Dear Editor:
Re: al Qaeda claims involvement in attack - with help of Pakistani ISI

Benazir Bhutto’s death was a great tragedy for Pakistan and for the world. While the world mourns the passing of what may have been Pakistan’s best chance at true democracy, questions remain as to what happened.

While the government of Pervez Musharaf vehemently denies any involvement in the murder, and the Ministry of the Interior has produced evidence that an al-Qaeda militant named Baitullah Mehsud was behind the planning and organization of the suicide bombers, and released a transcript of a phone conversation between Mehsud and another operative to ‘prove’ the al-Qaeda connection, a number of questions remain:

1. Why was Benazir Bhutto’s request for additional protection from the Musharaf government fall on deaf ears?

2. How did the Ministry of the Interior ‘discover’ the communications of Baitullah Mehsud so quickly after the suicide attack? Was the government of Pakistan listening in for some time to Mehsud’s conversations? And if so, did they overhear the preparations for the suicide bomber attack?

The implications of these unanswered questions are obvious: Did Pervez Musharaf have advance knowledge that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on Benazir Bhutto, and allowed the attack to occur to prevent Benazir Bhutto from running in the Pakistan elections? Was al-Qaeda an unwitting pawn used by Pervez Musharaf to help eliminate the opposition?

As it stands now, Pervez Musharaf has every reason he needs to suspend or postpone the elections -against the wishes of the United States- and retain his grip on power indefinitely. If anyone stood to benefit from Benazir Bhutto’s murder, it’s him. However, there are indications that, if such was his plan all along, Musharaf gravely miscalculated the reaction of Pakistan’s voters.

Silencing a living opponent is hard enough. But silencing a martyr? That’s impossible.

Marc Ouellette
Ottawa, Ontario

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Terrorism, World events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.