The New Nation - Internet Edition

AP, Islamabad

The assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has pitched Pakistan into a political freefall and raised fears that increasingly bitter divisions in the society are turning the country into another Iraq.

Shocked citizens blame the deepening turmoil on President Pervez Musharraf and his U.S.-backed crackdown on Islamic extremists. Overwhelmingly poor and more concerned with survival than anti-Western terrorism, most crave stability above all, and many believe things will only get better if Musharraf resigns. "The government of Musharraf has created an Afghanistan and Iraq-like situation in our country," said Zaheer Ahmad, 47, who works at a private clinic in Multan. "I don't know who killed Benazir Bhutto. But I do know that it is the result of Musharraf's wrong and bad policies." While many Pakistanis want him gone, there is no consensus on who could replace Musharraf - or whether anyone can unify the country's bickering political factions.

The suicide attack that killed Bhutto on Thursday has unleashed a maelstrom of anger among her supporters and three days of unrest have left more than 40 dead and tens of millions of dollars in damage. In some cities, security forces are now authorized to shoot rioters on sight.

Her killing has also deepened the sense that the rule of law, let alone prospects for democracy after eight years of authoritarian rule under Musharraf, are now in danger. Bhutto was the leader of the biggest secular political party and lionized by the rural poor.

Although her strongest support came from her home province of Sindh, she was perhaps unique in Pakistan for having national appeal across ethnic and religious divides, including among the moderate Muslim majority and minority Christians and Hindus. There is an alarming gap between Pakistan's rich elite - which she belonged to - and the majority of the 160 million people with a per capita annual income of just $720.

Critics derided her a political opportunist, tainted by corruption allegations during her two terms in office. Nevertheless, her passing has left a vacuum in Pakistani politics.

The most natural successor to Bhutto is another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who leads the other main opposition party.

Sharif is more conservative than Bhutto and rose to political prominence under a former military regime. It appears very unlikely he could coexist with Musharraf, who toppled him in a 1999 coup. He has demanded Musharraf's resignation and has vowed to take vengeance against the "rulers" for Bhutto's killing. The U.S. is pressing for Jan. 8 parliamentary elections to be held on time, but few in Pakistan believe that is a panacea for the current crisis.

"The most important question in Pakistan's politics is how to overcome the menace of religious extremists who want to impose themselves on society by force," said journalism professor Mehdi Hasan. "Unless there is a consensus on that, holding elections and democracy cannot change the situation in Pakistan."

Musharraf's Western allies have supported his leadership as a stabilizing force because of his control of the powerful military and his willingness to take on Islamic extremists. But he is now a divisive figure among his countrymen, unlikely to achieve national reconciliation.

He has largely alienated mainstream secular parties, whose support he needs to fight militancy. And with violence skyrocketing, he has lost the confidence of the public.

His promises to restore democracy have little currency, particularly after he declared a state of emergency this fall and purged the Supreme Court when it challenged his dominance. A poll conducted by the International Republican Institute last month found 72 percent of respondents opposed Musharraf's recent re-election to the presidency for a new five-year term.

"He is deadlocked with the political forces, deadlocked with the judiciary and deadlocked with civil society. He is now a huge part of the problem," said analyst Shafqat Mahmood, who once served as a Bhutto spokesman.

Yet Musharraf has his supporters.

AP, Larkana

Three days after Benazir Bhutto's killing, driving through her home province is a perilous experience. Charred vehicles, felled trees and rocks litter the highway, and nervous travelers paste her portrait to their cars to appease prowling mobs.

"Long live Bhutto!" one motorist shouted to a gang armed with stones and pieces of wood manning a roadblock.

After a brief discussion, he was allowed to continue on his way.

Bhutto's killing in a gun and suicide bomb attack on Thursday plunged Pakistan deeper into political crisis and triggered an orgy of violence that has killed more than 40 people and left hundreds of banks, shops, gasoline stations, railway stations and offices torched. Sindh, an agricultural region in the south of the country where Bhutto grew up, has seen the worst of the unrest. An Associated Press reporter who took the 280-mile highway that connects Larkana, Bhutto's hometown, and Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, on Saturday saw just a dozen cars and one truck traveling on it. Scores of smoldering vehicles lay beside the road.

In one attack near Larkana, unidentified assailants opened fire on a motorcade of Bhutto's supporters as they headed back to Karachi after her funeral, killing one man and wounding two others, said Waqar Mehdi, a spokesman for Bhutto's party.

