December 28, 2007 — FOR the next several days, you’re going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. Her country’s better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.
We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.
She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and “hardheaded” journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.
In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency.
Educated in expensive Western schools, she permitted Pakistan’s feeble education system to rot - opening the door to Islamists and their religious schools.
During her years as prime minister, Pakistan went backward, not forward. Her husband looted shamelessly and ended up fleeing the country, pursued by the courts. The Islamist threat - which she artfully played both ways - spread like cancer.
But she always knew how to work Westerners - unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.
Military regimes are never appealing to Western sensibilities. Yet, there are desperate hours when they provide the only, slim hope for a country nearing collapse. Democracy is certainly preferable - but, unfortunately, it’s not always immediately possible. Like spoiled children, we have to have it now - and damn the consequences.
In Pakistan, the military has its own forms of graft; nonetheless, it remains the least corrupt institution in the country and the only force holding an unnatural state together. In Pakistan back in the ’90s, the only people I met who cared a whit about the common man were military officers.
Americans don’t like to hear that. But it’s the truth.
Bhutto embodied the flaws in Pakistan’s political system, not its , feudal loyalties that stymied the development of healthy government institutions (provoking coups by a disgusted military). When she held the reins of government, Bhutto did nothing to steer in a new direction - she merely sought to enhance her personal power.
Now she’s dead. And she may finally render her country a genuine service (if cynical party hacks don’t try to blame Musharraf for their own benefit). After the inevitable rioting subsides and the spectacular conspiracy theories cool a bit, her murder may galvanize Pakistanis against the Islamist extremists who’ve never gained great support among voters, but who nonetheless threaten the state’s ability to govern.
As a victim of fanaticism, Bhutto may shine as a rallying symbol with a far purer light than she cast while alive. The bitter joke is that, while she was never serious about freedom, women’s rights and fighting terrorism, the terrorists took her rhetoric seriously - and killed her for her words, not her actions.
Nothing’s going to make Pakistan’s political crisis disappear - this crisis may be permanent, subject only to intermittent amelioration. (Our State Department’s policy toward Islamabad amounts to a pocket full of platitudes, nostalgia for the 20th century and a liberal version of the white man’s burden mindset.)
The one slim hope is that this savage murder will - in the long term - clarify their lot for Pakistan’s citizens. The old ways, the old personalities and old parties have failed them catastrophically. The country needs new leaders - who don’t think an election victory entitles them to grab what little remains of the national patrimony.
In killing Bhutto, the Islamists over-reached (possibly aided by rogue elements in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the murkiest outfits on this earth). Just as al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand and alienated that country’s Sunni Arabs, this assassination may disillusion Pakistanis who lent half an ear to Islamist rhetoric.
A creature of insatiable ambition, Bhutto will now become a martyr. In death, she may pay back some of the enormous debt she owes her country.

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Family rivalries surface to tear at Benazir’s legacy
· Son should not have been made party leader, says clan chief
· Feudal lord intervenes in the wake of assassination

Declan Walsh in Mirpur Bhutto
Wednesday January 2, 2008
The Guardian

Mumtaz Bhutto, head of the Bhutto tribe in Pakistan’s Sindh province and former rival of Benazir Bhutto, receiving visitors at the family ancestral home at Mirpur Bhutto, six miles from Benazir Bhutto’s home in Naudero. Photograph: Declan Walsh/Guardian

Mumtaz Bhutto sat back on the cool marble veranda of his sprawling country mansion in rural Sindh province. A guard brandishing a Kalashnikov stood behind him. A servant fanned the chocolate cake on the table to keep the flies at bay. He was dismayed.
The rise of Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s husband, to the leadership of the Pakistan People’s party, was nothing less than a disaster, said Mumtaz, the sprightly 74-year-old head of the Bhutto clan.
“Zardari is an illiterate man. He has no political background or experience. He will not be able to conduct himself as the same level as Benazir,” he said with barely concealed disdain. “Most unfortunate. ”

