Pakistan: Outrage At Musharraf And Bush
Whoever was to blame for the assassination, the focal point of the outrage at the moment seems to be Musharraf himself—and, by extension, the Bush administration, which has supplied him with about $1 billion a year in an increasingly controversial aid program. “Musharraf, you dog,” Bhutto supporters chanted as rioting broke out throughout the country, including the capital of Islamabad and in Karachi and Lahore, where shops were torched.
Newsweek’s Hirsh says Pakistan is now one of the most dangerous threats to the United States
“The problem with Gen. Musharraf is that instead of clamping down against terrorists he has been more strict on civil rights activists,” says Syed Farooq Hasnat, a scholar at Washington’s Middle East Institute and a former political scientist at the University of the Punjab, in Lahore. “Unfortunately Bhutto became a victim of this.”
When she returned to Pakistan, Bhutto warned that terrorists were trying to take over the country and had to be stopped.
Click here for reuse options!Left unsaid—out of political sensitivities—was her belief that Musharraf himself was responsible for permitting the rise of extremism by banning secular alternatives like her party from participating in elections…Bhutto, the exiled former prime minister whose pleas for democracy were once ignored by the Bush administration in recent months was seen as a key to legitimizing the presidency of autocrat Pervez Musharraf by forming a political coalition with him.
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