I don’t have much to say on the whys and wherefores of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Sharper minds than mine can give you excellent theories on who might have done it and why, whether Bhutto’s hagiographers are right and what happens next.
What caught my ear was some of the language used by politicians who, we can very reasonably suspect, might see Bhutto’s death as something of an opportunity. Take Gordon Brown, for example:
This atrocity strengthens our resolve that terrorists will not win there, here or anywhere in the world.
Easy for a man standing behind bullet-proof glass to say. Whose resolve? Our resolve? Put another body on the fire, would you, said Gordon. You do have to admire his ‘me and you against the world, kid’ spirit, mind. Like in his New year message where he says:
Just as we withstood the Asia crisis, the American recession, the end of the IT bubble and the trebling of oil prices and continued to grow…
Who’s this ‘we‘? I know quite a few people still crawling from the wreckage of some of those disasters. And while none of them starved, certainly a few will never walk again without help and none of them feel like crowing about a retooled Spirit of the Blitz either.
Forget for a minute that Brown might come to regret that use of the word ‘terrorists‘ in his eulogy to Bhutto. Should anyone in the Musharraf regime be fingered in connection with the assassination expect the word to be replaced with something like ‘rogue elements‘. Such linguistic contortions are the smaller price paid for cosying up to dictators. Concentrate instead on the word ‘win‘.
Much has been said about the nature of The War Against Terror and whether it can be won, lost or - looking at nascent efforts to engage with the Taliban in Afghanistan - drawn. Does Brown mean anything by ‘win’ other than paying lip service to propaganda?
I suppose if he’s looking at T.W.A.T. as one big game, then yes, the terrorists mustn’t be allowed to win. After all, it’s not as if there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of substitutes to replace those players stretchered off. To some, however, the assassination of a moderate and female Pakistani voice looks like a pretty big victory in its own right. I imagine Benazir Bhutto’s family aren’t viewing her death as a bump in the road to victory.
To Gordon’s mind, it’s probably akin to conceding a goal just before half-time. Yes, it’s particularly demoralising but after the break we’ll just have to dust ourselves off and level the score before notching the winner. Not forgetting the own goals of a million Iraqi dead and a resurgent Taliban that we’ll have to scrape back as well.
The coaching staff might want to look at substituting over-rated defender Pervez Musharraf who seems to be flagging. He’s definitely leaving space for the opposition to exploit. He’s promised to ‘redouble‘ his efforts in fighting Islamic extremists which would suggest he hasn’t been giving the team his full 100% in what is, after all, a vital fixture.