Sad Legacies Of Colonialism: Pakistan, Kenya

(BULLETIN: The Los Angeles Times today announced its endorsements of the two clearly superior candidates for the respective party presidential nominations -- Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic and Sen. John McCain for the Republican. Congratulations to Jim Newton, editorial pages editor, and David Hiller, publisher. More to say about this tomorrow).

The British and French colonial empires left a sad legacy of disorganization and violence in many countries, but none more so than in Pakistan, Kenya and Algeria. All three of these countries are dysfunctional and have been for a long time.

Kenya has been a great deal in the news lately, following a failed election that spun the country into tribal strife and ethnic cleansing. Hundreds have been killed, while the Western powers and the United Nations try to stitch the East African country back together. So far, they have had little success.

But this is really not new for Kenya. I remember visiting Stanley Meisler, then the L.A. Times correspondent resident in Nairobi, in the fall of 1968. As I was about to go to bed in his spacious home, he pointed to a kind of sash hanging down over my bed. "Now," he explained, "if there are intruders during the night, just pull that, and the police will be here in two minutes."

"WHAT?" I exclaimed. "Oh," Meisler said, "We still have remnants of the Mau Mau in this neighborhood."

Under a facade of greater stability than bordering Uganda, Kenya has evolved into a more and more violent and corrupt place. While foreign correspondents based there often extolled its virtues, the present strife would not surprise the author Paul Theroux, who, in his book, "Dark Star Safari," reporting on a trip almost all overland from Cairo to Capetown in 2003, depicted Kenya as more corrupt at that moment than Uganda. I've been reading Theroux's book, because I'm about to undertake a long cruise around the African continent and am scheduled to spend three days in the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Theroux seems more aware of Kenya's problems than some correspondents long based there.

In Kenya, but also in Pakistan and, for that matter, the Holy Land, the British seem to have left a tradition of internecine strife. For one thing, they had tolerated tremendous ethnic divisions without really trying to do anything about them. And then, exhausted by World War II, they cleared out in a great rush, leaving a mess behind. It might have been better had they been more perseverant about fulfilling what they had once said were their colonial responsibilities.

This is certainly true in Pakistan, which the British allowed to be partitioned from India, despite the fact that Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of the Subcontinent thought it was a terrible idea.

And it has certainly turned out that way. Pakistan is a fundamentally unstable and violent country that often just doesn't work, and is now nuclear-armed with a growing terrorist insurgency that threatens the rest of the world.

Just yesterday, U.S. forces based in Afghanistan used a Predator, a drone aircraft, to fire a missile that killed an Al-Qaeda leader, Abu Laith al-Libi, in the North Waziristan borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is only nominally Pakistani territory. Foreign armies have been fighting over it going back to the 19th century and even before. It was never really stabilized under the British Raj. Now, it is a bigger threat than ever.

At the beginning of the year, two high-ranking American emissaries visited the Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, in the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to ask him to agree to allow American forces to pursue Al-Qaeda and the Taliban on Pakistani territory. Musharraf publicly said no. But the drone attack by the U.S. yesterday that killed al-Libi indicates that he may secretly have given the go-ahead. Such drone attacks began in 2002. In the last few months, they have intensified.

Pakistan is a real mess, and there may have to be American and Indian intervention there to prevent Al-Qaeda from taking control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Almost anything is possible. Meanwhile, it is becoming another Iraq, with a proliferation of suicide attacks and assassinations. British failures during the colonial period helped cause today's strife.

The same thing is true with the French in Algeria. After a violent revolution, the French bugged out in 1962, and probably had to. Algerian strife was threatening the stability of the French government itself.

But what was left was a fundamentally unstable, violence-wracked country. In recent years, there have been coup d'etats, the imprisonment of the early revolutionary leader, Ben Bella, and a bloody civil war against Islamic extremists. The extremist attacks continue. Just recently, the United Nations aid building in Algiers was bombed, with the loss of at least 17 lives.

Now, despite its wishes, the French feel constrained to help the present moderately-Muslim Algerian government keep the lid on. If they don't, the terrorism in Algeria may spread to France and Spain.

When European imperialisms are examined, we see, in a broad historical context, that they don't seem to have worked out too well. In Kenya, Pakistan, Algeria and even Israel, they have left in their wake instability that threatens the world. And this is not a complete list of troubled lands formerly ruled by Europeans. I haven't even mentioned the bloody legacy of Dutch,
Belgian and Portuguese rule in Africa and Asia.

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Sam Zell, the new Tribune Co. owner, will meet with L.A. Times employees next Thursday. By then, the newspaper will probably have a new editor, and will have made its endorsements in the presidential campaign. In short, we should know more by then about the future of the paper, at least in the short term.

Who Is Behind The Bhutto Assassination?

