If Pakistani history is any guide: probably not.
As the latest video report from Channel 4 of the United Kingdom now streaming across the internet and numerous eyewitness accounts attest, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was shot by a seemingly professional, cool, clean-shaven young assassin in dark glasses standing within a few feet of her car, as she emerged from a successful rally in Liaquat Bagh, Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007. The video shows him calmly moving in her direction, accompanied by another man whose head was shrouded in a white sheet: the suspected suicide bomber. The film shows her head jerk suddenly as if hit by a bullet and then shows her fall inside her vehicle before the suicide bomb explosion that killed and injured scores around her car.
Yet the Pakistan government, which presented its "initial investigation" findings last week, insisted she had died as a result of a skull fracture -- one that was caused as her head hit the lever of her car's sunroof after the bomb explosion. This government presentation was made by the same spokesman who was reportedly quoted in the immediate aftermath of the attack as saying she was unhurt and had been driven away from the scene.
There will be calls for investigations, domestic and foreign. Now President Pervez Musharraf has said that Scotland Yard will be helping Pakistan's investigation and the team has actually arrived in Pakistan. While there is no a priori reason to doubt that Musharraf wishes to solve this murder, history indicates that Pakistan's governments have evaded or mishandled the search for truth in all major terrorist attacks and subsequent deaths, including those of heads of government and state and the Pakistan army.
Take the case of Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was shot dead by a lone assassin on 16 October 1951 in Company Bagh, Rawalpindi. This was the same location where Ms. Bhutto was killed last month, renamed in memory of the first assassinated prime minister. The killer -- a Pashtun named Said Akbar- was immediately shot and killed by a police officer, even as the crowd tried to subdue him. The government appointed a high level judicial commission to inquire into the assassination. The investigation team was headed by a senior police officer and assisted by Britain's Scotland Yard. It took ten months to produce a report that did little but produce various conspiracy theories. The main focus appeared to be on the "insiders", Punjabi politicians who resented the supremacy of the "outsider" prime minister, an émigré from India to the new Muslim state. Further investigations were being conducted when the senior police officer in charge of the case was asked to bring all the documents to the new prime minister. The plane he was taking to his meeting with the prime minister crashed en route, killing him and destroying all the documents. Liaquat's death was never solved.
On August 17, 1988, Pakistan's dictator and army chief President General Zia ul Haq, who had ruled the country after overthrowing Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1977, took off from Bahawalpur, southern Punjab, for Rawalpindi in a US-supplied C-130. Within minutes, the plane went into a series of fatal "phugoid" or yo-yo like movements and then crashed into the desert Zia was killed instantly, as were several high-ranking officials, including the US ambassador Arnold Raphael, military attaché Brigadier General Herbert M. Wassom, the chairman of the Pakistan Joint Chiefs of Staff General Akhtar Abdur Rahman and a score of senior army officers plus the crew. Two crates of mangoes had been loaded onto the heavily guarded plane before it took off. My research and those of others indicates that a nerve agent was released from timed devices in the aircraft rapidly immobilizing its crew and passengers. Some of the nerve agents may have been hidden in those exploding mangoes. No mayday call was issued. Zia's vice chief and successor General Mirza Aslam Beg told his army colleagues a few days later in a speech at army headquarters that he suspected insiders and would pursue and catch them to bring them to justice. But nothing definitive happened. The FBI involvement in the investigation, mandated by law at that time, was brought to a halt by the Centcom Commander at the time General George Crist, according to Beth Jones, the acting ambassador of the US embassy. No FBI agents were allowed into the country till seven months after the crash. Key pieces of evidence disappeared from the crash site and the hangar where parts of the crashed C-130 were kept.
The Pakistan military did not even put the investigation on the agenda of the first meeting in October 1988 of the joint chiefs after Zia's death. The US did not wish to create further instability in Pakistan. It found allies in the Pakistani army's higher command. The sons of Zia and Abdur Rahman wished to pursue the case but apparently were dissuaded by their US intelligence contacts, who had worked closely with Zia and Rahman in the prosecution of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. To this day, the public does not know who killed Zia nor why.
On January 8, 1993, the Pakistan army chief, General Asif Nawaz, my elder brother, suffered a massive heart attack while exercising at his home in Rawalpindi and died shortly afterward in the military hospital. Two months earlier he had become nauseous, sweating profusely after imbibing something at the Joint Chiefs of Staff Headquarters. He told me that Army doctors told him that he had food poisoning. Later at a judicial inquiry into his death they changed their diagnosis to an inner ear infection. General Nawaz's wife received anonymous letters claiming that people in then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's office had conspired to poison him over time. They did not provide any tangible proof of those charges. Tests on his hair samples conducted on my behalf by an independent laboratory in the United States that summer showed lethal traces of arsenic. A foreign investigation was requested by his wife. But the three-person team from the US, UK, and France that conducted the exhumation and subsequent tests came up with a delayed report that indicated that there was no arsenic in his system! That report was never released to the public. No attempt was made subsequently to determine the huge discrepancy in these results. The mystery remains till someone comes forward from within the US government at that time or from Pakistan. A freedom of information request by me for information from the Department of State is still pending.
On September 20, 1996, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, the estranged brother of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of a breakaway faction of his father's party, and six of his supporters were shot to death by police on a darkened street in front of his home in Karachi's tiny neighborhood of Clifton. A large police contingent was posted to the area. Yet his bleeding body lay for some time before it was taken to a hospital. No one knew why the lights had been switched off on that road that night. Accusations were leveled against Prime Minister Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari, whom Murtaza Bhutto had reportedly insulted by shaving off half his mustache, and separately against President Farooq Leghari, seen at odds with Ms. Bhutto at that time. Both denied involvement. Zardari was charged with the murder after Bhutto's government was removed. But nothing was proven. The crime scene had been washed of all evidence. And a Scotland Yard team that was brought in could shed no light on what happened or why.
Now, another Prime Minister of Pakistan is dead at the hand of an assassin. There are calls for an independent inquiry. Zardari is asking for a UN inquiry along the lines of the Hariri Commission that investigated the death of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The Government of Pakistan may mount its own judicial inquiry. It is in its own interest for the government of President Pervez Musharraf to reach the bottom of the truth in this latest death. But in the best of circumstances, most governmental efforts of this kind in Pakistan's history have been marked by either incompetence or mal-intent, or both. If the past is any indicator, this death too will remain a mystery.
Within hours of the death, the firemen were in action hosing down the crime scene and washing away whatever key evidence might have been available in the aftermath of the death of Ms. Bhutto. Neither the Government of Pakistan nor the US Administration seemed to favor an independent inquiry. Scotland Yard's belated arrival and their uncertain ability to work independently of the Pakistani authorities will mar their findings. Latest reports indicate that Pakistani authorities say they were unable to get fingerprints from the pistol used by the assassin. The people of Pakistan's desire to reach the truth behind a major leader's death will likely be short changed once again. They deserve better.
This year more than 3,350 deaths have been linked to terrorist attacks in Pakistan, more than twice the number in 2006 and five times the number killed in 2005. In 2002, there were two suicide attacks in Pakistan. In 2007, there have been at least 45. A recent Gallup Poll indicated that roughly half of all Pakistanis polled were fearful of walking alone in their areas at night, a drop from 71 per cent in 2005. Against this evidence, the government will have a hard time to make its case that it is winning the fight against terrorism or that it will get to the bottom of Benazir Bhutto's murder.
Shuja Nawaz is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its army, and the wars within (forthcoming) from Oxford University Press which covers the issues covered in this article in greater detail. He regularly appears as a commentator on television, radio, and at think tanks.