TranceAddict Forums (www.tranceaddict.com/forums)
- Political Discussion / Debate
-- Benazir Bhutto assassinated
Pages (7): « 1 2 3 4 5 6 [7]

quote:

Originally posted by George Smiley Well to be perfectly honest, if you want to find out more about the ISI then the best place to start is probably Wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-...e#Controversies That section deals with all the accusations (obviously go read the sources if you want more info!) Kashmiri terrorism is not really my speciality (I did write an essay on the Kashmir conflict once upon a time but that focused on India and Pakistan and why the region was so important to each other, rather than go in depth in how the conflict is fought) However, if you want to learn about the history of Islamist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, then I cannot recommend a book called "Al-Qaeda" by Jason Burke. That really is the dog's bollocks of books on al-Qaida. It's basically the story of radical Islam, obviously centring around the background of al-Qaida from the Afghan war up until 9/11 (and beyond). It is absolutely excellent. One of my university tutors talked about it and completely missed the point as some people think he argues al-Qaida does not exist (like Shaolin_Z seems to be suggesting) but what he actually argues is that al-Qaida, the global, structured and far reaching terrorist group does not exist (as the Americans would have you believe), but that al-Qaida (other than Bin Laden's immediate group) exists more as an ideology that encourages other groups sharing the same visions. He argues that the threat from al-Qaida is therefore much much more dangerous than what we think we are dealing with (ie the theory that says cut of the head of the snake and the body will die - well that won't happen!) Anyway, it's a great history of the Mujahadeen and offers an incite into how all these different groups relate to each other (and how "al-Qaida" is just one of many).

thanks.

quote:

Originally posted by LazFX thanks.

Just re-read what I wrote and that should be "I cannot recommend a book called "Al-Qaeda" by Jason Burke enough"!!!

quote:

Originally posted by Omega_M yeah but the correct spelling is Musharraf. Masharraf is incorrect.

Yea but one's the British spelling and the other's the American spelling...

George, bin Laden did it!!!

quote:

Originally posted by George Smiley Yep you can spell it how you like s long as it sounds the same I guess. Like some muppets spell al-Qaida as 'al-Qaeda'!! Even worse, Hizballah sometimes gets bastardised into 'Hezbollah'!!!

quote:

Originally posted by George Smiley Just re-read what I wrote and that should be "I cannot recommend a book called "Al-Qaeda" by Jason Burke enough"!!!

I guess this makes you a, 'muppet'...

Anyway, back on topic...

quote:

Originally posted by Fir3start3r Oh but they have...

Apparently not (link). The main suspect blamed by the Pakistani government has denied any involvement in the assassination. Leaving aside for the moment your earlier article claiming Mustafa Abu al-Yazid had accepted responsibility, the vast majority of news sources tying the assassination with al-Qaida went along with the Pakistani government's claims that Baitullah Mehsud was behind the attack. It would be very odd for him to deny the accusation if he was in fact behind the attacks.

But looking at Mehsud closer, it illustrates perfectly what I have been saying about the nature of al-Qaida above. "Al-Qaida accused" was the gist of pretty much every headline on 28th December when the Pakistani government made the claims. So Mehsud was clearly one of these "linked to al-Qaida" types. Where does that link come from? Mehsud is a pro-Taliban commander of a Pakistani Islamist militia. His troops regularly cross the border into Afghanistan to fight occupation forces there. The reason there are so many militant groups in the tribal areas of Pakistan is because that's where they were all base by the Pakistani and American governments when they assisted their efforts to fight the USSR. The area is full of the remnants of the militias that fought in that war and as we know, al-Qaida were only a small group in that war at best and outcasts from the Mujahadeen at worst on account of being Arabs. The radicalised tribal areas of Pakistan contain the remnants of the militias from Paksitan that fought in that war and Mehsud is one of the tribal cheifs of that area. Mehsud fights to help the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the Taliban and al-Qaida are not one and the same. The Taliban gave shelter to al-Qaida (ie Bin Laden and his close group of associates) and as Bin Laden rose to notiriaty, pressure was put on the Taliban to hand him over. They refused and since then the world decided that Bin Laden controlled the Taliban, so anybody that had ever fought in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban against the Russians, or had been provided a safe haven to set up training camps etc, are now referred to as "al-Qaida", rather than Taliban allies. I can find no real link between Mehsud and Bin Laden, other than they are both allied to the Taliban. But why would Mehsud, who commands 20,000 fighters, be taking orders from Bin Laden in his own country?

quote:

Originally posted by George Smiley Well to be perfectly honest, if you want to find out more about the ISI then the best place to start is probably Wikipedia!

Or the New York Times.

