In this bulletin:

• Two civilians among 10 killed in Afghan violence: police
• Taliban Kill 8 in Afghan Convoy Attack
• UN calls for release of employee held in Afghan row
• Suspected Taliban commanders captured in E Afghanistan
• Diplomats expelled 'at behest of the US'
• Irish diplomats’ expulsion may be due to MI6 operations
• Taliban fight needs 3,000 extra troops
• Wilkins encourages Canada to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2009
• Benazir Bhutto Remarks to Voice of America Reporter
• Bhutto murder blamed on Pakistan agents
• Roger Cohen: Bhutto's death on America's watch
• My life with Benazir

Two civilians among 10 killed in Afghan violence: police

GHAZNI, Afghanistan (AFP) — Ten people including two civilians have been killed in attacks in southern Afghanistan, police said, in the latest Taliban violence to rock the trouble-torn nation.

The civilians died Saturday when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle in the southern province of Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban insurgency, a police commander said.

Helmand police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said the bomb was laid by the Taliban to target Afghan and Western security forces.

"It was the work of the Taliban and was aimed at our and foreign troops," he told AFP, referring to the tens of thousands of NATO- and US-led troops based in Afghanistan to hunt down Taliban insurgents.

Also Saturday, Taliban militants used rockets to ambush an Afghan private security company vehicle, killing six guards and two police officers in southern Wardak province, close to Kabul, police said.

Wardak police chief, Muzafaruddin told AFP police that reinforcements sent to the area pushed back the Taliban ambush, wounding four rebels, but two officers were killed. Muzafaruddin, like most Afghans, goes by only one name.

"In total six guards and two policemen were killed. Our police officers were killed when they were sent to help the guards," he added.

Despite being forced out of government six years ago, the Taliban are still active, mainly in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where they carry out almost daily attacks on security forces and other government targets.

But such attacks, especially roadside blasts and suicide bombings, have frequently caused civilian casualties. Western and Afghan troops have also killed civilians in their operations targeting militants.

This year has been Afghanistan's bloodiest. More than 6,000 people have been killed, many of them Taliban insurgents but also about 1,000 Afghan security forces, as many civilians, and more than 200 Western soldiers.

Taliban Kill 8 in Afghan Convoy Attack

By JASON STRAZIUSO – KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — 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.

Koenigs said "underlying assumptions" from some elements within the Afghan government were misunderstandings. That was an apparent reference to allegations that the two officials met with and may have handed money over to Taliban leaders.

He said the U.N. was not involved in any intelligence operations or paying money to any insurgents.

Koenigs, the head of the U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan for the last two years, left his post on Sunday. Bo Asplund, a Swedish national, is now the officer in charge until a permanent head is named.

Paddy Ashdown, a former leader of Britain's opposition Liberal Democrats who served previously as Bosnia-Herzegovina's international administrator, is a leading candidate to replace Koenigs.

After two years as special representative, Koenigs said he leaves the country with both hope and concern.

"Afghanistan is moving from being a country decimated by decades of conflict to a progressive Islamic democracy, striving to improve the lives of its people," he said. "However, I share the same concern as the Afghan people for the security situation, particularly in the south of the country."

Koenigs said UNAMA will continue to back the rights of victims of Afghanistan's nearly three decades of conflict, saying reparations are needed for past abuses. He said acknowledging past abuses is not a barrier to reconciliation, but rather is a "prerequisite for future peace and stability in Afghanistan."

UN calls for release of employee held in Afghan row

KABUL (AFP) — The top UN representative in Afghanistan called on authorities Sunday to free a local employee detained in a diplomatic row that also saw two foreign officials expelled.

The government last Thursday expelled two Western officials -- the second most senior European Union official in Afghanistan and a top UN political advisor here -- accusing them of threatening national security.

Kabul said an unknown number of the pair's Afghan colleagues had been arrested and were being questioned by authorities.

The UN representative to Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, said the incident was a "misunderstanding" and called on the US-backed government here to free a local UN consultant arrested for links to the diplomats.

