Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteFirst, I offer my condolances with regard to the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Both Bhutto and Musharraf have long represented strands of the English education system, colonialism, and contemporary cosmopolitanism, and of the two, Bhutto may have offered Pakistan the greater hope for stability and continued integration with other of the world's trade systems by campaigning from her position out of power.
The incumbent "government in power" is always the "devil one knows"--the best alternative inevitably the best hope for change amenable with the needs of a culture at large.
Having done here with appropriate sentiment, however, Pakistan's down-to-the-core deepest issue would seem its inability to produce sufficient trust or systems enforcing such to the effect that the best of its would-be leaders produce the capability of working together for achievable and common ends.
Instead of providing the bellweather for an effort to produce a cohesive national politics, Bhutto's assassination seems to have touched off another round of "hot potato", starting with the discovery of a report "to give proof of vote rigging" [1] related to upcoming Pakistani polling to U.S. politicians. The report could well exist and well be true, but its surfacing in the nation's political conversation so soon after murder contributes to and reinforces Pakistan's already devisive and xenophobic political life.
Instead of spurring an effort to distill essential state issues and produce for Pakistanis a greater distributive justice within state systems in their totality, the PPP stance, which amounts to "Musharraf did it" (or, less vindictive but equally pointed, "Musharraf allowed it"), would seem to reinforce some culture-wide obsession with retribution, i.e., a retributive social system, the produce of which is deep mistrust among all parties concerned with governance as well as a continued drift toward the political chaos that undergirds Musharraf's reactionary position and Islamic extremism both.
1. "Benazir was to give proof of vote rigging, says PPP senator." The Daily Times, January 2, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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