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Considering Pakistan

Two reports during the weekend in the New York Times are of major concern:

Next-Gen Taliban Pakistan’s younger Islamic militants are bringing the jihad waged in Afghanistan back home: breaking with senior mullahs, renouncing elections and killing police officers, soldiers and, perhaps, Benazir Bhutto.

U.S. Considers New Covert Push Within Pakistan    A plan that could authorize more aggressive operations follows concern that Al Qaeda and the Taliban hope to destabilize the Pakistani government, officials said.

I have already written on the second in early November: Is this the best they can do to make peace?  In the light of the first report, and the murder of Benazir Bhutto I am horified that this is still a serious proposal. But there could be a problem here, according a report on Christian Today website:  Pakistan says won't let foreign troops on its soil   So will they go ahead, despite what one might imagine to be the embarassment of illegal missions on their ally's territory, and the potential destabilising impact of such action.

The message of the first article is chilling. And the sad thing is that the more the US pushes the more likely it is.  I weep for Pakistan, and for my Pakistani friends here in Luton.

The Murder of Benazir Bhutto: What Pakistan, If Not the World, Lost

My friend Charles Strohmer, a visiting fellow of the US Center for Public Justice, and writing a book on U.S - Middle East relations, has just written on the death of Benazir Bhutto.

The Murder of Benazir Bhutto: What Pakistan, If Not the World, Lost

He echoes my own feelings, but with some substance here:

I did not know Mrs. Bhutto, but having heard her speak I feel a sense of loss from her death, even from a distance. You should, too. Here’s why. She was safe enough away from Pakistan. So why return to what is often called the most dangerous nation on the planet? She was returning, she said at CFR, because Pakistan had changed dramatically since the last time she left office (1996). “Military dictatorship has fueled the forces of extremism and has put into place a government that is unaccountable, unrepresentative, undemocratic, and disconnected from the ordinary people of the country and their aspirations. Military dictatorship is born from the power of the gun, and so it undermines the concept of the rule of law and gives birth to a culture of might, a culture of weapons, violence, and intolerance. This suppression of democracy in my homeland has had profound institutional consequences.” She was willing to return to her homeland and risk death in order to stand again for election and to seek to democratize the institutional structures. ....

He concludes:

We could discern in Mrs. Bhutto’s wisdom the notion of an inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue that not only underscores the common humanity of us all, but seeks to open us all to its possibilities. May we not long be awaiting that “somebody else” to come along.

Strohmer brings some wisdom to the world of Foreign Policy where it sadly seems so lacking at times in our politicians and their staff.

Benazir Bhutto

I am shocked. At the event itself, but also because she is the world leader I perhaps felt closest to. She was at Oxford at the same time as me, we had a friend in common, and i met her once. Hardly a close friend (though we might have just got to be friends on Facebook if it had been around then).

But as a peacemaker I am challenged by the potential for relational peacemaking that the relationships represent that we form in this very small global society, especially in our university days. I have often spoken of her, and another rather more infamous Palestinan, as an example of what I might have done if had known them today.  (There is a paragraph on my friend Marwan here:  Waging Peace in a Divided World ) 

I must write more on this theme.

Anyhow on the woman i wish I could have said was my friend:

Some fairly ordinary people who knew here: I-Reporters around the world remember Benazir Bhutto.

US Reaction to Bhutto’s Death

What leaders are saying:  World Condemns Benazir Bhutto's assasination   in the London Times and World Reaction to Bhutto's Death   in Time in the US. 

Her  Life in Pictures

Britain's Pakistanis Mourn Bhutto