"We're certainly concerned that one consultant working for us is still in jail and we'll do everything to get him out," Koenigs said on the last day of his mission in Afghanistan, without giving details of the detained man.

The Afghan government has said the two expelled officials made contact with the Taliban during visits to the southern province of Helmand, a stronghold of the Islamic rebels.

One official said the two -- Irish national Michael Semple with the EU and Briton Mervyn Patterson -- had gaven money to the rebels.

Koenigs dismissed the charges against the United Nations Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA) employee as "misunderstandings."

"We at UNAMA are not making intelligence operations. We've no money to pay to anybody because we don't make projects," he said, adding the UN was in talks with President Hamid Karzai's government to resolve the row.

Koenigs said he hoped that time and coordination between government bodies would clear the pair of the allegations.

Suspected Taliban commanders captured in E Afghanistan

KABUL, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- Afghan national security forces have arrested several suspected Taliban insurgent commanders during a two-day operation without a shot being fired in Sabari district of eastern province Khost, the U.S.-led Coalition forces said in a statement issued on Sunday.

"The operation was unprecedented in terms of successfully capturing multiple suspected insurgent commanders without the use of lethal force, and the excellent cooperation between the Afghan Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior," noted the statement, which however did not give exact number or names of the insurgents.

On Dec. 27 night, the combined force consisting of Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police (ANP) and Afghan National Border Police acted on credible intelligence to search an area of known insurgent activity near Zambar Village in northern Sabari district, an alleged main insurgent safe haven in Khost.

Among the arrested are a suspected major insurgent facilitator in northern Khost province primarily associated with the Hizb-e-Islami-Gulbuddin terrorist organization, and believed to have ties to the Haqqani Network, the Taliban and al Qaida.

"He is suspected of directing IED (improvised explosive device) attacks, antagonizing feuding tribes in the area and facilitating other insurgent activities detrimental to the positive development of Afghanistan," the statement said.

The combined forces also arrested a suspected deputy Taliban commander during the operation, who was believed to be involved in several direct attacks in the Sabari district.

Several other insurgents were captured, including a suspected insurgent responsible for providing financial support to IED cells in the Sabari district.

Another suspected insurgent was implicated in stealing from Afghan government employees, transporting weapons, assisting IED-placement facilitators and delivering terrorizing "night letters" to intimidate local villagers.

Another man detained on the evening of Dec. 27 was suspected of facilitating an unsuccessful suicide-bomb attack on the governor of Khost province on Aug. 22.

The last suspected insurgent detained on Dec. 27 is believed to be directly involved in attacks on various schools, police check points and Afghan officials.

Follow-on operations conducted on Dec. 28 included clearing the Makhtab Bazaar area in the Sabari district, a suspected base of operations and center for insurgent activities.

The Afghan forces searched the bazaar for weapons caches and suspected insurgent activities, and detained several individuals suspected of criminal activity.

One detainee is suspected of identifying locations for IED emplacement along roadways throughout the province and conducting vehicle-borne IED attacks against Afghan and Coalition forces.

Another person detained is suspected of being a former HiG commander and financier for insurgent activities throughout the Sabari District.

Finally, another suspected insurgent was detained for his alleged involvement in an October attack on the Khulbesat Police Station, where one police officer was killed and four others were injured.

"Detaining these individuals will likely cause a significant disruption of insurgent activities in Sabari District," said ChrisBelcher, spokesman for the Coalition forces.

The Taliban, removed from power by the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001, has waged years-long insurgency against the Afghan administration and continued to attack Afghan and foreign forces.

The Afghan government forces who were being rebuilt and strengthened with foreign assistance have intensified their operation against militants in the country's southern and eastern regions as rising militancy-related violence have killed over 6,000 people in 2007, the bloodiest period since 2001 Taliban fall.

Diplomats expelled 'at behest of the US'

By Eleanor Mayne – The Telegraph - 30/12/2007

Two European diplomats accused of holding secret talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan were thrown out of the country following a complaint by the US, intelligence officials in Kabul have told The Sunday Telegraph.

