The Diary: Fatima Bhutto

The diary post can be read at:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/69f2a05c-5664-11e0-84e9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1HelcRVJA

Pakistan’s balancing act An interview with Fatima Bhutto

THE NEW York Times reported on October 18 that the United States is negotiating a “multiyear security pact with Pakistan, complete with more reliable military aid—something the Pakistani military has long sought to complement the five-year, $7.5 billion package of nonmilitary aid approved by Congress last year,” but added that “the American gestures come at a time of fraying patience on the part of the Obama administration, and they will carry a familiar warning.... ‘Pakistan has taken aggressive action within its own borders. But clearly, this is an ongoing threat and more needs to be done,’ the State Department spokes?man, Philip J. Crowley, said.” How would you characterize the Obama administration’s stance toward Pakistan, and what do you expect to be the outcome of this pressure? AMERICA HAS always played this sort of carrot-and-stick policy with us. It goes back to the late 1950s, when Pakistan signed on to be an arm of American interests in the region, and continues until now. General Pervez Musharraf, America’s last favorite dictator, bent over backwards to accommodate America, and yet it was never enough. Obama’s administration takes up where George W. Bush’s left off. The drone strikes have even been escalated. Bush employed drone strikes 45 times during his eight years in power. Obama exercised the use of drones 53 times last year alone. In fact, he ordered his first drone strike against Pakistan 72 hours after ascending to the presidency. There have been over 90 drone strikes against Pakistan this year, and we haven’t even hit December yet. The current administration is even more amenable to American pressure than Musharraf’s was, and that’s saying something. Asif Ali Zardari has opened up Pakistan’s skies for these drone strikes most enthusiastically. It’s the first time in our history we’ve ever opened our country so that a foreign power may kill our citizens. Obama, like Bush, continues to support and prop up corrupt and criminal leadership in the region. Zardari’s and [Afghanistan President] Hamid Karzai’s graft are infamous. And the United States looks the other way when Pakistan’s government imposes draconian censorship on its press and people. If the Pakistani army gives in to this increased American pressure—and the history of their relationship leads us to think they won’t be able to carry out all the conditions imposed on them by the Americans, conditions which are unpopular not only within the country but also within the army itself—it will only lead to more unrest in Pakistan and more tension between the Pakistani state and its people, who already feel their government and its machinery operates at the behest of a foreign power. THE DRONE strikes are wildly unpopular in Pakistan and have led to widespread displacement of people, destruction of homes, and civilian casualties. How does the government handle this balancing act of supporting the attacks and yet denying this fact in public? VERY BADLY. No government can handle such a balancing act. These attacks are not only geared toward destabilizing al-Qaeda but also to destabilize Pakistan. Any unpopular act the government undertakes destabilizes it, and this is an unpopular government, especially one that involves the murder of its people—there have been more than 2,000 Pakistanis killed in drone attacks thus far. The worst month for casualties and deaths resulting from drone attacks was the month after the floods, the most devastating natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. And we know that at that time, instead of withdrawing their support for drone strikes that are killing Pakistani civilians, at the time of utter havoc wreaked by the floods, the Pakistani government did the opposite and assured Washington and its NATO allies that they would not be diverting their troops from the war on terror efforts in the north to aid flood relief and rehabilitation. As the floods raged in August, the provincial health secretary, Khurshnood Lashari, claimed that the Jacobabad airbase on the Sindh and Baluchistan border was being reserved for the unmanned drones—and that this is why the airbase could not be used to facilitate flood relief. The U.S. Embassy immediately denied they were using Pakistani airbases to launch their attacks, of course, and the Pakistani government kept very, very silent. According to Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, when CIA Director General Michael Hayden told Zardari that the United States would be employing unmanned Predator and Reaper drones against Pakistan, the Pakistani president is said to have replied, “Kill the seniors. Collateral damage worries you Americans. It does not worry me.” Zardari not only enthusiastically enabled the drone strikes against his country but went a step further and asked America for drone technology for Pakistan. He’s desperate to possess it. Why? To attack his own people? His neighbors? It’s outrageous. THE WASHINGTON Post reports that, “The United States has renewed pressure on Pakistan to expand the areas where CIA drones can operate inside the country.” Can you comment on the areas they are seeking to target and what the impact of a broader drone strike campaign might be? THE IMPACT will be more deaths, more civilian deaths. It is absurd that, after nine years, the Americans are still using the same tactics in the “war on terror.” Tactics that promise swift solutions to universal terror, huge military interventions that haven’t been swift in any sense, given that we’re nine years into the failure of this war. Baluchistan, if it is attacked, will not yield any more results for the conclusion of this war on terror. America’s huge military actions have failed for the last nine years. Pakistan’s military interventions in Baluchistan have failed for the last 60 years. By expanding the surface area of the drone strikes, the United States will only increase terror, fuel violence, and lessen any goodwill that they might have (which is very little to begin with, I’d argue). That said, the Pakistani government would love to take the drones to Baluchistan—not only because it would make America happy, but also because this is an extraordinarily rich province that has been economically exploited by the state since time immemorial and where some 10,000 people have been disappeared since the war on terror began in 2001. THE LATEST disclosures from WikiLeaks reveal that, as the New York Times reported, “Last fall, the Pakistani Army secretly allowed 12 American Special Operations soldiers to deploy with Pakistani troops in the violent tribal areas near the Afghan border.” What kind of operations were these and are they continuing? What has been the reaction inside Pakistan to this news? THE PAKISTANI people are the last to hear anything about what our state allows other armies to carry out on our soil. There’s been absolutely no light shed on any of these operations in the form of confirmations from the spokespeople attached to the current regime, who exist only to deny, deny, deny. When asked if Blackwater was in Pakistan, the answer was no. When asked if the state was facilitating the drone attacks against their people, no. Did the chief of the army collaborate in the strikes against the northern areas? No. All bald-faced lies. And it’s not just the Pakistani machinery that’s lying. Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, lied when he said America didn’t have troops on the ground in Pakistan. He didn’t even attempt to dance around his lie. It was an out and out untruth. Anything involving collaboration with the U.S. Special Forces is always shrouded in absolute secrecy in the country. From previous operations, we know whatever they’re doing constitutes attacks on Pakistani sovereignty and most likely the most horrific human rights abuses. We can assume this from a long history of disappearances, renditions, torture, gun running, and more, that the American military has a dirty history in Pakistan. There’s no evidence that this enthusiastic cooperation with the U.S. Special Ops soldiers has stopped in the least. THE TIMES adds that “The cables also reveal that the American Embassy had received credible reports of extra?judicial killings of prisoners by the Pakistani army more than a year before the Obama administration publicly acknowledged the problem.” A cable labeled “secret/noforn” on September 10, 2009, acknowledged “extrajudicial killing of some detainees” but stated that the U.S. ambassador “advises that we avoid comment on these incidents to the extent possible.” IN THE Swat Valley, evidence of extrajudicial killings grows more sinister. In June 2010, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported that 282 extrajudicial murders had been carried out in the past year in the Swat Valley alone. In September, a five-minute video was leaked showing men wearing what seemed to be Pakistani military uniforms and carrying standard issue G3 rifles executing six young men in plain clothes. The men were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs. The video, grainy mobile phone footage, shows one of the soldiers asking his commander in Urdu, “One by one?” “Together,” comes the reply, before the men in civilian clothes are fired at and killed. The Pakistani army insists that the video is a fake, though according to news sources including the BBC, Al Jazeera, and some American media outlets, unnamed American officials were surprisingly quick to voice a belief that the video is authentic. Nothing has been done in the way of investigating any of these killings. And since those unnamed officials suggested this was a tactic of the Pakistani army, there have been no calls for Pakistan to answer the questions relating to this spate of extrajudicial killings. And this is just in the northern regions. We’re not even talking about the rest of the country. By August of this year, some 300 political activists or politicians in Karachi were victims of targeted killings. This is a hallmark of this government that, in the 1990s, presided over a genocidal rampage in the city of Karachi under Operation Clean Up, in which some 3,000 men were murdered in a two-year period. YOU WRITE in your new book, Songs of Blood and Sword, about your rejection of the dynastic politics that have dominated Pakistan. Could you talk about your journey to this stance? DYNASTIC POLITICS has been the scourge of Pakistan. It has transformed our political culture, subverted it to be a system that operates solely on the basis of names, rather than ideology, or personalities over platforms or principles. Dynasty isn’t unique to Pakistan. It’s found across the region, from India to Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, and I’d argue it’s not a particularly viable system anywhere. For Pakistan, though, we’re at a crossroads right now in our history, and we have to make a choice. We can’t afford the luxury of no longer taking a stand. We have to choose whether we want to throw our lot in with dynasty or with democracy. They can’t go together. They can’t operate simultaneously, because dynasty ultimately cancels out democracy. Where democracy seeks to encourage participation—and I’m talking here not just of representative democracies, but of participatory ones—dynasty negates participation. It closes down what should essentially be an open system. Where democracy is inclusive, dynasty is exclusive. We’ve seen in Pakistan that decades of dynasty hasn’t strengthened democratic institutions, hasn’t furthered progressive reform, hasn’t elevated the level of discourse between a government and the people. It’s really a form of political inbreeding. MILITARY PLANNERS now speak routinely about “Af-Pak,” reducing Pakistan to an appendage to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, which has now lasted even longer than the Soviet occupation. The likelihood of any withdrawal keeps receding into an ever-distant horizon, and we see Washington putting pressure on other countries to step up their presence in Afghanistan, especially as some NATO powers pull out troops. What role does the Obama administration expect Zardari to play in Afghanistan, in your view, and how is that viewed within Pakistan? IT WOULD seem that so long as we continue to agree to let America use our country to launch their attacks against our neighbors, to open our skies, our borders, our airports, so that the war against Afghanistan can be more easily conducted, we’re doing what is asked of us. Tariq Ali wasn’t exaggerating when he called Pakistan a “U.S. satrapy.” If you look through the latest tranche of cables released by WikiLeaks, it’s outrageous how often the Zardari government seems to acknowledge and thank America for keeping them in business. There’s no disguising the fact that it is this government’s acquiescence that keeps them in power. The minute they say no—which I wouldn’t hold my breath for—they’re out. But there’s no danger of this happening. Zardari has even breathlessly assured his American allies that, if he is killed, they are not to worry, as his sister—as unqualified in any political or intellectual sense as her brother—would take over running the country and would continue the bidding of the Americans. This obeisance is regarded with deep anger and shame in Pakistan. We are only a 63-year-young country. There is a generation that remembers the fight for an independent Pakistan—and this is a state that operates at the behest of a foreign power. IN THE establishment press, we rarely see any discussion about the social dynamics within Pakistan. Can you discuss the class fault