Zardari has a point

An interesting, though not necessarily a convincing take on Oct. 18 bomb blast:

While Baitullah Mehsud may still try to kill Benazir and may even decide to do it with a bomb, he is likely to come forth and own the deed. So who has been going about exploding anonymous bombs in Pakistan in the name of terrorists, and in the latest instance, who is behind the Karachi attempt?

Let’s venture a guess. It is quite clear that Benazir’s return makes none of the power players in Pakistani politics happy except the United States and perhaps also General Musharraf, who, though unhappily, might have had the sense to think that his own survival now depends on this unholy alliance with Benazir. He would have had this sense because he would know, one hopes, that there is quite clearly a part of the establishment — a powerful part — which has consistently tried to destabilise him for some time now.

The Chief Justice episode and its subsequent handling was not the result of incompetence on the part of the government, because no government, not even this one, can be so horribly incompetent. The police attacks on lawyers in Lahore two days in a row, the attack on TV channels, the manhandling of the Chief Justice, the bomb blast in Islamabad before the Chief Justice’s address to the bar and the May 12 incidents in Karachi were not just instances of ‘mishandling’.

Someone was surely up to something and this someone is obviously part of a setup, if not the setup itself, that has the wherewithal to make all this happen. Earlier on, while the “deal” between Musharraf and Benazir was being discussed and had not yet been finalised, these people would have had to eliminate only Musharraf from the scene. Now, however, there is another party: Benazir.

These people, with end goals that are perhaps not very different from those of the ‘fundamentalist terrorists’, are obviously hard at work. But while they may or may not be able to succeed, for all their campaign in the press about security threats from ‘terrorists’, it seems that Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto and this writer will remain unconvinced.