Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

On the heels of my earlier post about the mixed legacy of Benazir Bhutto and the problems caused by our government’s meddling in the affairs of Pakistan, I ran across another post addressing the problems (”Ron Paul Is Correct About Pakistan” by David T. Beito and Scott Horton).

Beito and Horton write:

This “wisdom” of interference is so conventional that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer expressed shock when Republican candidate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas said that the tragedy proved his case for nonintervention in the affairs of other nations. We should not, Paul said, either subsidize or work to undermine other governments because such policies invariably only empower our enemies.

But why should Blitzer have been shocked?

Benazir Bhutto herself thought this was so. In one of her last interviews, she told Parade magazine, “[The U.S.] policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country. I now think al Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.”

They further argue that by continuing to interfere, we actually play into their hands (as I’ve argued myself in the past):

Terrorism is a tactic adopted by weak actors. Having limited resources with which to wage war, groups like al Qaeda resort to a sort of foreign affairs judo: using the enemy’s power against itself – in this case, us. The action for them is in the reaction. Al Qaeda’s strategy is to recreate the old Afghan jihad against the USSR: hit the U.S. and our allies hard in order to provoke invasion and occupation to bleed our treasury and military dry. They celebrate our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as steps towards our eventual total withdrawal from the region.

Even if we don’t invade Pakistan but merely meddle in the government, we still provide something for Al Qaeda to appeal to when recruiting.

In the mean time, we now have reports that the Al Qaeda fellow blamed for the killing denies he had anything to do with it. Since we were given three contradictory reports of what exactly killed Bhutto (gunshot, shrapnel, or finally a blow to the skull) and video evidence seems to rule out the latter “official” version from the government, it doesn’t surprise me that there’s confusion on this point too.