lines in the country and also some of the linguistic, cultural, and ethnic divisions in the country among Bengalis, Punjabis, Pashtuns, Baluchis, Sinds, and others? THERE IS one large class fault, and that is between the rich—the very rich—and the very poor, who are dispossessed in the extreme and who live without access to potable water, to health care, without access to justice, without even the most basic education. That is why the Islamists have been able to build a popular base across the country—simply because they provide what the state seems either unable or unwilling to provide. While you have a majority of Pakistanis living in desperate poverty, you have a slim minority of those who are above the law. The courts run only at their behest—if they run at all. They have entire laws made up to protect their plundering of the state treasury, like the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), for instance, an odious piece of legislation brought in by General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto that erased twenty years of corruption cases against politicians, bankers, and bureaucrats and includes a stipulation that will make it virtually impossible to file charges against sitting politicians in the future. I’ll tell you something that demonstrates this fault line in regards to the NRO. Nasir Aslam Zahid is a former justice and chief justice of Sindh, and he resigned when judges were required to take their oath to a sitting general, Musharraf—so he’s the independent judiciary, not these others who took the oath and then complained about it later. Zahid refused and lost his judgeship, and he now runs the juvenile and women’s prisons in Karachi. Two years ago, just after the NRO was passed, he told me the story of two young boys who had stolen the metal bar off a gate. They took the bar—which would have locked the gate shut, it’s a tiny piece of metal really—in front of the man whose gate it was, and so naturally they were caught and sent to the juvenile jail. Zahid met them and asked why they stole the bar. Why risk jail for such a small bit of metal? And one of the boys replied that they thought they’d get 100 rupees for it, maybe 150. A negligible amount in any case—maybe a dollar or two dollars worth of money. “Why did you bother getting into all this trouble for such a small amount of money?” Zahid asked them, confounded, and the other boy replied, “Oh, well, we thought it wouldn’t be a problem because we heard there’s this new law that sets you free if you’re found guilty of stealing.” And Zahid replied, “For that law to benefit you, you’re going to have to steal a hell of a lot more.” It’s true, though. That’s the amazing thing. As for the ethnic fault lines, there is a complete lack of provincial autonomy. Power is concentrated in the hands of the Punjabi elite. The army, the bureaucracy, they all are centered in the Punjab. Yet it is Sindh’s water, Baluchistan’s gas, Sindh’s oil, the natural resources of the northern province and their strategic position that the country runs on, while it’s Punjab’s large population that benefits. PAKISTAN AND India both are nuclear powers, neither is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and both use their historic conflict domes?tically as a political weapon. How would you describe the current tension between India and Pakistan? Do you share Tariq Ali’s view, in his new book on Pakistan, The Duel, that “One of the older sources of official legitimacy—the cultivation of anti-Indian/anti-Hindu fervor—has... run dry.” THE TENSION between India and Pakistan has always been between the two countries’ respective governments, but not their people. It has been a necessity for those governments, who have nothing else to stand on, who deliver nothing to their electorate (whether deliberately or not, that’s a whole other discussion), to distract from their poor rule by using the Pakistan card or, in our case, the India card. But Kashmir—which is the source of the tension—is not unresolvable. The Kashmiri people have come out and made it clear that they are ready for a resolution that involves India, Pakistan and the Kashimiri people. But in both countries, the political establishment is terrified of this idea. There cannot be an Indian solution to Kashmir. There cannot be a Pakistani solution either. There has to be a Kashmiri solution. There has to be autonomy within the state of Kashmir—provincial autonomy, I mean. Kashmir is the most militarized zone in the world. It’s the longest running conflict. Dr. Mubashir Hasan, a founding member of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy, is a great voice on Kashmir in Pakistan. I don’t mean to speak on his behalf, but in his writing he’s advocated a demilitarized Kashmir with Pakistan protecting its borders and India protecting its borders but neither country imposing itself on Kashmir and its people—again, autonomy and the devolution of power play big parts in this discussion. I’m also a great admirer of Basharat Peer and his extraordinarily courageous writing on Kashmir. Yes, though, to get back to your main point—Tariq is right, this bogeyman has run dry. PAKISTAN HAS seen growing signs of unrest—the lawyers’ movement, protests against the government’s abysmal response to the massive flooding during the monsoons, the strike of the Gadani Ship-Breaking Democratic Workers’ Union. Do you think any of the social movements in Pakistan today have the possibility of bringing about institutional, structural change? ABSOLUTELY. BUT they have to be people’s movements. They have to come from the grassroots, from those disaffected and those millions dispossessed, like some of the protest movements you mention. The lawyers’ movement was a strange one because it was fought for the independence of a judiciary that said absolutely nothing about the NRO. If the NRO is about anything, it’s about the sanctity of the law. Its about those in power being above the law, about the judiciary being subverted so the corrupt status quo can reign, and there was not one peep about this from the lawyers’ movement. The lawyers’ movement was also a movement heralded as independent, but it was promoted and sponsored by political parties. That made it tribal: one man’s tribe against another, the chief justice against the general. Now that Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has been reinstated, we’re still waiting to see what he does in regards to the disappeared, the NRO, and investigating the corruption he said had him removed from office. The movement seems to have floundered. It had the aim to restore Iftikhar and they did that. Now who defends the disappeared? Who defends the law against those in power who have been extraordinarily enthusiastic about subverting it? But, yes. The objective conditions exist in Pakistan. It’s only a matter of time. Source: http://www.isreview.org/issues/75/interview-bhutto.shtml

