By An Oct 21, 2007 editorial of Malaysia’s New Sunday Times newspaper.
The Prime-time terrorist attack in Karachi on Thursday did not need the genius of al-Qaeda.
Benazir Bhutto’s motorcade had traveled just 8km in 10 hours as it inched its way amid thousands of fans from the airport, where she had landed after eight years in exile, to the tomb of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where she was to address her adoring crowds.
According to the official version, the country’s worst terrorist atrocity – 134 dead and hundreds wounded – was due to a single suicide bomber with an extra grenade, though Benazir claims there were two.
Either way, the Pakistan People’s Party has to take some of the blame, perhaps as much as the government it accuses of a failure to protect, for its doyenne’s gross exposure to her enemies.
In the days leading up to her arrival, the air had been thick with assassination plots – from Taliban groups to the country’s own myriad extremists to renegades in the intelligence services.
Benazir survived unhurt, some say by being at the back of the bus to take the load off her feet, others by her being in the lavatory of the armour-plated vehicle.
The PPP had wanted a rousing homecoming to match her first, in 1986, when 750,000 turned up to greet her in Lahore in defiance of the then dictator General Zia-ul Haq and which swept her to power two years later.
Instead, what the since diminished party got was another pile of doubt in the rubble of uncertainly that is Pakistani politics.
Benazir’s return was patched together by President Pervez Musharraf as he struggled to keep up a veneer of democracy against an opposition boycott and hostile Supreme Court.
Although the two have so far desisted from the implosion that the bombers intended, a climate of suspicion is once again beginning to stymie the political haggling that is so necessary in a country as fractious as Pakistan.
It was not meant to be that way.
Benazir was expected to win parliamentary elections and become prime minister, allowing Musharraf to remain as president with civilian authority rather than by the might of his position as army chief.
The general, who had risen from putsch leader to the only person capable of saving his country from the basket case it was threatening to turn into, was also not meant to have sunk so low in the estimation of his people.
Pakistan needs a strongman with popular support, but seems fated to lurch endlessly from the crisis of one to the other.