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See the actual Video below;

www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/30/undercover.slaughter.video/

Bhutto helped create Taliban monster

A2 * TORONTO STAR * WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2008

NEWS > DIMANNO > UNSOLVED MYSTERY

SAEED KHAN/GETTY IMAGES

Pakistani policemen patrol at the site of the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi yesterday. Parliamentary elections — originally set for Jan. 8 — are expected to be delayed until February, due to the fallout caused by Bhutto's death. A date is to be announced today.

Bhutto helped create Taliban monster

I

n 1991, Pakistan's intelligence services stashed a massive cache of assault rifles and am­munition at a secret weapons dump in Spin Boldak, rushing ar­maments across the border as a (phony) deadline loomed for end­ing direct supply of their favoured combatants in Afghanistan's civil war.

Seventeen tunnels beneath the dump contained enough weaponry to arm thousands of soldiers.

Three years later, the Taliban broke the depot open and handed out rifles — still wrapped in plastic — to volunteers summoned from local madrassas, an incident docu­mented in the authoritative book Ghost Wars.

Within 24 hours, the Taliban cap­tured Kandahar, Mullah Omar took possession of the governor's headquarters, and the airport was seized — with its six MiG-21 fighter jets, four Mi-17 transport helicop­ters, fleet of tanks and armed per­sonnel carriers.

The Taliban gutting of Afghani­stan was on, nearly all opponents swept aside, Kabul falling with barely a whimper.

As Ghost Wars author Steve Coll

ROSIE DIMANNO

so dryly put it: "Benazir Bhutto was suddenly the matron of a new Afghan faction."

The late — twice — but no longer future prime minister of Pakistan was far, far from a stupid woman. The Taliban was a gamble she took, cunningly if not without consider­able trepidation — and certainly at the behest of a powerful intelli­gence service, the ISI, she feared but had to accommodate, in the doomed hope of retaining office.

But make no mistake: The wom­an who is now being so widely mourned — assassinated last week, perhaps by the very elements she empowered more than a decade ago — was nurturing stepmother to terrorists incubated under her watch; the same Islamist fanatics she inveighed against during the election campaign that came to a

screeching halt in the calamitous assault on her motorcade.

She was a brave woman, without question, but Bhutto was much to blame fqr the tinderbox that Paki­stan became during her exile hi Dubai and London — the toxic mil­itary entanglement with the Tali-ban — having helped to create a monster that not even the spon­soring ISI can control any longer.

For years, during her second ten­ure as PM, Bhutto lied brazenly to Washington about the extent to which Pakistan, with her approval, was covertly arming and funding the Taliban. As Bhutto admitted in a 2002 interview: "Once I gave the go-ahead that they should get the money, I don't know how much money they were ultimately given ... I know it was a lot. It was just carte blanche."

For Bhutto, the objective was to keep a new Afghanistan yoked to Pakistan and out of India's orbit. (Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was considered far too Delhi-friendly.) Out of this re­lationship would flow the riches of a Pakistan-controlled trucking in­dustry circumventing Kabul — a modern Silk Road trade incorpo-

rating the markets of Central Asia — the never realized gas pipeline from Turkmenistan, and training camps, off the Pakistan reserva­tion, for fighters deployed to Kash­mir.

Bhutto had an economic and po­litical vision for Pakistan, one that depended largely on creating a compliant client state next door. It all got away from her, as it did also ,., from the ISI. Indeed, Al Qaeda -^jBj now firmly interwoven with the S|f Taliban — was contemptuous of *4ljf Bhutto from the start, plotting her political demise, at the invitation of some ISI officers, as early as 1989.

Maybe by 2007, Bhutto had learned from her mistakes. Per­haps there was more to her than the democratic platitudes she es­poused, as Washington's latest pu­tative ally in the region. But this was a woman who lied and con­nived with brio, bewitching even the most garrumphing skeptics with her intelligence, charm and beauty.

She's already a better martyr than she ever was a leader of state. Rosie DiManno usually appears Mon­day, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.