Off the Grid by Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto's latest piece on the Afghan refugees in Karachi:

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story.aspx?Storyid=718&StoryStyle=FullStory

Celebrating South Asia’s unlikely heroes

To celebrate their second anniversary, the team behind Kindle, a Kolkata-based, outspoken and progressive magazine for India’s youth, has compiled a list of South Asia’s 30 youth icons. Spanning the worlds of literature, cinema, public sector, art, music and politics, these are people who have (often subconsciously) gone beyond their chosen specialism, to shift the status quo in some way. Sona Hathi speaks to Pritha Kejriwal, (pictured, right) Kindle‘s Editor-in-Chief, about the literary presence within the list and what else binds these 30 personalities together.

Kindle Magazine, 2nd anniversary issue

SH: What prompted you to create such a list?
PK: Once in a while, every publication dabbles into making lists – be it year-end lists, icon lists, song lists, event lists etc. and it’s an essential exercise to make one’s stand clear, to once again assert one’s choices to the readers and to substantially establish the contextuality and the drift of the publication.Kindle’s list of youth icons is also created in similar purview and is an annual tradition. Our first list came out on our first anniversary and the second list – which is the list of South Asian youth icons is our second birthday present to ourselves and our readers.

SH: Upon which criteria was each “icon” selected?
PK: To a lot of people, this list might be a very iconoclastic list, but to us, it essentially defines the values, whichKindle, as a radical and progressive publication, upholds. Hence, even while each of the icons is unique in his/her own ways, all of them are strung together, by a certain thread of profundity, beauty and wilderness, and by an ability to defy odds, shun stereotypes and challenge imaginations. These are unlikely heroes springing up from the unlikeliest of places.

SH: Kindle is a Kolkata-based magazine, and there are arguably many such personalities within India alone, why did you choose to broaden the focus to South Asia?
PK: Kindle very recently announced its Neighbourhood Project. The idea behind this is to work towards a stronger, more united South Asia in our own little ways. Along with many other socio-cultural projects, this list of South Asian youth icons is also an extension of the same context.

Why South Asia? For very many reasons, the most important of which is our geo-political commonality – a shared past and an inseparable future that ties all of us together in more ways than one. These ties cannot be overlooked, instead should be nurtured at all levels – socio-politically, economically and culturally, and this is essential for our very survival in an emerging new world order.

SH: Fatima Bhutto, one of the icons in your list is also speaking at the DSC South Asian Literature Festival. What gained her a place on your list?

PK: Fatima Bhutto captured our imagination, when she came to India to release her book – Songs of Blood and Sword. She was all over the Indian media, speaking so eloquently and with such unabashed pain in her eyes for her battered country and her bruised childhood that she simply could not be ignored. As we dug deeper, we found out that the material that goes into her writing was somewhere very deeply rooted into the complex political flux of the sub-continent; and that, when combined with the romanticism, passion and hopefulness of a young mind, created a strong, enduring body of work. She is a writer, who had made her pact with the darkness and is trying to interpret light. Unanimously, she was an icon to us.

SH: Fatima insists she does not wish to pursue a career in politics, do you think this will inevitably happen at some stage? Can she wield more influence as a politician or as a writer?

PK: That’s a question to which I don’t have a clear answer at this point of time. It’s true that she hasn’t yet captured the political imagination of the people of Pakistan, a very big faction of which hold Benazir Bhutto very close to their hearts. It’s equally true that Pakistan is going through an enormous socio-political churning which may yield changed perceptions, changed agendas, changed imaginations and Fatima Bhutto just might be at the centre of it all. As of now, she may still be as political through her writings.

SH: Another literary icon in your list is graphic novelistSarnath Banerjee, how influential is he, and has he increased the demand for graphic novels in India?

PK: The tradition of storytelling in a graphic format is very very old in India, right from the tradition of Mangal Kabya, Patua or tribal art. Its newest paperback avatar is equally interesting and intriguing, a complex intertwining of genres which transforms visual vocabulary into layered narrative. Sarnath’s work in this genre has been exemplary, often breaking into a riot of new forms, interpretations and characters, making the contemporary graphic novel, very very independent and indigenous. His foray into the form has definitely increased the spectrum of its audience. However the contemporary graphic novel scene is still limited to a very small niche in India. Hopefully, it will grow in the future.

SH: How do today’s South Asian youth icons differ from those of say, ten or twenty years ago, if at all?

PK: Icons, in many ways, are representative of their times. They are people who actively negotiate with their times, to create a dent here and there, to bring about change – in mindsets; and the world of icons is multi-directional, multi-faceted, constantly evolving and changing. Hence, it’s not a good idea to categorize their qualities so physically in time periods.

SH: Who in your view are the most promising and/or influential South Asian writers of today?

PK: In my view, Arundhati Roy is perhaps one of the most influential South Asian writers of today. Her political writings are deeply humane with such a profound sense of justice. Her language is so simple, yet so powerful. In her own words, she is “one stubborn chink of light”.

SH: Finally, the images of each icon are beautiful, why did you use illustrations rather than photographs?

PK: The idea to go with illustrations had multiple reasons. Apart from the obvious aesthetics of it, an artist’s interpretation always opens up the thought to so many other interpretations! So, the icons, bursting into this beautiful riot of colours, gave so much more lucidity to their features, so much more humanity to their expressions and most importantly, so much more space to the reader’s imaginations.

Source: http://southasianlitfest.com/2010/09/kindle-south-asian-icons/

Upcoming Readings At Village Voice

There are two must-see/hear readings coming soon at the Village Voice bookshop in the 6th. First up on January 27 the Pakistani poet and journalist Fatima Bhutto will read from her family memoirSongs Of Blood And Sword. The following week author and former New York Times European cultural correspondent Alan Riding reads from his latest book And The Show Went On: Cultural Life In Nazi-Occupied Paris.