Mervyn Patterson, who is British, and Irish-born Michael Semple were flown out of Kabul on Thursday after the Afghan government accused them of "threatening national security".

The pair had been working for the United Nations and the European Union respectively.

source, American officials had been unhappy about meetings between the men and high-level Taliban commanders in the volatile Helmand province.

The source claimed that the US alerted Afghan authorities after learning that the diplomats were providing direct financial and other support - including mobile phone cards - to the Taliban commanders, in the hope of persuading them to swap sides.

"This warning came from the Americans," he said. "They were not happy with the support being provided to the Taliban. They gave the information to our intelligence services, who ordered the arrests."

A government source in Kabul said there were close links between Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS) and the US Central Intelligence Agency, adding:

"The Afghan government would never have acted alone to expel officials of such a senior level. This was information that was given to the NDS by the Americans.

" These claims will reinforce perceptions of a rift between the US and its international partners in Afghanistan, including Britain.

Last year, US commanders expressed frustration with the British decision to withdraw from Musa Qala and allow tribal elders to strike a deal with the Taliban, who quickly reoccupied the town.

The American embassy has strongly denied any involvement in the incident involving the two diplomats, saying it had "no knowledge" of their activities.

Afghan officials, speaking anonymously, have accused the men of giving support to the Taliban in the form of money, food and phone cards for 10 months.

Irish diplomats’ expulsion may be due to MI6 operations

30 December 2007, By Nicola Cooke, The Post, Ireland

An Irish diplomat and his Northern Irish colleague, who were both expelled from Afghanistan last week, may have paid the price for MI6 intelligence gathering operations in the war-torn country, well-placed sources in Kabul have alleged.

Wicklow man Michael Semple and Belfast-born Mervyn Patterson were both accused of contacting the Taliban during meetings with tribal elders. Both flew out of the country last week after efforts to prevent their expulsion failed.

Semple is the acting head of the EU mission in Afghanistan. Bas ed there since the 1990s, he is an expert on Afghan tribal culture and speaks several national languages.

Formerly human rights adviser to the British High Commission in Islamabad, Semple is now in Pakistan with members of his family.

Patterson is a senior UN official who was based in Kabul with Semple. The pair spoke to local leaders last Monday in the Helmand town of Musa Qala, which was recaptured from the Taliban by British and Afghan troops two weeks ago.

An Afghan government official said their trip was ‘‘detrimental to the national security of the country’’.

However, a western official based in Kabul told The Sunday Business Post that the men’s expulsion was more likely a message to the British government.

‘‘MI6 [the British secret intelligence service] are known to be operating down in the south of the country, and these guys got caught up in the collateral damage,” the source alleged.

‘‘The Taliban are no friends of Michael and Meryvn’s - they have already said they would not be talking to them. As part of their work, they had to speak to disaffected members in society, and they spoke to tribal and community elders all the time. This expulsion is to send a signal to the British that president Karzai is not happy about deals they are doing as part of their intelligence gathering,” the official claimed.

UN spokesman in Afghanistan, Aleem Siddique, said efforts were continuing to persuade the Afghan government to allow the men to return, but this is expected to be a protracted process.

Taliban fight needs 3,000 extra troops

Michael Smith - The Sunday Times, December 30, 2007

MILITARY commanders need an extra 3,000 troops in Afghanistan to contain the Taliban, according to senior defence sources. They have also called for more talks with leaders in northern Helmand province in an attempt to separate them from the Taliban.

The calls came as Afghan officials claimed that an adviser to the United Nations and a European Union official expelled last week had $150,000 (£75,000) with them. According to Kabul, the men were trying to buy off a local Taliban leader in Musa Qala.

MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, was heavily involved in bribing Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan to change sides during the 2001 operation to remove the group from power.

British officials have been careful to distance current MI6 talks with Taliban commanders in Helmand from the expulsions of Michael Semple, the Irish head of the EU mission, and Mervyn Patterson, a British adviser to the UN.

