International
Musharraf can't tackle militants: Benazir
By Kesava Menon
Manama (Bahrain) Jan. 21. Senior members of the Indian Cabinet are not the only ones who are skeptical of the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf's capacity to deliver on his declaration that he will tear down the terrorist infrastructure in his country. One amongst those who think on the same lines is the former Pakistan Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.
In an article in Monday's Gulf News, she argues that it is only a civilian dispensation that can tackle religion-based terrorism in Pakistan and not the military which boosted this phenomenon in the first place. If the article is read together with those points that Ms. Bhutto has very conveniently left out, it could be described as self-serving.For instance, Ms. Bhutto writes, "The democrats stoically faced the theocrats in upholding the banner of freedom and human rights during past decades. In its defiance the democratic forces laid the culture that enables Pakistan today, should it will, to make a retreat from theocracy''. The truth is that neither Ms. Bhutto nor Mr. Nawaz Sharif nor anyone else who has sat on the Prime Ministerial chair in Pakistan since 1990 (and this by the way includes Mr. Moeen Quereshi) ever took on the fundamentalists head-on. The civilian Prime Ministers of Pakistan have been irked by the fundamentalists and have broken their political alliances with such forces as quickly as they could. But they had never tried seriously to break up the fundamentalist-terrorist networks and had usually, in their rhetoric, pandered to the extremists.
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