Fatima Bhutto is the grand-daughter of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the niece of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Her father Murtaza Bhutto was murdered during his sister's premiership, when Fatima was 14 years old. She has consistently alleged that Benazir or Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir's widower and current president of Pakistan, had a hand in her father's death. As a journalist she writes regularly for The Daily Beast and the New Statesman amongst others. Hers is a respected international voice in the realm of Pakistani socio-politics, although she has repeatedly intimated that she has no desire to pursue a career in politics.

Her first book, a collection of poetry entitled Whispers Of the Desert, contained work written when Bhutto was just 15 years old. 8.50 am. 8 October 2005, her second book, contained accounts of the devastating 2005 earthquake in Kashmir. Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter's Memoir is an account of her father's life, her family's dramatic, complex history, and the larger story of the country of Pakistan. In a detailed account of her father's murder she makes clear her belief that those responsible for the organization of the attack are now running the country.

For 12 years Alan Riding was the European cultural correspondent for The New York Times. Previously he was bureau chief for the Times in Paris, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City. In And The Show Went On Riding introduces us to a panoply of artists who kept working throughout the four year German occupation of France, amongst them Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, Django Reinhardt, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. Despite the suffocating living conditions more than 200 films were made and thousands of books published, including Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness.

Riding examines the divisions that existed in France before the occupation, divisions that reemerged when the Nazi's arrived. Ultimately he is brave enough to question whether artists and writers have a special duty to show moral leadership in moments of national trauma.

Both events start at 7pm and will be seated on a first-come first-served basis, so queuing up early is essential. The readings are free but buying a book is "suggested" on the website. Make of that what you will good people.

VILLAGE VOICE
6 rue Princesse 75006
Metro St Germain des Pres

Source: http://www.vingtparismagazine.com/2011/01/upcoming-readings-at-village-voice.html

Interview with Jezebel

A wonderful talk by Fatima Bhutto - agree with her or not, the woman has observations and opinions that are worth a listen - especially if you are even remotely interested in the political climate in Pakistan. Lonk to the podcast of the talk:

svn.araudio.org

Source : http://jezebel.com/comment/35308309/#ixzz1BSPGzv00

A Pakistan in mourning will not be silenced

Fatima Bhutto's article in FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/602cb62e-1cef-11e0-8c86-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Aehd4T9a

B & N Review's Songs of Blood & Sword

In September 1996, a 14-year-old Fatima Bhutto hid in a windowless dressing room, shielding her baby brother while shots rang out in the streets outside the family home in Karachi. This was the evening that her father Murtaza was murdered, along with six of his associates. In December 2007, Benazir Bhutto, Fatima's aunt, and the woman she had publicly accused of ordering her father's murder, was assassinated in Rawalpindi. It was the latest in a long line of tragedies for one of the world's best-known political dynasties.

Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of a family of rich feudal landlords—the proud descendants of a warrior caste—who became power brokers in the newly created state of Pakistan. It is an epic tale full of the romance and legend of feudal life, the glamour and license of the international political elite and ultimately, the tragedy of four generations of a family defined by a political idealism that would destroy them.

The history of this extraordinary family mirrors the tumultuous events of Pakistan itself, and the quest to find the truth behind her father's murder has led Fatima to the heart of her country's volatile political establishment. It is the history of a nation from Partition through the struggle with India over Kashmir, the Cold War, through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan up to the post 9/11 'War on Terror.' It is also a book about a daughter's love for her father and her search to uncover, and to understand, the truth of his life and death. A work of international significance,Songs of Blood and Sword establishes journalist and poet Fatima Bhutto as a brave and passionate campaigner.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:

"Brilliant, beautiful, and outspoken, Fatima Bhutto adds fuel to the feud within Pakistan’s warring dynasty...The book [Songs of Blood and Sword] is at once a heartbreaking love story between father and daughter; a pilgrimage across the globe to fill in the missing pieces about her father and the Bhutto family’s history; an autopsy of Pakistan’s corrupt ruling elite; and Fatima’s take on the ills at the heart of Pakistan’s relationship to the West. It’s also a riveting political tale filled with cliff-hangers and pathos."
—Vogue


"Fatima Bhutto has dug deep, bravely confronted those in power and searched far and wide for answers and understanding."

—New York Journal of Books

"…a lucid and engaging account of a nation and a family."

—Publisher's Weekly

"A bleak, disturbing picture of a country of strategic importance to American foreign policy."

—Kirkus

"Moving, witty...a uniquely fascinating, wonderfully well-constructed memoir from the heart of the most violent and Borgia-like of the South Asian dynasties."

—William Dalrymple, The Financial Times

"A story with dazzling twists and turns told by a true-blue member of the Bhutto fold."
—The Independent

"In clear and unpretentious prose [Songs of Blood and Sword] gives a vivid impression of the brutal and corrupt world of Pakistani power politics, which has resulted in the violent deaths of four members of the Bhutto dynasty in the past 31 years."
—Roderick Matthews, Guardian

"Fatima Bhutto writes a compelling account that is both political and personal. Her life is proof that in Pakistan, torn apart by American diktat and local avarice, the political is the personal. Her passion and integrity ring out on every page. If you don't understand what is happening to Pakistan and Afghanistan, you soon will."
—Charles Glass, former ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent, author of Tribes with Flags and Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation

Source: http://www.nationbooks.org/book/210/Songs%20of%20Blood%20and%20Sword

Campaign For Justice for Mir Murtaza Bhutto- December

(If for some the video is not working on blogger you can watch it on the following link:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbgoV3BtvB0

In Solidarity

Fatima Bhutto Fan club

Disclaimer: None of the views expressed here are of Fatima Bhutto or any of her family members. These are views of the team...