Written from Needham, Mass.--

After the American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded in 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan, the French writer Bernard Henri Levy wrote a book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" that suggested the crime resulted from Pearl finding out too much about the connections between Pakistan's intelligence services, nuclear scientists, and Islamic terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.

That book comes to mind today as we consider who was behind the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, an act which has spun that chaotic, dictatorial country into a greater crisis that affects the whole world.

Much has been written about the assassination in the 48 hours since it occurred. I particularly was impressed by the Op Ed Page piece in the Los Angeles Times by Amy Wilentz, wife of Op Ed Page Editor Nick Goldberg, who had known Bhutto since their student days at Harvard, and had interviewed her only recently in Dubai. Wilentz wrote that Bhutto, as prime minister, had been "notoriously-high handed," before being removed for allegedly being corrupt, and she suggested "the desire for political redemption pulled her back" from exile in the present situation.

"Certainly, she knew the mess she was stepping into: a nuclear-armed country governed -- or not governed -- by an unstable military-affiliated regime in the neighborhood of two U.S. wars. It was clear that her return might make the mess messier," Wilentz wrote.

"Bhutto's hideous murder has made the situation even more obscure, but as events play out, perhaps we will see more plainly who the real players are in Pakistan. Her death, and the definitive end of the Bhutto dynasty, means a new era for Pakistan. But a new era is not always a better one."

Certainly, Bhutto was a conflicted character, as the obituary in the New York Times by its great Middle Eastern reporter, John Burns, now stationed in London, made clear yesterday. Burns described Bhutto as "a woman of complex and often contradictory instincts. Mrs. Bhutto was a politician who presented herself on public platforms as the standard-bearer for Pakistan's impoverished masses, for civil liberties and for an unfettered democracy, while at the same time she often behaved in an imperious manner in private, and in her dealings as prime minister with government officials, diplomats and reporters.

"She once rebuked a reporter who was left waiting for an interview in the living room of the prime minister's residence in Islamabad for having the temerity to look at family photographs on the mantel shelf. 'Where do you think you are?,' she asked."

Bhutto, when she returned to Pakistan recently, seemed to have a death wish, not forgetting that her father, the onetime president and prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been hung by a military dictator in 1979. What else can explain her insistence on appearing in risky situations in public even after suicide attacks directed against her had killed 140 persons on the night she returned?

Bhutto, like John F. Kennedy, was riding visibly in an open car in a dangerous city, when she was shot and her car blown up. Since then, there have been suggestions that Al-Qaeda was behind the crime, but there have been charges by her allies that elements in the Pakistani government close to the present military dictator, Pervez Musharaff, may have been at least complicit in the crime.

On the basis that Al Qaeda and its allies in the Taliban have the most to profit from the lack of stability in Pakistan, I might be inclined to let Musharaff himself off the hook. Why would he want a murder that could only compound the dangers to himself?

But the fact is that Musharaff, an "ally" of the United States after a fashion in the War on Terror, does not well control his own government, military or intelligence services. They are rife, as I remarked two days ago, with conspirators, traitors and loonies capable of anything. It is representative of the larger, tortured Islamic world.

Now, there are many calls for an international investigation into Bhutto's assassination. But just what good that would do escapes me, since, like the Kennedy assassination, masses of the public would never be satisfied with the explanation. It is also clear that, regardless whether they were guilty in this instance or not, the leaders of Al-Qaeda, for the good of humanity, must be exterminated just as soon as they can be found. It is unbelievable that this has not already happened.

Besides that, there are bigger issues in Pakistan than Bhutto's death. What would happen were Pakistan's nuclear weapons fell into the hands of the extremists?

It could well be that foreign intervention in this country will be needed. It would be mandatory did it appear likely that Musharaff was going to fall and possibly be replaced by the terrorists.

This indeed is a world crisis, and, fundamentally, it involves nuclear proliferation. It should certainly be clear that the U.S., India, Israel and even Russia and Western Europe could not afford to live with an Al-Qaeda-dominated nuclear weapon.

A dynamic, ambitious and, to a degree, a noble woman with high aspirations, is dead. What will now follow?

One thing that must follow is a strong dedication to their own personal security by the world's leaders. Assassins are loose, and none of these leaders should go riding around anywhere in an open car.

Musharraf's Emergency In Pakistan Is Necessary

There will be hand wringing from Washington and London to all points east, but the emergency proclaimed today in Pakistan by the military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, is necessary as a last resort to prevent Al Qaeda and Taliban gains that could soon result in a seizure of control by terrorists in that nuclear-armed state.

