Benazir Bhutto served two non-consecutive terms as Prime Minister of Pakistan. She was assassinated by gunshot to the head after her eventual return to Pakistan from exile. Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, subsequently became President of Pakistan.[1]
The Dubai exile meeting
During Bhutto’s period of exile from Pakistan, John Kiriakou and a more senior CIA colleague met with her at her residence in Dubai — a $10 million beachfront mansion. She had earned approximately $60,000 per year during her time as Prime Minister of Pakistan.[2][3]
During the meeting Bhutto and her CIA visitors heard a car pulling up outside the mansion. Bhutto remarked aloud:
So help me God — if he’s pulling up in another Bentley, I’m going to lose my mind.[3]
Kiriakou and his colleague glanced at each other, registering the implication: “Corrupt a little bit?”[1] In a separate telling of the same Dubai meeting, Kiriakou puts Bhutto’s presidential salary at closer to $80,000 a year, worrying aloud, “So help me God, if he came home with another Bentley, I’m going to flip out,” and asking her CIA visitors how a family on that salary could afford “a fleet of Bentleys and a $5 million palace.”[4]
The accidental creation of the Taliban
Per John Kiriakou, the Taliban as a political-military force emerged from a Pakistani road-security program Bhutto launched as Prime Minister in the early 1990s. The word Taliban, in both Pashto and Arabic, is the plural of Talib — “student.”[5][6]
Kiriakou’s account: in the early 1990s Pakistani trucks crossing Afghanistan en route to Iran were being hijacked. Bhutto proposed using Afghan refugees from the Pakistani madrassahs — the talib — as armed guards in the truck cabs. “We’ll take these Afghan Taliban, the Afghan students who were studying — they ran away from Afghanistan — we’ll take these Taliban out of the madrassahs, we’ll have them sit in the trucks with the truck drivers, so if somebody tries to hijack the truck they can protect the cargo and the driver.”[7][8]
The program escalated: rather than ride along, the Taliban were stationed in villages along the truck routes; rather than just protect trucks, they were given weapons and money to defend themselves. “And the next thing you know, she created the fucking Taliban. And then she lost control of it, and it took the whole country, and then it let al-Qaeda come in, and the rest is history. It was an accident. It was poor policy planning, and we’re still paying the price.”[9][10]
Kiriakou has repeated this account elsewhere in near-identical terms, closing with: “The next thing you know, she created the Taliban, and then she lost control of it, and then it took the whole country, and then it let al-Qaeda come in, and the rest is history. It was an accident. It was poor policy planning, and we’re still paying the price.”[11][12][13][14][15]
See also
- Asif Ali Zardari
- Pakistan
- John Kiriakou