Family feuds are never pretty but for the Bhuttos, Pakistan’s dominant political dynasty, they are played out with the same intensity that characterises the rest of the family’s Greek tragedy-style history.
As Pakistan’s opposition has fractured, so Bhutto’s family has been rent asunder by discord. There are several rival wings, mostly defined in terms of support or opposition to Benazir. Now that she is dead, though, that may be about to change.
Mumtaz Bhutto fell out with Benazir more than 15 years ago. He said she had led the PPP astray; she said he was jealous of her power. His house is just six miles from Benazir’s Naudero home, but the last time they met was in 1995. “It was a lunch in Islamabad. We didn’t agree on anything,” he recalled.
Mumtaz retreated to start his own political party from his elegant home amid the salt-encrusted fields. But it won little support, so he concentrated on his duties as an old-style feudal lord. Critics call him a relic of another age.
Peasants surround his magnificent house with its fleet of four-wheel-drive vehicles and ornate private mosque. Two sleek hunting dogs, recently imported from Britain, roam the garden where servants trim the grass with a donkey-drawn mower. A domineering Raj-era portrait in the hall shows his grandfather brandishing a curved sword and a Purdey gun.
By Mumtaz’s estimates, his land is worth £12m and he makes approximately £23 per acre from his landholdings, which he estimates at about 15,000 acres.
Summers are spent in London, where he rents flats in Mayfair or Knightsbridge, or on Italy’s Amalfi coast. “Absolutely heaven,” he said. “But this year we went to Portofino - the Hotel Splendido.”
Otherwise he sits on the veranda of his home, solving the problems of his peasant tenants. Up to 100 supplicants stream in every day, bringing a variety of grievances to be solved. “There is total lawlessness here. Someone gets shot, someone is murdered, marriage disputes, wife eloping - I have to find a solution,” he said.
But the one dispute he could never solve was the one with Benazir, whose tomb he has just visited. Now he is angry that control of the PPP - considered synonymous with the Bhutto family - has passed to her son Bilawal, and he has dared to take to the Bhutto name.
“He is a Zardari, you can’t just change it like that,” he said. The mantle should have passed to a Bhutto, he said, because “it came into existence and survived on the name and sweat and blood of the Bhutto family.”
Asif Zardari, he said, “made no sacrifices for the party”.
“He has become a billionaire with bank balances and studs and ranches all over the world. That should have been enough for him.” Instead, he said, the title should have passed to the “real” Bhuttos.
In life Benazir was a great rival to her sister-in-law, Ghinwa Bhutto, the widow of Benazir’s brother, Murtaza, who was gunned down on a Karachi street in 1996 while she was prime minister.
Ghinwa comes from northern Lebanon and met her husband during his exile in Syria, where she worked as a ballet teacher. Benazir disparaged her as the “Lebanese bellydancer” . Ghinwa blamed Benazir for the death of her husband.
“I place the moral responsibility on Benazir. If she did not kill him, certainly his death was very convenient for her party of cronies,” Ghinwa told the Guardian last October.
Benazir denied the accusation, saying the shooting had been engineered by the country’s intelligence agencies to undermine her rule and divided her clan. “Kill a Bhutto to get a Bhutto,” she would tell friends.
But the conflict passed to the next generation through Fatima, Murtaza’s 25-year-old daughter and newspaper columnist. Clever and impassioned, Fatima was considered a possible heir to the Bhutto political dynasty. But she has not entered politics and her mother’s party, a splinter from Bhutto’s PPP - lacks even one seat in the provincial assembly.
Until recently, they were campaigning for a seat in Larkana, the heartland of Bhutto power.
Fatima had tried to avoid living in the shadow of her more famous aunt.
“The fact that she’s my aunt is just a footnote,” she said in October. “Benazir always gives these interviews saying that we are brainwashed and mummy’s a bellydancer. But I don’t engage in that. We don’t respond to her petty diatribes and attacks.”
After Benazir returned to Pakistan, surviving a suicide bombing, Fatima issued scathing criticism of her aunt, whom she referred to as “Mrs Zardari”. Benazir had recklessly exposed hundreds of people for the sake of her “personal theatre”, she charged. “She insisted on this grand show, she bears a responsibility for these deaths and these injuries.”
But this week, all that changed. Traumatised by her aunt’s killing, Fatima dropped the fiery rhetoric for wistful memories. “Honestly, I am at a loss,” she wrote in a heartfelt column in The News, a Pakistani daily, this week. “I am compounded in a state of shock.”
Bhutto’s death reminded her of her own ghosts, she said. “I have yet to bury a family member who has died a natural death,” she said, recalling her father, who was shot, her uncle Shahnawaz who was poisoned, and her aunt Benazir, assassinated.
“This isn’t about me, it’s about those whom we have lost,” she wrote.
“It’s about the graveyard … that is just too full”.

1) Sleep at 10 PM
2) Improve dental Hygiene
3) Wear a Cap, Use Sunglass, Wear a mask
4) Wear pants and convince others to wear pants.
5) Learn English
6) Work hard, Control your anger
7) Ask questions, Never insult anyone with their question
Use actual names (no munna, pappo,gudda)
9) Keep your house very clean. Keep your streets very clean.
10) Make sure your toilets are clean. Re-build if necessary.
11) Plant a tree if possible else buy a small flower pot.
12) Read a book at least every two months.
13) Show courteously and say Thank you/Shukriya to stranger. Show a smile face.
14) Wash your face and hands as often as your can.
15) Practice driving without honking.

Best Regards to all.
Happy New Year 2008
11)

Game Plan
Being the PM for past two times she understood and was a part of the game plan (like her father was) of the ‘Big Powers’ meddling in that area of Pakistan and Afghanistan
She was well aware of her life at stake since she entered into politics. Knowing the causes of her father’s death also. Not only that, but beginning from Late Liaquat Ali Khan. Murder (assassination)
If ever one can watch the new movies: Charlie Wilson’s War, Kite Runner and so on, one can see some of thought and game that is being executed and played in Pakistani area, North West and Afghanistan for past 20 years.