Copyright: Fatima Bhutto Fan club.

Please do not reproduce this anywhere without permission.

Tomgram: Fatima Bhutto, The War Against Pakistan

I mean, you couldn’t make this stuff up. In fact, if I were to offer a conspiracy theory to explain it, I might suggest that the U.S. government now exists mainly to feed material to The Daily Show. I’m referring to an article in the New York Times reporting that “the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.”

Don’t laugh. No, really, stop it!

Honestly, it’s perfectly sensible. Secrecy being such an all-encompassing value for our government, why shouldn’t its employees work in the dark, even when the rest of us, the rest of the world, knows what’s going on. Fortunately, I’m not an employee of the U.S. government or its military-industrial contractors; so, though Raytheon, the Library of Congress, and other places have been thoughtful enough to try to minimize the pain of the ongoing Wikileaks dump of State Department documents by blocking people from reading them, and the Obama administration and assorted Internet crews, including Amazon and PayPal, are trying to ensure that there won’t be a fourth, fifth, or sixth round of dumps, I’ve been wandering the Web like any 12-year-old reading around.

You want to know what struck me? Something small. And it happened in Yemen, that anything-goes country whose president Ali Abdullah Saleh gave Washington almost carte blanche to act militarily -- “an open door on terrorism,” as he put it to Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan in September 2009 (according to one of the State Department documents Wikileaks released). More like an open bomb bay, actually. And Saleh was even eager to take credit for those bombs we were dropping. “We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," he told then-Centcom commander General David Petraeus last January.

In return for the right to drop bombs and launch missiles, the Yemeni president got his own “open door” -- directly into the U.S. Treasury: tons of money (it’s euphemistically called “aid”) shoveled his way, U.S. trainers and training for his troops, and lots of fancy military equipment because, let’s face it, Washington is still laboring in a coalition-of-the-billing, not a coalition-of-the-willing world. Still, even for Saleh, there were limits and -- it’s so Washington 2010 of us -- we nonetheless tried to exceed them. According to that State Department document, Petraeus evidently wanted to get U.S. troops -- probably Special Operations forces -- on the ground in combat areas with Yemeni units. According to a State Department observer, “Saleh reacted coolly, however, to the General's proposal to place USG [U.S. Government] personnel inside the area of operations armed with real-time, direct feed intelligence from U.S. ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] platforms overhead.”

In other words, anywhere we have a foot in the door of war, the next thing you know we’re trying to slip a (uniformed) body through it as well. That catches the American way of war these days and helps explain why we always seem to end up more, not less involved, in conflict in distant lands. Among the places where the U.S. offers big dollars for the right to blast the hell out of things, Yemen is actually a Johnny-come-lately. Only recently have American officials made Sana’a, its capital, a Club Med for recreational bombing.

On the other hand, ever since Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage marched into the office of Pakistani autocrat General Pervez Musharraf soon after the 9/11 attacks and reportedlytold him that the U.S. would bomb his country “back to the Stone Age” unless he joined the fight against al-Qaeda, that country has been a magnet for Washington’s top brass, military and civilian. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen had visited 16 times by early 2010 and sometimes there seems to be a greater density of American officials, wheedling, bribing, threatening, cajoling, and maneuvering in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, than in Washington itself. Meanwhile, the CIA’s drones have been attacking Pakistani territory, its helicopters crossing the border shooting, its Special Operations troops on the ground, and the CIA swarming, as Washington acts with relative impunity in that land.

A Flood of Drone Strikes
What the Wikileaks Revelations Tell Us About How Washington Runs Pakistan
By Fatima Bhutto

With governments like Pakistan’s current regime, who needs the strong arm of the CIA? According to Bob Woodward's latest bestseller Obama’s Wars, when Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, an obsequiously dangerous man, was notified that the CIA would be launching missile strikes from drones over his country’s sovereign territory, he replied, “Kill the seniors. Collateral damage worries you Americans. It doesn’t worry me.”

Why would he worry? When his wife Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 2007 to run for prime minister after years of self-imposed exile, she was already pledged to a campaign of pro-American engagement. She promised to hand over nuclear scientist and international bogeyman Dr. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of the Pakistani atomic bomb, to the International Atomic Energy Agency. She also made clear that, once back in power, she would allow the Americans to bomb Pakistan proper, so that George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror might triumph. Of course, the Americans had been involved in covert strikes and other activities in Pakistan since at least 2001, but we didn’t know that then.

This has been the promise that has kept Zardari, too, in power.

According to the recent cache of State Department cables released by Wikileaks, his position and those of his colleagues in government haven’t wavered. In 2008, for example, Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani enthusiastically told American Ambassador Anne Paterson that he “didn’t care” if drone strikes were launched against his country as long as the “right people” were targeted. (They weren’t.) “We’ll protest in the National Assembly,” Gilani added cynically, “and then ignore it.”

In fact, protests by the National Assembly have been few and far between and yet, by the end of November, Pakistani territory had been targeted by American unmanned Predator and Reaper missile strikes more than 100 times this year alone. CIA drone strikes have, in fact, been a feature of the American war in Pakistan since 2004. In 2008, after Barack Obama won the presidency in the U.S. and Zardari ascended to Pakistan's highest office, the strikes escalated and soon began occurring almost weekly, later nearly daily, and so became a permanent feature of life for those living in the tribal borderlands of northern Pakistan.