The United States over the last several months has been working to fortify Musharraf by arranging a coalition between himself and the exiled prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. But Bhutto's return to the country on Oct. 18 was marred by twin suicide bombing attacks that killed 140 of her supporters in Karachi, and Bhutto, never exactly a strong leader, left the country again for her home in Dubai. (There were reports Saturday that in the wake of the proclamation of emergency, she was trying to return again to Pakistan).

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, buttressed by an influx of foreign Islamic fighters, have been spreading their insurgency out from the borderlands of Waziristan, next to Afghanistan. The New York Times reported just yesterday that fighting now extends out of tribal areas into the cities of Pakistan's north, and there have been suicide attacks in the last week against regular Pakistani armed forces elsewhere in the country. Some Pakistani soldiers have been taken hostage.

At the same time, the Pakistan Supreme Court has been considering a nullification of Musharraf's recent reelection by the parliament. This morning, following his proclamation of an emergency, eight of the 11 Supreme Court justices said it was illegal. But there were reports that Musharraf has ordered army units to surround the court and has deposed the chief justice.

The stakes in Pakistan are too high for the U.S. to back off its longtime support of Musharraf now. And, after all, Pakistan has throughout its history, since partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, been mostly under military control of one kind or another. This is perhaps a state that never should have been created. Democracy there has never lasted for long.

What I believe is happening is that Al Qaeda and its allies are transferring the main seat of the war from Iraq to the east, to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and given the existence of nuclear arms in Pakistan, this is becoming a far more critical theater of the War on Terror than Iraq.

Just this week, there have been new signs that the war in Iraq is being won by U.S. forces. U.S. military deaths in that country were 39 in October, the lowest level in two years, and deaths of all persons from suicide bombers were down 80%. All deaths from sectarian strife and insurgent action in the city of Baghdad are running only about one third the number of a few months ago. These are signs of gains that should not be ignored. They indicate that President Bush's tactic of a "surge" in U.S. forces in Iraq has worked out well.

A turning point in Iraq may have come this fall when the three leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards, all declared in a Democratic candidates' debate in Hanover, N.H., that they would keep at least some U.S. troops in Iraq through their first term in office (until 2013). This combined with the recent statement by retired Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, former head of the U.S. Central Command conducting the war, that U.S. troops may remain in the Middle East for the next 50 years, may well have discouraged Al Qaeda profoundly. Once the terrorist commanders realized the U.S. was likely to stay, they seem to have decided to pursue new fields of endeavor, and the prospects in Pakistan, for now, seem more promising, and perhaps more important, to them.

The next days will be critical in Pakistan. What will be the popular reaction to the state of emergency? What will Musharraf do to pacify or control the Supreme Court? What will be the reaction of the terrorists? And what will be the American and Indian reactions?

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Eric Malnic's obituary in Friday's Los Angeles Times of Paul Tibbets, Jr., the Air Force pilot who commanded the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, was impressive, and clearly superior to the New York Times obituary. Tibbet was 94.

The decision of President Harry Truman to use the bomb, in effect, brought World War II to an end and saved hundreds of thousands of lives that would have been lost had an American invasion of the Japanese home islands been required. However, Truman's decision has only grown in controversy over the years. Could the atomic bomb have been demonstrated in some way, say in the oceans off Tokyo, that would have induced the Japanese to give up, without the deaths of so many thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Terrorists Strike Benazir Bhutto In Karachi

Written From Lyme, N.H.--

In another instance of terror attacks meant to destabilize Pakistani society, suicide bombers allegedly working for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban attacked the convoy of Benazir Bhutto as she reentered Karachi after eight years in exile.

Reports today are that 136 died and about 250 were injured in the attempts by at least four extremist Muslim assailants to murder Bhutto amid rapturous welcoming crowds.

Fortunately, the former Pakistani prime minister, who had been riding on top of an armored truck before the bombings occurred, was inside the truck and protected at the moment of the attack. Security agents quickly removed her, unhurt, to safety.

Bhutto today assailed the terrorists and again vowed she would work to destroy their influence in Pakistan. But, shaken by the attack, she also suggested that elements of the government sympathetic to the terrorists might have somehow facilitated their plot. It is not the first suggestion that Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf does not fully control his own government.

The fact is that until Osama bin Laden and his followers are terminated, they will continue their attempts to remove in nuclear-armed Pakistan every semblance of civilized order. Their aim is to take over both Pakistan and its nuclear weapons, and this would be such a dire threat to the world that they must be stopped no matter what the cost.

This is what foes of War On Terror in Washington and elsewhere do not understand: This is a war to the finish, and not until Al-Qaeda and its allies in the Muslim world are finished will the world be safe. Fortunately, these are such murderous, barbaric organizations that one day they may implode. We have already seen in Iraq how they have lost, through their brutal practices, the allegiance of even most of their fellow-Sunnis. Now that Al-Qaeda has begun to lose in Iraq, it may shift the battle to Pakistan, as a more promising locale.

