The Toronto Star’s Rosie Dimanno quoted something yesterday from Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars that I had forgotten about. Benazir Bhutto’s role in the rise of the Taliban…

“As Ghost Wars author Steve Coll 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 for the tinderbox that Pakistan became during her exile in Dubai and London – the toxic military entanglement with the Taliban – 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 incorporating 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 – now firmly interwoven with the Taliban – was contemptuous of Bhutto from the start, plotting her political demise, at the invitation of some ISI officers, as early as 1989.”

Everything comes out in the wash, unfortunately.

Some not so shocking news from the London Times this morning…

“On the day she was assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was due to meet two senior American politicians to show them a confidential report alleging that Pakistan’s intelligence service was using US money to rig parliamentary elections, officials in her party said yesterday.

The report was compiled by the former Prime Minister’s own contacts within the security services and alleged that the Inter-Services Intelligence agency was running the election operation from a safe house in the capital, Islamabad, they said. The operation’s aim was to undermine Ms Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and to ensure victory for the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) party, which supports President Musharraf, in the elections scheduled for January 8.

Patrick Kennedy, a Democratic congressman for Rhode Island, and Arlen Specter, a Republican member of the Senate sub-committe on foreign operations, have confirmed that they were planning to have dinner with Ms Bhutto on Thursday evening but were not available for comment yesterday.

Sarfraz Ali Lashari, a senior PPP official who works in its election monitoring cell, told The Times that he had helped to compile a 200-page report on the Government’s efforts to rig the poll, which Ms Bhutto planned to give to the Americans and to the press the day she was killed.”

This comes as absolutely no surprise. The question now is, if the PPP has the report in its possession, will it still release it, or is it now only valuable in the context of laying blame at the ISI and Musharraf’s door? If the report is accurate, and legitimate, then it should be released, but the objective of it should not, nor should it ever have been, to gift to foreign interests that were backing Ms. Bhutto. The people of Pakistan should be the report’s foremost recipients, being that its contents would have far greater implications on their lives than on those of foreign statesmen.

With such information coming to light, each layer of the onion that was the game that Ms. Bhutto was playing with regards to foreign interventionism becomes more apparent. And while the allegations that the report professes are extremely serious, the fact that Ms. Bhutto was relying on foreign interests with regards to the actions of the country’s military establishment should be seen for what it was – not a defense of true Pakistani democracy, but self centered efforts to placate such interests to secure power. And in saying that, it should not be overlooked that those who aid in the ascension of a political figure gain political capital themselves that they can later cash in to further their own objectives.

Again, that reality speaks to the betrayal of the people of Pakistan and those that risked their lives in supporting Ms. Bhutto.

There is absolutely no arguing the fact that the ISI has extreme political influence and functions as a ghost government in many ways, just as there is no denying the fact that theirs is a game that is also steeped in complexities, deceits, and self preservation. But this situation ultimately places the people of Pakistan, rather ironically, on the outside looking in. Between a government that is little more than a representation of the military establishment and a supposed democratic saviour that was, in many ways, a foreign proxy, the people of Pakistan are left courting falsehoods, insecurities, and fear – not the real possibility of true democratic salvation.