Barack Obama ordered his first drone strike against Pakistan just 72 hours after being sworn in as president. It seems a suitably macabre fact that, according to a U.N. report on “targeted killings” (that is, assassinations) published in 2010, George W. Bush employed drone strikes 45 times in his eight years as President. In Obama’s first year in office, the drones were sent in 53 times. In the six years that drone strikes have been used in the fight against Pakistan, researchers at the New America Foundation estimate that between 1,283 and 1,971 people have been killed.

While the dead are regularly identified as “militants” or “suspected militants” in newspaper stories and on the TV news, they almost never have names, nor are their identities confirmed or faces shown. Their histories are always vague. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) took a careful look at nine drone strikes from the last two years and concluded that they had resulted in the deaths of 30 civilians, including 14 women and children. (Perhaps, of course, superior American military intelligence classified them as “militants in training.”) Based on this study, an average rate of error can be calculated: 3.33 civilians mistakenly killed in each drone attack. The dead, Pakistanis will assure you, are largely unnamed, faceless, unindicted, and un-convicted civilians.

Pakistanis are considered irrelevant, however, and collateral damage, as it turns out, doesn’t seem to worry anyone in the governing elite.

Think of it this way: this summer, monsoon rains and floods submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, affecting 20 million people. It was the country’s worst natural disaster in its history. Although the body count, under the circumstances, was considered comparatively low -- 2,000 killed -- the United Nations concluded that the destruction caused by the floods surpassed the devastating Asian tsunami of 2004, the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, and the recent earthquake in Haiti combined. Two million homes were destroyed and the crucial food belt in the key agricultural provinces of Punjab and Sindh was ravaged. Millions of children were left homeless or at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. According to the World Heath Organization, 1.5 million potentially fatal cases of diarrhea and another two million cases of malaria are still expected.

During what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon termed the worst disaster he’d ever seen, with the country desperate and prostrate, the CIA launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. Over the 30 days of September, as Islamabad rushed to assure Washington that it would not divert too many troops from the war effort to help with flood relief, 20-odd drone strikes were called in. They would produce the highest number of drone fatalities for a single month in the last six years.

In 2009, in one of the many State Department cables Wikileaks loosed on the world, U.S. Ambassador Anne Paterson confirmed that key player and Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani directed his forces to aid those American drone strikes. Various U.S. operations in the country’s northern and tribal regions were, the ambassadorwrote, “almost certainly [conducted] with the personal consent of… General Kayani.”

The Pakistani media has welcomed the release of the State Department documents because much that reporters and pundits have long claimed (and which Washington has long denied) has now been confirmed: that, for instance, themercenary private contractor Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) has been operating in Pakistan at the behest of the Americans, that the country’s military high command has given the green light for drone strikes on its own people, and that the infamously corrupt government of President Zardari has turned the country over to the Americans in exchange for money.

Pakistan already receives approximately two billion dollars in military aid a year, and that’s just for the army. Under the Kerry Lugar Bill passed by the U.S. Congress, if Pakistan plays nice, opens up its nuclear secrets, and the Army’s internal documentation on how it selects the Chief of Army staff and other matters, the country will get $7.5 billion dollars of “civilian aid” over five years -- and this is just the tip of the financial iceberg, which, of course, offers the present leadership the chance to extend their incompetent rule just a little longer.

One newspaper baron and government chamcha -- apple polisher in Urdu -- became the laughing stock of the country’s new media when he went on television to suggest that revelations about how Pakistan’s government had lied to its people, subverted its national sovereignty, and coordinated foreign attacks didn’t faintly measure up to those about leaders in other countries. Look at Berlusconi!

The Pakistani political establishment has always believed that the West is best. It has, after all, been the ultimate source of their power and so, on December 3rd, Prime Minister Gilani called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, the Defense Minister, and various cabinet ministers, including the Finance Minister, to discuss the Wikileaks scandal and strategies for dealing with any potential embarrassments in yet-to-be-released cables. (Lie, undoubtedly. It worked so well before.)

Tariq Ali, the Pakistani writer and historian, reacted to the Wikileaks revelations swiftly and with a frustration and anger felt by many Pakistanis. “The Wikileaks,” he wrote, “confirm what we already know: Pakistan is a U.S. satrapy. Its military and political leaders constitute a venal elite happy to kill and maim its own people at the behest of a foreign power. The U.S. proconsul in Islamabad, Anne Patterson, emerges as a shrewd diplomat warning her country of the consequences if they carry on as before. Amusing, but hardly a surprise, is that Zardari reassures the U.S. that if he were assassinated, his sister would replace him and all would continue as before. Always nice to know that the country is regarded by its ruler as a personal fiefdom.”

Still, that elite carries on with little sense of the grim absurdity of recent events. As the Wikileaks documents pour out, various members of parliament are queuing up to have their names put forward as possible replacements for the prime minister. Since the only person capable of replacing the president is his sister, there’s no need for debate there.

Like many military chiefs in the past, General Kayani is putting forward his own set of favored names, overstepping the official limits of his office with impunity, while the unelected dark overlord of the government, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, has been offering himself for another unelected posting.

Malik came to public notoriety as Benazir Bhutto’s security adviser -- until her assassination. The job of policing the nation was always a peculiar reward to offer a man who couldn’t keep his one charge safe. Malik, for whom President Zardari issued a presidential pardon and who had all corruption charges against him dropped under the National Reconciliation Ordinance (an odious law pardoning 20 years worth of graft carried out by politicians, bankers and bureaucrats) was also given a senate seat by his friend the president.

