Sacrificing Bhutto to prop up Musharraf?

http://www.suntimes.com/news/novak/719606,CST-EDT-NOVAK31.article

Sacrificing Bhutto to prop up Musharraf?
December 31, 2007
BY ROBERT NOVAK
Sun-Times Columnist

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto followed urgent pleas to the State Department for the last two months by her representatives for better security protection. The U.S. reaction was that she was worried over nothing, expressing assurance that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would not let anything happen to her.

That attitude led Bhutto's agent to inform a high-ranking State Department official that her camp no longer viewed the backstage U.S. effort to broker power sharing between Musharraf and former Prime Minister Bhutto as a good-faith effort toward democracy. It was, according to the written complaint, an attempt to preserve the politically endangered Musharraf as President Bush's man in Islamabad.

Bush confirmed that judgment Thursday when he urged that the Jan. 8 election be held in furtherance of Pakistani ''democracy.'' That may be Musharraf's position, but it definitely is not that of his critics. They say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead, no successor named to head her Pakistan People's Party, and Saudi-backed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif boycotting the balloting.

The Bush administration months ago decided to broker power sharing with the deeply unpopular Musharraf and the popular Bhutto. That decision was based on Pakistan's strategic importance as a sanctuary for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. Bush was in a quandary. Bhutto was much tougher than Musharraf on Islamist extremists, but Bush had heavily invested in Musharraf.

When I last saw Bhutto in August in Manhattan, she was deeply concerned about U.S. ambivalence but asked me not to write about it. She had not heard from Musharraf for three weeks after their secret July meeting in Abu Dhabi. She feared the Pakistani strongman was not being prodded from Washington.

Next came Musharraf's state of emergency and purge of Pakistan's Supreme Court to guarantee legality of his questionable election as president. According to Bhutto's advisers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Bhutto to go along with that process in return for concessions from Musharraf. Bhutto agreed but got nothing in return.

The unsuccessful Oct. 18 attempt on Bhutto's life followed the regime's rejection of her requested security protection when she returned from eight years in exile. The Pakistani government vetoed FBI assistance in investigating the attack. On Oct. 26, Bhutto sent an e-mail to Mark Siegel, her friend and Washington spokesman, to be made public only in the event of her death.

''I would hold Musharraf responsible,'' Bhutto said. ''I have been made to feel insecure by his minions.'' She listed obstruction to her ''taking private cars or using tinted windows,'' using jammers against roadside bombs and being surrounded by police cars. ''Without him [Musharraf],'' she said, those requests could not have been blocked.

In early December, a former Pakistani official supporting Bhutto visited a senior U.S. government official to renew her security requests. He got a brush-off, a mind-set reflected Dec. 6 in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, was asked to respond to fears by nonpartisan American observers of a rigged election. His reply: ''I do think they can have a good election. They can have a credible election. They can have a transparent and a fair election. It's not going to be a perfect election.'' Boucher's words echoed through corridors of power in Islamabad. The Americans' not demanding perfection signaled they would settle for less. Without Benazir Bhutto around, it is apt to be a lot less.

A more sinister fallout of a free hand from Washington for Pakistan might be Bhutto's murder. Neither her shooting last Thursday nor the attempt on her life Oct. 18 bore the classic al-Qaida trademark. After the carnage, government trucks used streams of water to clean up the blood and in the process destroy forensic evidence. If not too late, would an investigation by the FBI still be in order?

Musharraf's critics say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead.