27 December 2024 marks the seventeenth death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto. She sacrificed her life courageously while resisting the agenda of fanatics and terrorists in Pakistan. She fought relentlessly against forces bent upon making Pakistan a theocratic state so that it could never progress towards egalitarianism and democracy. Unfortunately, her assailants and their abettors are still at large. Those arrested were exonerated on August 31, 2017, after trial lingered on for nearly a decade.
Since the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007, Pakistan has been continuously entrapped in dreadful conflicts and grave crises—constitutional, political, economic, etc. Since the mandate given by the masses through elections on February 8, 2024, has been stolen and denied, it is now widely felt that the country lacks leadership capable of pulling the State out of the existing mess.
In today’s Pakistan, there is not a single leader who matches the vision and determination of Benazir Bhutto to regain what we have lost domestically and internationally. It is tragic and shameful that the state machinery has utterly failed to unveil the real hands behind Benazir’s assassination even after a lapse of seventeen years. After the verdict by Anti Terrorist Court on August 31, 2017, Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians accused Pervez Musharraf (late) of hatching a conspiracy for her assassination, and in retaliation, the late General accused Asif Ali Zardari being the main beneficiary—the well-known motive theory was applied by him.
The wages of appeasement towards militants, the inaction of the rulers against them, and their protection by certain quarters culminated in the most lamentable barbaric incident in Peshawar on December 16, 2014, when seven terrorists of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) launched an attack on the Army Public School.
The TTP mercenaries were clad in the uniform of the Frontier Corps and entered the school from the rear. They stormed the premises and held it in the 9-hour siege. They moved from classroom to classroom, massacring innocent students and staff—nearly 150 lost their lives and many hundreds received serious injuries. Thereafter many attacks were made by these cowardly forces but their ability to strike without challenge is valiantly countered and largely destroyed by our armed forces. Unfortunately, it has resurfaced again.
The carnage in Quetta on August 8, 2016, killing 70 and injuring over 100 was another great jolt to the entire nation. It was documented in a detailed Inquiry Report prepared by Justice Qazi Faez Isa, now retired as Chief Justice of Pakistan with a controversial legacy. It was followed by a wanton attack on Quetta’s Police Training Centre on October 23, 2016, killing 59 cadets and injuring 116.
Peshawar school massacre and before that sad and gruesome killing of General Sanaullah Niazi, Lieutenant Colonel Touseef, and others on September 15, 2013, Bashir Ahmad Bilour, senior and respected leader of Awami National Party (ANP) and others on December 22, 2012, bomb blasts at many places, attacks on armed forces and civilians by the militants since 2001, are links of a single chain. These have been openly claimed by TTP and/or other banned militants/religious outfits—all proxies of Neo-Colonialists in their ‘New Great Game’.
At one point in time, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz)—PMLN—Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) were advocating a “truce” with terrorists. PTI received their wrath, losing Law Minister Israrullah Gandapur and many others, after sharing power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with Jaamt-i-Islami (JI)—an ardent and open defender of militant Islam.
It is obvious that there exists a ‘Grand Design’ under the ‘New Great Game’ aimed at keeping Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Iran, and even India, especially in the wake of China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), in turmoil by certain powers that need to be analysed and understood in its entirety if our civil-military leadership wants to overcome the menace of militancy/terrorism.
Benazir gave her life for resisting the designs of those who support militants to wreck Pakistan providing them pretext to intervene physically in the name of safeguarding nuclear arsenals
The ghastly attacks on GHQ Rawalpindi, PNS Mehran Base in Karachi, PAF Base at Kamra, intrusion in Abbottabad, invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and campaigns against Libya, Iran, Syria, and other Muslim States should be seen from the perspective of keeping the threat of fundamentalism alive by some hidden hands.
We all know who admitted to having created the monsters like Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and provided them with billions of dollars. All these were well-designed ploys, observes Dr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan, in The Great Game Continues. His core argument is that “the purpose is not to eliminate the ‘Islamic threat’ but to contain it within manageable limits and to spawn the next generation of terrorists”. In Pakistan: Drug-trap to Debt-trap, a detailed discussion is available on how the Late Neo-Colonialists invented new enemies and eliminated the older ones as part of the ‘New Great Game’.
Dr. Sachithanandam says that “Islamic threat created through Al- Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS, etc. is a leverage to intervene in countries for self-aggrandisement”. In the case of Pakistan, its prime goal is distancing Islamabad from Beijing and exploiting energy resources abundantly found in Balochistan and, in the long run, perhaps derail the US administration’s well-laid plans to bring Afghanistan to heel and to dominate Central Asia and its oil-rich Caspian Sea Basin,” Dr. Sachithanandam argues at length in his paper, The Great Game Continues.
The phenomenon of fundamentalism is complex and riddled with many puzzles. It cannot be understood without studying the foreign policy of the United States in which terrorism, drugs, arms, and war, play a pivotal role. This is not a recent phenomenon. From the early part of the twentieth century, US leaders have been using arms, drugs, and war hysteria as tools to advance their foreign policy objectives.
Analysts and scholars have yet not probed the assassination of Benazir Bhutto from the perspective of ‘New Great Game’ unleashed by powers at war in this region having economic interests. Benazir gave her life for resisting the designs of those who support militants to wreck Pakistan providing them pretext to intervene physically in the name of safeguarding nuclear arsenals.
Even after seventeen years of the tragedy of losing great leader Benazir Bhutto, our agencies have failed to punish her assailants and forces behind terrorism. The responsibility for this rests collectively on civil-military leadership and judiciary.
Benazir, as a popular leader of the poor and dispossessed, will always live in the hearts of the masses. If the legacy of Benazir is to prevail, people from all walks of life must work hand in hand to resist and counter the forces of exploitation, bigotry, extremism, fanaticism, and fascism, which are part of the New Great Game aimed at controlling South Asian and Central Asian resources through the bogey of Islamic militants with the ultimate objective of containing socialist China, defiant Iran and undermining nuclear Pakistan.