Zardari, it is worth noting, did not stand for elections either, has no constituency, and was made president in the very same manner as Pakistan’s previous ruler General Pervez Musharraf: he was selected by his own parliament.

What will Pakistan’s elite learn from Wikileaks? Undoubtedly nothing. And if we’re going by the White House’s response so far, nor will Washington feel more constrained than it ever has when it comes to choosing its allies and running the South Asian arm of its informal global empire.

The Zardari government makes no secret of its gratitude for American support. They have, after all, watched as a foreign power bombs its land, illegally detains or renders its citizens, and turns a blind eye to Pakistan’s flagrant censorship and abuse of human rights.

This obeisance to power is the key to Zardari’s American engagement. And so it will remain. While we wait for Wikileaks to reveal the rest of the cables, which are unlikely to have any bearing on Washington’s future dealings with the corrupt governments of Zardari in Pakistan or President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan (or anywhere else for that matter), we watch as American officials argue for expanding their drone attacks southwards into the natural-gas-rich province of Balochistan. That it shares a border with Iran hardly seems a coincidence.

The Zardari regime’s essential acquiescence has recently been acknowledged via a multi-year “no strings attached” offer of a military aid package by Washington. At the height of the devastation wreaked by the summer floods, the Health Secretary of Balochistan and the Deputy Chairman of the Pakistani Senate both alleged that aid could not be airlifted out of an air base in the city of Jacobabad on the border between Sindh and Balochistan, two flood ravaged provinces, because it was being used by the Americans for their drone strikes in Pakistan. The American embassy issued a swift and suitably hurt-sounding denial, but the damage was done -- and the message was clear: the war against Pakistan continues unabated, with its own government at the helm.

Fatima Bhutto, an Afghan-born Pakistani poet and writer, is most recently the author of Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Nation Books, 2010). Her work has appeared in the New Statesman, the Daily Beast, and the Guardian, among other places. Her father, Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan's former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima lives and writes in Karachi, Pakistan. To listen to a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview in which Fatima Bhutto discusses the unequal U.S.-Pakistani relationship, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Fatima Bhutto

Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175329/

THE LAST WORD ‘I Loved Benazir’ An interview with Fatima Bhutto From the Dec. 6, 2010, issue

Benazir Bhutto’s niece Fatima Bhutto is the author of Songs of Blood and Sword, an account of her turbulent life as a member of Pakistan’s most mythical political family. Newsweek Pakistan’s Nick Jackson spoke with the 28-year-old in London recently. Excerpts:

Have the Bhuttos been a force for good or bad in Pakistan?

We’ve been a force of great destruction. Dynasty negates participation, and limits democracy. If you subscribe to [notions of] dynasty, you cannot subscribe to any democratic or participatory philosophy, politically. The fact that you have a country of 180 million people held hostage to one or two families is always going to be a bad thing. It’s not productive, it’s not progressive, it’s not just, and it’s not democratic.

Will you ever enter politics?

I am very political in my writing and activism, but I have to rule a political career out entirely because of the effect of dynasties on Pakistan.

You spoke movingly about your estranged aunt in the immediate aftermath of her assassination. Was this a bid for power?

I loved Benazir. I was very close to her as a child. [But] that Benazir I lost long before she was killed. Of course, I was upset—I was horrified [about her death]. Three years later, we can see there was no other reason for being upset than that my aunt was killed. The Benazir pre-power was an incredibly brave and vulnerable woman fighting a dictatorship. I think power changed that, and I would very much like to keep power out of the equation. I like to hope, with any family, that each generation learns from the mistakes of the previous. That's certainly something I’d like to do.

You attract a great deal of criticism in Pakistan. Why?

It’s strange. People have made their lives off this family, and when you threaten someone’s livelihood people get very wrathful, frazzled. And it goes the other way, too. People remember someone else, they remember those ghosts, and see you through a very fuzzy lens. Hopefully, people will realize they’ve got to pin their hopes and fears and hatreds on someone else, on another family.

The account of your slain father, Murtaza, in your book is said to be overly generous, particularly the PIA hijacking case.

There are conflicting accounts about the hijacking, but it’s the same courts that accused Murtaza of the hijacking that cleared him of it. More than 90 cases were filed against him, and he’s been cleared in all of them so far. Under [the governments of] Benazir, Nawaz Sharif and [Pervez] Musharraf, he’s been cleared.

In the wake of the floods, you said people should be wary of giving money to the Pakistan government. Do you regret that?

Money can’t be given to the government. We know that from the 2005 earthquake: $5.6 billion was raised from [foreign] donors, and I challenge anyone to find any documentation for where that money has gone. Money won’t reach the people if it goes via the government. Of course, there’s wastage with international organizations, and it’s never an ideal situation to be reliant on UNICEF not only because of their overhead costs but because they can’t reach everyone. There are wonderful organizations in Pakistan that do good work, but if you’re talking on the BBC, people will want to know where their money has gone.

Has the 18th Amendment made you reconsider your opinion of your uncle President Asif Ali Zardari?

Zardari’s certainly no more democratic than a military dictator. What’s the difference? He was selected to be president in the same way Musharraf was. Democratic institutions in Pakistan haven’t been strengthened. The 18th Amendment is an interesting case: the president still has the power to eject any member from his party, and the prime minister is still a member of his party. It was a very cosmetic change. It’s the Zardari way of doing things.

Source: http://www.newsweekpakistan.com/the-take/180