From today's paper:

quote:

January 4, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor Bhutto�s Deadly Legacy By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE New Delhi WHEN, in May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India was killed by a suicide bomber, there was an international outpouring of grief. Recent days have seen the same with the death of Benazir Bhutto: another glamorous, Western-educated scion of a great South Asian political dynasty tragically assassinated at an election rally. There is, however, an important difference between the two deaths: while Mr. Gandhi was assassinated by Sri Lankan Hindu extremists because of his policy of confronting them, Ms. Bhutto was apparently the victim of Islamist militant groups that she allowed to flourish under her administrations in the 1980s and 1990s. It was under Ms. Bhutto�s watch that the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was also at that time that hundreds of young Islamic militants were recruited from the madrassas to do the agency�s dirty work in Indian Kashmir. It seems that, like some terrorist equivalent of Frankenstein�s monster, the extremists turned on both the person and the state that had helped bring them into being. While it is true that the recruitment of jihadists had started before she took office and that Ms. Bhutto was insufficiently strong � or competent � to have had full control over either the intelligence services or the Pakistani Army when she was in office, it is equally na�ve to believe she had no influence over her country�s foreign policy toward its two most important neighbors, India and Afghanistan. Everyone now knows how disastrous the rule of the Taliban turned out to be in Afghanistan, how brutally it subjected women and how it allowed Al Qaeda to train in camps within its territory. But another, and in the long term perhaps equally perilous, legacy of Ms. Bhutto�s tenure is often forgotten: the turning of Kashmir into a jihadist playground. In 1989, when the insurgency in the Indian portion of the disputed region first began, it was largely an amateur affair of young, secular-minded Kashmiri Muslims rising village by village and wielding homemade weapons � firearms fashioned from the steering shafts of rickshaws and so on. By the early �90s, however, Pakistan was sending over the border thousands of well-trained, heavily armed and ideologically hardened jihadis. Some were the same sorts of exiled Arab radicals who were at the same time forming Al Qaeda in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan. By 1993, during Ms. Bhutto�s second term, the Arab and Afghan jihadis (and their Inter-Services Intelligence masters) had really begun to take over the uprising from the locals. It was at this stage that the secular leadership of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front began losing ground to hard-line Islamist outfits like Hizbul Mujahedeen. I asked Benazir Bhutto about her Kashmir policy and the potential dangers of the growing role of religious extremists in the conflict during an interview in 1994. �India tries to gloss over its policy of repression in Kashmir,� she replied. �India does have might, but has been unable to crush the people of Kashmir. We are not prepared to keep silent, and collude with repression.� Hamid Gul, who was the head of the intelligence agency during her first administration, was more forthcoming still. �The Kashmiri people have risen up,� he told me, �and it is the national purpose of Pakistan to help liberate them.� He continued, �If the jihadis go out and contain India, tying down their army on their own soil, for a legitimate cause, why should we not support them?� Benazir Bhutto�s death is, of course, a calamity, particularly as she embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis. But, contrary to the commentary we�ve seen in the last week, she was not comparable to Myanmar�s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Bhutto�s governments were widely criticized by Amnesty International and other groups for their use of death squads and terrible record on deaths in police custody, abductions and torture. As for her democratic bona fides, she had no qualms about banning rallies by opposing political parties while in power. Within her own party, she declared herself the president for life and controlled all decisions. She rejected her brother Murtaza�s bid to challenge her for its leadership and when he persisted, he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances during a police ambush outside the Bhutto family home. Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan�s becoming the region�s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war. William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of �The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857.�

quote:

Originally posted by emc^2 I also hate to point out that sometimes if the gun is pointed at your head and loaded and you're told that you'll be killed unless you leave, perhaps it would be a good idea to leave. Woman had a death wish and as much as I feel sorry for her, I also feel her death was stupid. I guess politics were her life and she martyred herself for her cause. I wonder if she gets 72 hot guy-virgins? //dark humor mode: off

Certain, she did.

quote:

Originally posted by Lesbianosaur Or the New York Times. From today's paper:

Wow. That article puts a lot of things in perspective. If she really was behind her brother's murder, then I suppose she got her just desserts.

quote:

Scotland Yard: Suicide Bomb Blast Killed Bhutto, Not Bullet British detectives from Scotland Yard have concluded that the force of a suicide bomb blast, and not an assassin's bullet, killed Pakistani opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Investigators presented the findings Friday of their probe into the December 27 assassination of Ms. Bhutto as she left a political rally in Rawalpindi. They determined that Ms. Bhutto died from a fatal head injury caused by the suicide blast, triggered by a lone assailants. There were earlier suggestions that two assailants were involved. The British investigators spent more than two weeks in Pakistan at the request of President Pervez Musharraf. Their findings supported the Pakistani government's version of how Ms. Bhutto died. A spokeswoman, Sherry Rahman, for Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party rejected the British findings and insisted that she died from a bullet wound. The British report noted that despite the lack of an extended and detailed search of the crime scene or autopsy of Ms. Bhutto's body, "the evidence that is available is sufficient for reliable conclusions to be drawn." Ms. Bhutto's family and members of her party blame the government for her death, in part due to what they say was a lack of adequate security for during her political campaign. Pakistani and U.S. officials say the popular opposition leader was killed by fighters allied with tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud, with support from al-Qaida. A spokesman for the militant leader says the group was not involved in Ms. Bhutto's death. Pakistani police said Thursday they have detained and are interrogating two more suspects in connection with Ms. Bhutto's murder. Security officials say the two men, identified only as Hasnain and Rafaqat, are being held in Rawalpindi.

Scotland Yard is supporting a version which seems too incredible to be true. And they didn't even perform a basic autopsy.

http://voanews.com/english/2008-02-08-voa7.cfm

I still don't understand why there are different conclusions in which people hate one aspect over the other. In the end, she was assassinated.

Could anyone tell me the difference of importance if it was a suicide blast that killed her or a bullet, and vice versa?

quote:

Originally posted by Lemonad In the end, she was assassinated.

By whom ?

The question of how exactly she was assassinated is important to determine who exactly is lying.

Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright © 2000-2021, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.