military officers and politicians. And, when some officers sneaked meetings with Musharraf, he reminded the army that he considered Musharraf a politician too.
On 13 February 2008, US Ambassador Patterson reported in detail back to Washington and US outposts at United States Central Command (CENTCOM) as well as to allies in the UK on the moves that allowed Kayani to take charge of the army and leave Musharraf on his own, while raising the popularity of the army among the masses. He focused on improving the lot of the lower ranks, declaring his first year as
chief as the Year of the Soldier, and following up with the Year of Training. 24 Kayani also dealt Musharraf and his PML-Q Party supporters a death blow by taking a public position of neutrality in the upcoming elections. He guaranteed the security of the elections, a code word for ensuring that no one would be allowed to tamper with the voting process at the polling stations.
The US ambassador summarized the changes succinctly. She had earlier been ambassador to Colombia and was familiar with the cut and thrust of civil–military relations in a nation beset by an insurgency. An understated but steely diplomat, who had even challenged Musharraf by trying to visit the former Chief Justice when he was under virtual house arrest, she had travelled widely in Pakistan cultivating her sources and was in regular contact with both the civil and military, often acting as Mother Confessor to disgruntled local officials. She wrote to Washington:
1. (SBU) Summary: Following through on his public pledges to reduce military involvement in civilian politics, Chief of Army Staff General Kayani decided February 7 to withdraw military personnel who are currently serving in civil departments and return them to military positions. On February 11, he ordered the immediate return of approximately 150 Army officers working in various GOP offices. In a move to improve soldier morale, Kayani also approved a robust welfare package for soldiers and young officers. End summary.
[. . .]
5. (C) Comment: The most recent IRI [International Republican Institute] poll shows the Army’s popularity has been rebounding under Kayani’s leadership, and Kayani’s statements and the ensuing press coverage almost certainly will continue the trend. As the last army pay raise benefited high-ranking officers, the new welfare package [aimed at lower ranks] will increase morale among the junior commissioned officers (JCO) and the lower officer ranks who have suffered the most casualties in recent actions against militants. These operations, along with the young retirement age of JCOs, suggest that Kayani is looking to ensure the Army’s ability to recruit new troops. Kayani’s father was a junior commissioned office [sic.] which helps explain his sympathy for the lower ranks. PATTERSON 25