Bhutto helped create Taliban monster
Rosie DiManno
In 1991, Pakistan's intelligence services stashed a massive cache of assault rifles and ammunition at a secret weapons dump in Spin Boldak, rushing armaments across the border as a (phony) deadline loomed for ending direct supply of their favoured combatants in Afghanistan's civil war.
Seventeen tunnels beneath the dump contained enough weaponry to arm thousands of soldiers.
Three years later, the Taliban broke the depot open and handed out rifles ? still wrapped in plastic ? to volunteers summoned from local madrassas, an incident documented in the authoritative book Ghost Wars.
Within 24 hours, the Taliban captured Kandahar, Mullah Omar took possession of the governor's headquarters, and the airport was seized ? with its six MiG-21 fighter jets, four Mi-17 transport helicopters, fleet of tanks and armed personnel carriers.
The Taliban gutting of Afghanistan was on, nearly all opponents swept aside, Kabul falling with barely a whimper.
As Ghost Wars author Steve Coll so dryly put it: "Benazir Bhutto was suddenly the matron of a new Afghan faction."
The late ? twice ? but no longer future prime minister of Pakistan was far, far from a stupid woman. The Taliban was a gamble she took, cunningly if not without considerable trepidation ? and certainly at the behest of a powerful intelligence service, the ISI, she feared but had to accommodate, in the doomed hope of retaining office.
But make no mistake: The woman who is now being so widely mourned ? assassinated last week, perhaps by the very elements she empowered more than a decade ago ? was nurturing stepmother to terrorists incubated under her watch; the same Islamist fanatics she inveighed against during the election campaign that came to a screeching halt in the calamitous assault on her motorcade.
She was a brave woman, without question, but Bhutto was much to blame for the tinderbox that Pakistan became during her exile in Dubai and London ? the toxic military entanglement with the Taliban ? having helped to create a monster that not even the sponsoring ISI can control any longer.
For years, during her second tenure as PM, Bhutto lied brazenly to Washington about the extent to which Pakistan, with her approval, was covertly arming and funding the Taliban. As Bhutto admitted in a 2002 interview: "Once I gave the go-ahead that they should get the money, I don't know how much money they were ultimately given ... I know it was a lot. It was just carte blanche."
For Bhutto, the objective was to keep a new Afghanistan yoked to Pakistan and out of India's orbit. (Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was considered far too Delhi-friendly.) Out of this relationship would flow the riches of a Pakistan-controlled trucking industry circumventing Kabul ? a modern Silk Road trade incorporating the markets of Central Asia ? the never realized gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, and training camps, off the Pakistan reservation, for fighters deployed to Kashmir.
Bhutto had an economic and political vision for Pakistan, one that depended largely on creating a compliant client state next door. It all got away from her, as it did also from the ISI. Indeed, Al Qaeda ? now firmly interwoven with the Taliban ? was contemptuous of Bhutto from the start, plotting her political demise, at the invitation of some ISI officers, as early as 1989.
Maybe by 2007, Bhutto had learned from her mistakes. Perhaps there was more to her than the democratic platitudes she espoused, as Washington's latest putative ally in the region. But this was a woman who lied and connived with brio, bewitching even the most garrumphing skeptics with her intelligence, charm and beauty.
She's already a better martyr than she ever was a leader of state.
Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/290372
