The Bhutto myths

Amir Taheri:

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One American pundit asserts that Bhutto's death represents "Washington's policy failure in Pakistan." The claim is based on the belief that Bhutto was nothing but an instrument of US policy.

But Benazir and Gen. Pervez Musharraf never did anything they didn't want to do simply because the Americans, or anybody else, asked for it.

Another myth since Benazir's death is that she was a victim of the Pakistani security services. The accusation is so childish that it wouldn't have merited attention had it not received global currency from conspiracy theorists.

Secret services may have hit men and hired assassins but don't have suicide killers. That's a specialty of Islamist terror groups. Had the Pakistani secret services wished to kill Benazir, they would've organized a massive explosion like the one that the Syrian secret service used to kill former Lebanese Premier Rafiq Hariri in 2005.

Another myth is that Islamists are about to sweep the general election and seize power.

Today, Pakistani Islamists are at their weakest in terms of popular support. Their coalition, known as the United Action Assembly (MMA), has fragmented, its components spending more time fighting each other than their secular enemies.

In the last election, the Islamists collected some 11 percent of the votes. They would be lucky to do as well next week. Their best-known figure, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, may lose his seat.

The Islamists have held sway in the Northwest Frontier province, one of the four that constitute Pakistan, for four years and have a record of failures. They've proved the bankruptcy of their sick ideology. I doubt they would fool many Pakistanis much longer.

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One British magazine has come out with a cover story that Pakistan is about to fall to the Taliban. This turns out to be based on a claim that "Taliban-like" groups are assuming power in parts of a mountainous enclave known as South Waziristan.

Readers might not know that the enclave covers half of 1 percent of Pakistan's territory.

South Waziristan's population is less than half a million, compared to the total Pakistani population of 169 million.

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Taheri believes we should buy the jihadis rather than defeat them. I suspect at best we could only rent them. It is unlikely that they would stay bought. However, his essay gives some perspective on the problem and probably that perspective accounts for some of Pakistan's military's lack of excitement about the problem.