Bhutto Assassination: Who Stands to Benefit?

The assassination of Pakistan’s twice-elected Prime Minister raises many a question of grave concern.

Ask yourself who benefits most from the removal of Benazir Bhutto from the Pakistani political landscape.

As he does with mostly everything these days, President Musharraf was quick to tie the assassination back to the fight against terrorism. When President Musharraf addressed the Pakistani nation shortly after Bhutto died from her injuries in a Rawalpindi hospital, he said she was assassinated by the same terrorists against whom the country has been fighting.

But the Islamic militants are not the only ones who disliked Bhutto...

Is it possible that Musharraf is just scapegoating “religious extremism” in Pakistan for Bhutto’s murder the same way he used it to justify imposing emergency rule?

After all, Musharraf stands to reap the most benefits from the vacuum in political leadership left by Bhutto’s death.

It is plausible that the religious extremists in Pakistan played a role in her assassination. Bhutto had repeatedly avowed to crush the rising extremism and militancy in Pakistan after she came into power. Bhutto also received letters threatening suicide attacks from “friends of Al Qaeda” on October 23.

While the religious extremists had their reasons to hate Bhutto, they did not have much to gain from ensuring her removal from the Pakistani political arena. The Islamic parties in Pakistan are floundering for minimal support, even in their stronghold of NWFP where they won control of the provincial assembly in 2002. As I wrote in an earlier post, only 4% of Pakistanis intend to vote for the religious parties in the upcoming elections. The reasons for this disfavor are myriad and such that wouldn’t be solved by the removal of Bhutto alone.

Maybe former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had a motive because his party, PML-N, was the main opposition to Benazir Bhutto’s PPP in the January 2008 elections. Sharif, however, has been permanently barred from contesting the elections. The Election Commission of Pakistan bases the rejection of his nomination papers on his conviction in 2000 on terrorism and hijacking charges while Sharif’s party claims that the rejection is politically motivated and that Musharraf is behind it. Sharif’s supporters point out that his nomination papers were rejected on December 3, 2007 on the grounds of his 2000 conviction despite the fact that they were accepted for the 2002 elections when he was in Saudi Arabia.

With Bhutto killed and Sharif barred from contesting the election, Musharraf’s party, PML-Q, no longer has to face Pakistan’s two biggest political parties in January’s parliamentary elections. Interestingly enough, two days prior to her return to Pakistan and the twin suicide blasts that took the lives of about 140 people, Bhutto sent a letter to Musharraf in which she named four persons she believed posed a threat to her life. One of the four she named was Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, Chief Minister of Punjab and parliamentary leader of PML-Q. Elahi is now widely tipped to become the next Prime Minister of Pakistan.

The assassination of Bhutto leaves the U.S. without a viable West-aligned, moderate and democratic leader committed to continuing America’s war against terror in Pakistan. The U.S. administration again finds itself in a situation where seemingly it has no option but to rely on Musharraf.

Bhutto’s untimely and tragic demise has left Musharraf in an unparalleled, strengthened position. His party faces effectively little competition in the upcoming elections. He has once again become the only suitable front-man in Pakistan to fight America’s war against terror.

Will the U.S. administration be able to find another viable, democratic leader to support in Pakistan? How will U.S. foreign policy shape up following this tragedy?

And, perhaps most importantly, what will Musharraf do?

What You Didn’t Know about Foreign Aid

As the U.S. rethinks its promise of $750 million in civilian aid to Pakistan’s tribal regions, and Australia, Britain and France promise new aid packages to Afghanistan, I was reminded of a highly insightful research paper that analyzes the determinants of foreign aid.

The authors, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, both professors of politics at New York University, approach foreign aid as resources traded for policy concessions. This means they view official giving abroad as aid-for-deals rather than as motivated by humanitarian concern.

According to the authors, donor country governments are willing to purchase policy concessions that are favorable to their country but costly to recipient countries. Such policies are always harmful to the recipient country or they would not have to be paid to pursue them.

Mesquita and Smith analyzed bilateral OECD aid data for all countries during the years 1960-2001 and found some very interesting results. I summarize the thought-provoking ones as follows:

• Autocracies are more likely to receive aid than democracies.

That autocratic regimes attract more foreign aid from OECD countries reflects the fact that it is cheaper to buy off a dictator who only needs to pacify his small group of loyal cronies. Since it is hard for a democratic government to implement a policy that hurts the country, it is more expensive for a donor government to buy that policy concession. Because democratic leaders require high levels of aid before being willing to provide policy concessions, they are less likely to receive any aid.

• When democracies receive aid, however, they get larger aid packages than autocracies receive.

Since the aid-recipient democratic government is answerable to its entire electorate rather than a small group of loyal followers, it incurs a higher cost in implementing a policy concession unfavorable to its populace. The size of the aid packages offered to democratic countries reflects this higher cost.

• Needy countries are not very likely to receive aid.

The authors use the crude death rate, measured as number of deaths per thousand people, as the indicator of a country’s need. “A high death rate is associated with poor health care, poor sanitation and drinking water, too few physicians, immunizations, inadequate education, and so forth.”

Altruistic donors should predictably give more aid to needier countries with worse death rates. The empirical analysis shows that having trade and security interests with a certain country increases the chances that it receives aid from OECD countries while being needy does not.

• Conditioning on receiving aid, needy countries are likely to receive small aid packages.

Non-U.S. OECD countries are not only less likely to give aid to needy countries but when they give, they are also giving them relatively less.

This supports the aid-for-deals theory. The neediest are not receiving the most aid; rather, those whose policy compliance can be purchased at an affordable price apparently are offered aid and agree to take it.

• Contrary to popular belief, U.S. does not have a more cynical aid policy than the rest of the OECD.

It is well-known that relative to many European, especially Scandinavian, countries, U.S. gives very little aid as a proportion of its GDP.

The data shows, however, that while non-US OECD members gave less to those with the greatest need, the U.S. was needs blind in the amount of aid it gave. Furthermore, while other OECD countries are less likely to give at all to needy countries, the U.S. is more likely to give to countries with a significantly elevated mortality rate.

These results suggest that the argument that non-U.S. OECD members are more motivated by humanitarian concerns may need some reconsideration.

The on-going discussion about the efficacy of foreign aid as a poverty alleviation tool would be significantly improved if it acknowledged that the reduction of poverty is not aid's primary function either for donors or recipients.

Which of the study's findings stood out to you as surprising, awful, or obvious?

Pakistan’s Tyranny Continues

The New York Times published this must-read op-ed by Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan yesterday.

A former minister of the interior and of law and justice, Aitzaz Ahsan is the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan.

He successfully represented now-deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry’s case in the Supreme Court which reinstated the Chief Justice and declared his March 2007 suspension by President Pervez Musharraf “illegal”.

Aitzaz Ahsan and Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry have been under house arrest since Musharraf’s declaration of the state of emergency on November 3rd.