That said, it is an embarrassment for the Musharraf regime that its security forces could not or would not better protect the Bhutto convoy. What almost happened to Bhutto was reminiscent of the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in the Philippines the very day that he returned to that country from exile.

One of the complicating factors in Pakistan, like many Muslim countries, is that duplicity is everywhere. In Pakistan, from even before the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, there have been a whole host of questions as to just who is on whose side. Pakistani intelligence is strongly permeated with sympathies for the terrorists, nuclear engineers reach their own deals with foreign countries, Musharaff and Bhutto command conflicting loyalties. It is a country that is barely organized and mostly incapable of ruling itself.

The Bhutto caravan last night was headed for the Muhammed Jinnah Memorial, which honors the devious politician who insisted on the partition of India in the first place, a 1947 separation that was accompanied by internecine strife that killed a million people and set up in the case of Pakistan a fundamentally unstable state, while leaving more than 100 million Muslims behind to destabilize India. It would have been better to force the Muslims to accept Hindu control throughout the subcontinent.

The whole region continues to pay the price of the haste of the British to give this region independence. As in the Holy Land, the British left a mess behind.

Pakistan -- We Cannot Easily Dismount The Tiger

In one of those silly intellectual articles that they love to run on the L.A. Times Op Ed Page, Rajan Menon, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University and a fellow at the obscure "New America Foundation," advocates that the U.S. essentially do nothing in the crisis now enveloping Pakistan.

Nick Goldberg, editor of the Times Op Ed Page, loves to run starry eyed, would-be appeasers, and Professor Menon is one of them.

He writes, notably, "The Administration's best course of action in Pakistan is inaction. Let Pakistanis find a solution to their crisis. Any made-in-America remedy will not only fail to make matters better, it will make them worse. President Bush would do well to remember the aphorism, 'First, do no harm,' or, given his penchant for the informal, a folkster variant, 'Don't do something, just stand there.'"

That was what the intellectuals advised President Carter in the crisis that deposed the Shah of Iran and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power, and we know how that ended up. America abdicated its position and has been paying for it ever since.

No, we are going to have to choose in Pakistan, or we may find ourselves with a nuclear-armed Taliban and Al Qaeda. In a flash, they could seize power in a country which, for the most part, remains with a secular majority. That majority could be overwhelmed and the whole country cast into the dark ages.

Ever since the War on Terror began, we have been allied in Pakistan with the regime of Army dictator Pervez Musharraf. Now, there can be no question that Musharraf is in political trouble. Suicide bombing has become commonplace and the country's Supreme Court has strayed out of Musharraf's control.

Is the answer, simply to move away from him and let the chips fall where they may? Or should we try, as we are doing, to patch together a national unity government of Musharraf and the former premier Benazir Bhutto (not including the former premier, Nawaz Sharif, who is no friend of the U.S).

To me, the answer is obvious. As in the old proverb, that you cannot dismount a tiger because you may end up inside, the sounder course is to try to stick with the continued authority, although perhaps reduced in a coalition, with Musharraf. It is too early to conclude, as this weak-kneed professor does, that he is another Anastasio Somoza, Shah of Iran or Ferdinand Marcos, in short a dictator without a prayer of survival.

Musharraf, for all his faults, has at least turned out to be resourceful. When his life was threatened, the plane he was riding in told that it could not land in Pakistan, years ago, Musharraf directed that the plane ignore the threats to shoot at it and land anyway. It did, and that was the day he seized power. Since then, after casting his lot with the U.S., more or less, he has survived several assassination attempts.

It was a mistake for the departing British in 1947 to allow the Pakistani state to be created in the first place. It has been a military fiefdom, with rare, brief exceptions, ever since. that has contributed little good to the world, while a democratic India, the country it split from, has prospered by comparison. Now, in terrorist hands, it could threaten the world, and force us to take action far more severe than trying to stick with Musharraf, possibly in a coalition with Bhutto.

Meanwhile, a little realism on the Times Op Ed Page is in order, but we probably can't hope for it until Goldberg leaves town and moves back, with his Eastern-loving wife, to New York.

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George Skelton, the L.A. Times staff political columnist, had another of his classic columns yesterday on the career of Michael Deaver, the aide to Governor and President Reagan, who died recently. The column recalled Skelton's 50-year association with Deaver, going back to their days together an San Jose State, and how Deaver parleyed piano playing and general resourcefulness to build a successful career.

I wrote about Deaver too after his death, but not nearly so eloquently as Skelton was able to do.

Word also comes today that Janet Clayton is leaving the L.A. Times and her post as metro editor. She has been with the newspaper a long time, and has served the paper ably, but I'm sure a good replacement can be found.