Hundreds and thousands of Pakistanis attend the funeral of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan’s political future remains unclear and riots erupted as news of Bhutto’s assassination spread across the country. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has blamed Islamic militants for carrying out the assassination, but several associates of Bhutto have accused Musharraf himself of having a role. In an email sent to a confidant in the US two months ago, Benazir Bhutto wrote that Musharraf should be held “responsible” if she was assassinated, because his government did not do enough to provide for her security. We go to British-Pakistani author and activist Tariq Ali in London and historian Manan Ahmed in Chicago for analysis of the current crisis and Benazir Bhutto’s checkered history. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Tariq Ali, acclaimed British-Pakistani historian, activist, and commentator joins us now on the phone from London. He is one of the editors of the New Left Review and the author of a dozen books.
Manan Ahmed, historian of Pakistan and South Asian Islam. He blogs at Chapati Mystery and at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment.
JUAN GONZALEZ:
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Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. He writes fiction and non-fiction and his non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author.
