- Peter Bergen, CNN Terrorism Analyst
We are at JFK airport on the way to Pakistan to report on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto who I first met in 1989 when she was Prime Minister. I was then a young associate producer for ABC News 20/20 and we interviewed her for a story on the legal status of women in Pakistan. She was beautiful and intelligent and had the air of someone who is rarely contradicted.
I met her again a decade later in 1999, first for tea at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington and then at the suburban house of one of her supporters in New Jersey. Then she was very much out in the political wilderness; two years into a self-imposed exile and bedeviled by corruption charges. Many felt her political career was over. I had the sense that official Washington was treating her as something of a pariah.
One story she told me then is relevant to what happened today in Pakistan: She said that a young Saudi militant named Osama bin Laden had bribed some politicians to vote against her in a no-confidence vote in Pakistan's Parliament in 1989. Al Qaeda has long despised the first woman prime minister of a Muslim country.
And then I met Bhutto for the final time at a dinner at the Mayflower hotel in Washington a couple of weeks before she returned to Pakistan in October of this year. She was in great spirits, enormously charming and dominated the conversation because of her intellect and infectious brio. I spoke with Asif, her husband, who agreed with me when I suggested that the imminent return to Pakistan of his wife was a moment of great triumph for her and her family. Asif agreed but he also warned, "You know there are also dangers in returning. We have agreed that I will remain out the country in case anything goes wrong." Today something went terribly wrong.
As we are about to get on our flight I can't help but think that we will arrive in a Pakistan made terribly somber by this tragedy, for this is Pakistan's Kennedy assassination.
My buddy Rick had this to say, and I couldn't agree more.
Americans have this overwhelming tendency to cling to ignorance, as if they believe it's somehow safer. So many still believe that Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and terrorism in general swooped out of the sky one day in 2001 and attacked America because they hate our freedoms.
On a world scale, these machinations have been in place for many years. It baffles me how so many Americans can continue wearing blinders. Reductionism, willful ignorance, and a national arrogance rivaled only by that of Manifest Destiny are certainly not helping us to be productive players on the world stage. We attack the symptoms, but not the cause, refuse to hold any accountability for the actions we take that will surely someday result in catastrophic blowback, and profess total amnesia when forced to pay the piper his due at the cost of thousands of lives, whether they be in collapsing buildings, exploding trains, or tragic assassinations.
And to suggest that all if this is not part of a wider issue that is older than many believe - certainly older than I am - is dementia.
He's got a damn good point. Americans have an alarming tendency to ignore world events - if it isn't directly and obviously affecting them, they simply don't give a shit. I spent yesterday morning glued to every damn news source I could think of, and a friend of mine, when I told her what was going on, asked why I cared. Excuse me? Not only is this my job and, if i'm frank, something I actually care about and am passionate about, but this is a major world event with serious serious implications for not only Pakistan and US-Pakistani relations, but for US Foreign Policy and I don't think i'm venturing too far out of my own gate when I remember that we are fighting a so-called war against terrorism, and this may just have an impact on it.
"What do you care?" she asked me, "you don't live in Pakistan. So what?"
This is the problem people. This is the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment