Web Letters: Benazir's Bequest

The author might need to be reminded that the elections in Pakistan, if they are held, will be for the purpose of electing a Prime Minister and not a president. Musharraf is the president of the country. And the president of Pakistan is not popularly elected; she/he is elected by a ballot casted by the assemblies.

Omer Shaukat

Charlottesville, VA

It is really strange to see Benazir Bhutto repeatedly martyred and idolized in the pages of The Nation.

The facts of the matter are that Bhutto was an autocratic despot who even had her own brother assassinated when he became a threat to her power. Under her rule, Pakistan was a source of assassinations and human rights violations, and even as Benazir Bhutto was padding her pockets with huge sums of money coming from the various criminal schemes she hatched, even as Interpol was trying to gather enough data for an arrest warrant for Bhutto on major crimes, her intelligence services helped to create the Taliban in their early form in Afghanistan in the Kush.

She only returned to Pakistan because the US was setting her up to replace Musharraf in power, where she would be able to continue the brutal and kleptocratic regime she constructed there so long ago.

The Nation should be jumping for joy that this monstrous woman was finally removed from the scene, as much as an assassination is a sad end.

Seymour Friendly

Seattle, WA