The carnage that met on her return to Pakistan showed the brutality of the Islamic threat. But it also exposed how weak the answers to it are, writes Graham Usher in Karachi It took 10 hours for 's return to Pakistan to turn into the bloodiest nightmare. At midnight on 18 October one, perhaps two, suicide bombers ran into the masses surrounding her triumphal motorcade in Karachi and blew themselves up. In a surging, molten flash, 140 people were killed and more than 350 injured. Miraculously, the two-time prime minister was not among them. For most of the procession she had stood aloft her steel-reinforced campaign bus, swooning in the adulation of the thousands that had come to see her first visit to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile. But at the time of the blasts she was in the hold. "I was very, very fortunate," she said from a safe house at her Karachi party headquarters. Two things can be said about Bhutto's homecoming and its terrible aftermath. One is that, despite exile, she still commands the most efficient political party machine in Pakistan. On 18 October thousands bussed, cajoled and paid tens of thousands to turn out and receive her -- even if her claim that there were "three million" awaiting her in Karachi was vainglorious. "If nothing else, she showed she is still a force to be reckoned with", said analyst Talat Aslan. Second, the barbarity of the attempt to kill her pushed to the fore the issue she has long claimed to be the fundamental fracture in Pakistan -- that of a moderate majority versus a militant Islam and those in Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment that support it. "Of course they [the militants] would like to kill me," she said on 21 October. "They fear the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) under my leadership because they know the ordinary people of Pakistan, the moderate middle, want a moderate nation that gives them employment, education and empowerment. They don't want chaos." Few in Pakistan would disagree with the last part of this diagnosis. But fewer believe Bhutto has the right remedy for the clash. She is not returning to Pakistan to confront a military regime that, for years, nurtured radical and sectarian Islamic outfits precisely to sideline mainstream, secular political parties like the PPP. She has decided to work with it. Under a US finessed "deal", she has agreed to throw the popular weight of the PPP behind Pakistan's President-General Pervez Musharraf if he stands down as chief of the army. He has agreed to amnesty her against a slew of corruption cases that allegedly total $1.5 billion in public money. The trade has outraged Pakistani liberal opinion and embarrassed many in her party. It has also exposed her to the charge of hypocrisy, says opposition leader Imran Khan. "Given the way that she has undermined democracy by siding with Musharraf, I don't know how she has the nerve to say that the 130 (sic) people killed in those bomb blasts sacrificed their lives for the sake of democracy in Pakistan." Bhutto has also not done herself many favours by casting Pakistan's "moderate- extremist" divide in language and actions that might have been minted in the White House. In recent months she has supported army operations in Islamabad and on the Afghan border that have killed hundreds of civilians and displaced thousands. She has also said, if prime minister, she would let the US army invade Pakistan if the quarry was Osama bin Laden or any other top Al-Qaeda or Taliban leader. These views are opposed by the vast majority of Pakistanis, "moderate" and "extremist" alike. They also hinder those forces in Pakistan who wish to combat Islamic militancy without kowtowing to American imperialism, says Fatima Bhutto, Benazir's niece and one of her most trenchant critics. "For the last eight years we have fought the dictatorship in Pakistan, denounced its policy of 'disappearing' those wanted by the CIA and promoted women and minority rights. At each step the fundamentalists denounced us by saying this was America's agenda. But it's not -- it's a Pakistan agenda. Now Benazir comes along and says actually it is an American agenda and she will bring democracy the American way. Well we know from Iraq and Afghanistan what democracy the American way means -- it means civil war". For many, the bottom line is that the threat posed by militant Islam in Pakistan now goes beyond the capacity of Musharraf, the army, Bhutto and Washington or any coalition between them. It requires a collective, national strategy. It cannot be fought according to scripts drafted in Washington and London, says analyst Pervez Hoodbhoy. "The notion of a power-sharing agreement [between Musharraf and Bhutto] is a non- starter. Instead, the government should help create a public consensus through open forum discussions, proceed faster on infrastructural development in the tribal areas [bordering Afghanistan] and make judicious use of military force. This is every Pakistani's war, not just the army's, and it will have to be fought even if America packs up and goes away."