Condemnation:
I condemn the people who have no common sense. Our literacy is very low and blames the politicians for not providing facilities for education and educating the masses.
Pakistan claims to be a Muslim Nation, and the people never fails to claim and defend this right of being” Islamic and Muslim”.
Where in Islam and being a Muslim it says or guides a person to come out on the streets, burning houses, small business, national transports (buses and trains, train stations) and killing your own kind and your own population. (Families and children)
By doing so one is depriving another poor family of their loved one, depriving them from food and daily hard earned living. Do you think that the politicians are suffering? They will have no issues and problems in this. See who is suffering now. Common person are now without transports, without fresh food and so on. Why is the asking NOW the governments to get provide them? Why blame the government? Did they ask the government before they went out burning the train stations, buses, cars, shops?
These politicians are very abusive, shrewd and intelligent to use the mass for their own motives purposes and steer to gain what they want.
We as common Pakistani needed to talk about all of this. The media should talk about this daily and the politicians should tell their followers not to do this. It is a loss for all.
How much it cost to buy a car, a bus and train and build a train station.

Question: What did Benazir and Nawaz Shariff do in the past 20 years in Pakistan? Roti,kapra Mukaan ?? People are living in worst conditions now. This is the reflection of the past doings. What you sow is what you reap. These two had enough money stashed and stacked away to live in foreign land in luxury and lavishness. Now, they see an opportunity to gain more from the national wealth by coming back.

Security:
Pakistan is an under developed country [third or fourth world now]
Benazir and all other politicians have enough money that they can afford their own private security.
Pakistan cannot be compared nor can one ask the Govt. to provide security
(As it is done in West and European countries Any Pakistani Politician who enters into politics knows this. They can buy votes, buy media and do other stuff, and they cannot secure and get their own security. It is not valid to blame the govt. not to provide security.
If we are Muslim and do follow the values of Islamic teachings then every Muslim is same and has the same rights. How many others (poor) are without any security. The common person is robbed, murdered and theft is rampant on a daily basis. Don’t you think that they also deserve the same ‘Security’ from the government?

Elections:

Election must go on, maybe delayed. As soon as the law and order is restored. We always compare to West. In that case PPP should nominate another candidate and participate in the election. How much political sense does her son’Bilawal’ has to be the Chairman of PPP. Is this democratic or is creating a dynasty? Is this party for the people, by the people? We, as Pakistanis are Hippocrates. Unislamic? Undemocratic? on the other hand we talk about fair and transparency in our system. There are too many things to be corrected by us, Pakistanis. Don’t blame the government and President Musharaff for everything. Every Pakistani should look into them and ask them of each step they take forward- Is this right? Is this fair? Is it Islamic?

Dua’s-Prayers

I see and hear the TV media projecting great Quran prayers, poems and songs, patriotic ones. To Ask God/Allah to save Pakistan, and for His blessings is good, but, God-Allah also has said to follow the teachings of Islam and Prophet Mohammed-PBUH. Are we doing so? Why do we ask for forgiveness, after we are committing crimes against Muslims and our own Pakistani people? What justifications we have here?

May Allah help us all, bless us all

Imagine one of the top justices of Pakistan (Nizam Ahmed), have two kids (a boy and a girl)….sending his only son (Nadeem) to Iowa State University (Ames) to earn a degree in Engineering. I still remember a few years back when I went to see one of my good friends at Iowa State. I stayed with him for a week or so. Nadeem was a class mate and a friend of my friend. I spent a few evenings (and days) with Nadeem, who was a wonderful young man. He was very jolly, lively and very NICE boy. I had great time in that small town of Ames, IA.

Nadeem graduates, goes back to Pakistan and start doing a degree in law so he could follow the footsteps of his dad, as my friend told me this. Sometimes later I was told, Nadeem got engaged to a wonderful young lady….soon to be married.

Then came, the horrible new! One day, my friend called and told me that Nadeem and his dad (Justice Nizam Ahmed) were gunned down in the driveway of their own house in Karachi. Both were instantly killed. Nadeem in his mid 20s, received 25+ bullets in his body. Can you imagine the condition of his mother who lost her only son, her husband of 30 plus years? Can you imagine the condition of her sister who lost her father and only brother? Can you imagine the condition of his fiancée who was looking forward to spending rest of her life with him in a few months time!

What does this got to do with Benazir and Zardari? Well, here are some related links I could find about the connection;
http://www.dawn.com/2004/04/24/nat4.htm
http://www.dawn.com/2004/12/22/nat1.htm
http://www.dawn.com/2007/12/16/local3.htm
http://www.pakistanlink.com/Headlines/March06/15/08.htm

Justice Nizam was killed by the Zardari/Benazir’s people because of a dispute over a prized plot near Awami Markaz as Justice Nizam had opposed its commercialisation and illegal allotment.

FIR submitted by the brother-in-law of Justice Nizam named Zardari as suspect. Hence the big “murder case” against Zardari.

I am not judging anybody or anybody’s actions because this is the job only reserved for the God Almighty but incidents like these only confirm that….yes, he is watching and he is there judging people for their actions.

From Jutice Nizam’s family standpoint, all I can say is that justice well served!