Along the normally bustling highway, hundreds of truckers with loads of coal, rice and sand were stranded at small motels or by the roadside, too scared to continue their journey. Long lines formed at the few gasoline stations bold enough to open.

"We have all been uselessly stuck here for three days and want to reach our destinations and then go home, but who knows when normalcy will return?", said 30-year-old Farid Ahmed, a stranded driver.

Some people pasted photos of Bhutto on their vehicles, either because they were supporters of the former prime minister or because they felt doing so offered them some protection against the mobs burning bits of wood and pulling cars over. In towns and cities in Sindh, many people complained about food shortages.

"I am looking for fresh milk for my 2-year-old for the past day have not been able to get any," said Hanif Khan, from Saddar city. Sindh's provincial home minister Akhtar Zamin said he ordered police to guard gasoline stations so trucks could resume food deliveries.

AFP, Islamabad

Born from chaos and bloodshed, and still steeped in turmoil 60 years on, Pakistan has repeatedly defied predictions that the centre of the world's only nuclear-armed Islamic nation cannot hold.

While Benazir Bhutto's assassination has renewed fears Pakistan will become another failed state with a destiny determined by bombs instead of ballots, analysts say it has been down this road before -- and survived.

Pakistan is accustomed to seeing its political leaders meet a violent end, to be followed by claims civil war is at hand, and a kind of internal war has been part of the national fabric since its birth in 1947, they say.

Carved out of the rump of the British empire to give Muslims their own homeland with the partition of India, even the nation's founding was soaked in blood, with one million killed during the largest migration in human history.

"Pakistan was constructed as a contradiction, a homeland for Muslims that called itself a secular state. That is something Pakistanis have not come to terms with," said Marie Lall, an expert at British think-tank Chatham House. "But because there is a problem with the basis for the creation of Pakistan, that does not mean it is destined to be a failed state," she told AFP.

Often seen now as little more than a breeding ground for Islamic militancy, Pakistan is a complex mass of tribes and peoples where even the all-powerful military has come to believe that setbacks today do not mean failure tomorrow. The army, rulers of the country for more than half its existence, had to step in almost at the beginning, following a 1948 conflict with India over the Himalayan region of Kashmir that set off decades of strife.

Since then, Pakistan has lived through war and assassination, turmoil and the "war on terror" -- even the loss of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, which is widely seen as the most traumatic moment in its history.

AP, Kabul

Taliban militants fired rocket-propelled grenades from their vehicles at a convoy of private security guards on Afghanistan's main highway, killing six guards and two police officers, a police chief said Sunday.

The attack in a dangerous section of Wardak province occurred Saturday afternoon as the security contractors were guarding equipment being driven from Ghazni city to the capital Kabul, said Wardak police chief Gen. Zafaruddin, who goes by one name.

Taliban militants opened fire on the convoy near Maydon Shahr, about 20 miles southwest of Kabul, and six guards and two policemen were killed, he said.

This year has been Afghanistan's most violent since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion drove the Taliban from power. More than 6,300 people, mostly militants, have been killed in insurgency-related violence, according to an Associated Press count.

Meanwhile, the U.N.'s top representative here, Tom Koenigs, said he was "particularly concerned" that an Afghan consultant who worked for the U.N. remains jailed after he accompanied officials from the U.N. and European Union, allegedly to a meeting with Taliban commanders in Helmand province.

The government asked the two officials to leave the country last week, and detained the Afghan consultant for attending the alleged meeting.

"We've made it clear to the Afghan government that we want to see him released as soon as possible, because even the government has publicly stated that no U.N. staff member was involved in any secret talks," said Aleem Siddique, a spokesman for the U.N. mission.

AFP, Qufu

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda called for closer cooperation with China on Sunday as he wrapped up a four-day visit in which the two sides pledged to build on a recent thaw in relations.

"This trip to China has been very meaningful," Fukuda told reporters after visiting a shrine in eastern China to the ancient philosopher Confucius.

"I have talked with Chinese leaders and agreed that Japan and China can do more if they cooperate than each can do single-handedly."

During his landmark visit, Fukuda held talks with Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao in Beijing on closer cooperation between the nations in trade, climate change and other fields, although they failed to close the gap in a stubborn dispute over maritime gas fields.

Fukuda, however, has accentuated the positive during his trip, his first to China since becoming prime minister in September and the latest step forward in a relationship marred by decades of distrust.

"There's no good thing if Japan and China confront each other," Fukuda said Sunday.

Ties between east Asia's two dominant nations, long coloured by Japan's brutal invasion of China before and during World War II, have improved rapidly.

China cut high-level contacts with Tokyo during the 2001-2006 premiership of Junichiro Koizumi due to his visits to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, which venerates 2.5 million war dead including war criminals who invaded China.

But Koizumi's successor Shinzo Abe, and now Fukuda, have reached out to Beijing to keep diplomatic ties on a par with a deepening trade relationship, partly due to intense lobbying by Japanese industrialists seeking a warmer atmosphere.

Both sides have said President Hu intends to visit Japan in 2008, probably in the spring, at the culmination of a series of landmark visits that also saw Wen travel to Japan earlier this year.

AFP, London

Benazir Bhutto's last words were "Long live Bhutto", the chief political adviser with the former Pakistani prime minister as she was killed told the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph. Bhutto shouted the words from her car just before she was killed at a campaign rally in the northern city of Rawalpindi on Thursday, said Safdar Abbassi, who said he was sitting behind her in the vehicle. "She did not say anything more," he recalled, in what the weekly broadsheet said was the first account of Bhutto's death from inside her car. Recounting the incident, Abbassi said: "All of a sudden there was the sound of firing. I heard the sound of a bullet. "I saw her: she looked as though she ducked in when she heard the firing. We did not realise that she had been hit by a bullet."

He said he looked up to see Bhutto sliding back through the sunroof, just before it was rocked by a huge explosion.

There was no sound from the 54-year-old and Abbassi said he noticed blood seeping from a deep wound on the left side of her neck.

His wife Naheep Khan cradled Bhutto's head in her lap and pressed her own headscarf onto the politician's wound to try to stem the blood flow.

AP, Washington

Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden warned Muslims against supporting Iraq's US-backed government and promised the "liberation of Palestine," in a new online message issued Saturday. In the 56-minute tape, the hunted militant accused the United States of seeking to control the region through the Iraqi government, according to SITE, a US-based institute that monitors extremist web forums. He singled out Iraqis fighting against Al-Qaeda in Anbar province, and the Islamic Party of Iraq, a political group allied with the government, saying that Muslims supporting it are traitors to Islam, the monitor said in a report. "The group is assisting the Americans in Iraq" and "fighting against the mujahideen" Islamist warriors, Bin Laden said, according to an excerpt translated from the Arabic by SITE.

The message came in the form of a video displaying a still image of him along with an audio commentary.

Bin Laden labeled any Muslims cooperating with the US-led Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as apostates, and accused the United States of seeking to set up a separate Iraqi government through which to access oil.

He also said that with Islamist mujahedin fighters currently engaged in Iraq, the "liberation of Palestine" will follow, adding the mujahedin would never recognize Israel nor any Palestinian government that accepts a Jewish government, including one led by the Hamas Islamist movement.

AFP, Damascus

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said that Damascus values dialogue with Washington in a meeting with visiting US Senator Arlen Specter on Saturday, official media reported. Muallem stressed the "importance of dialogue between Syria and the United States on the basis of mutual respect," the state SANA news agency said. He said it was "necessary for the two sides to agree a common platform which would contribute to resolving crises" in the Middle East. Specter arrived in the Syrian capital earlier in the day accompanied by Congressman Patrick Kennedy. Relations between Damascus and Washington have been strained since the US-led invasion of Iraq of 2003. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying his "patience ran out" on the Syrian leader "a long time ago." "So if he's listening, he doesn't need a phone call, he knows exactly what my position is," Bush said at a year-end press conference.

AFP, Havana

Cuba's ailing leader Fidel Castro has defended naming his brother Raul to stand in for him last year, saying no one in the communist country's national assembly saw it as nepotism. In a letter to the assembly Friday, the 81-year-old strongman also again made an ambiguous suggestion that he could give up the presidency, saying that he had stopped clinging to power. "There was a stage when I thought I knew what had to be done and I wanted the power to do it," he admitted, saying it was due to "an excess of youthfulness and deficit of conscience." "What made me change? Life itself, tempered by the profound thought of (Jose) Marti and the classics of socialism," Castro said, in the letter read by assembly speaker Ricardo Alarcon. In the letter Castro also referred to criticisms made by Washington that in choosing his brother Raul to steer the country he was being anti-democratic and reserving power to his family.

"In the proclamation signed on July 31, 2006, none of you saw it at all as an act of nepotism nor as a usurping of the functions of the assembly," he told the body.

The communist leader turned over his responsibilities to Defense Minister Raul Castro "temporarily" in July 2006 to recuperate from surgery. He has not been seen in public since, and there have been no clear reports on the state of his health.