The town of Musa Qala - scene of a previous truce brokered by British special forces - was retaken by British and Afghan troops this month after a Taliban commander changed sides. When Semple and Patterson were detained, they had the cash and data on their laptops showing they had made previous payments to a local Taliban leader, according to Afghan officials.

Senior British commanders believe last year’s Musa Qala truce, brokered by the Special Boat Service, should have been the blueprint for others across Helmand. But after Dan McNeil, an American general, took over as commander of Nato forces in February and denounced the deal, it was broken by US air attacks.

The commanders say they have no problem taking ground from the Taliban but do not have enough men to hold it.

Wilkins encourages Canada to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2009

COLUMBIA, S.C. - The U.S. ambassador to Canada says he's unsure how the death of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto will affect Canada's upcoming parliamentary vote on troops in Afghanistan.

Ambassador David Wilkins says: "It remains to be seen" if the crisis in Pakistan will affect how Canadian legislators vote.

As ambassador, he is encouraging Canadian officials to extend the country's military operations in Afghanistan beyond its current commitment that ends in February 2009. But, he says, "It's up to Canadian elected officials to make that decision."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said the mission would not be extended without the approval of Parliament. No date has been set for the vote but Wilkins says he expects it to happen early in 2008.

About 2,500 Canadian troops are in Afghanistan, most of them in the southern region bordering Pakistan, where Bhutto was assassinated Thursday.

Wilkins said Canada, with 73 combat deaths, has suffered higher casualties in Afghanistan than other countries because of its troops' location in an area with high insurgent activity.

He made the comments in his native Greenville after returning from his first trip to Afghanistan.

"I think we're all not only expressing regret of a tragic death but concerned about the stability of Pakistan and how that instability, if it turns to instability, affects Afghanistan," he said.

The ambassador left Afghanistan on Wednesday after a three-day visit with Canadian and American troops, at the invitation of Defence Minister Peter MacKay.

Wilkins said he spent 45 minutes in a bunker on Christmas night after a rocket hit an airstrip at an air force base he was visiting in Kandahar. But he said the explosion was not near him.

"I wanted to take the opportunity to thank Canadian troops on behalf of my country for their service," said Wilkins, who was speaker of the South Carolina House for 11 years before becoming ambassador in the summer of 2005.

"If the United States and Canada and other NATO countries were not there to bring stability, it would surely fall into chaos," Wilkins said.

Wilkins, 61, said he plans to return to South Carolina after President George W. Bush leaves office in January 2009.

Benazir Bhutto Remarks to Voice of America Reporter

PRESS RELEASE -  Islamabad, Pakistan, December 27, 2007 - Voice of America (VOA) reporter Sayed Hassan was among a group of journalists who spoke with Benazir Bhutto just hours before her assassination. The comments came after Ms. Bhutto met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and before she went on to her final campaign rally. Ms. Bhutto gave a lengthy answer in English to a VOA question about terrorism and Afghan-Pakistan relations.

The transcript of Benazir Bhutto's remarks:

"I explained to President Karzai that the Pakistan People's Party hoped to win the elections and form the government and we look forward to working very closely with Afghanistan. We too believe it is essential for us both of our countries and indeed the large Muslim world to work to protect the interests of the Islamic civilization by eliminating extremism and terrorism. I touched upon the need to of - I asked him about madrassas (Islamic schools) in Afghanistan and I said we discussed about madrassas and they have only the traditional madrassas. You know there are two types of madrassas. One is the traditional madrassas, which teaches Islamic teachings and which are very good and which are very noble and on the other hand there are these training institutes that brainwash young children and turn them into warriors and fighters for no cause- for creating anarchy and chaos but they pose as madrassas which they're not. So I asked him, he said 'we don't have that problem in Afghanistan', I said well we have that problem in Afghanistan.

"And we discussed about trade in the region. Trade had gone up really high in 2006. It's come down now and I suggested that might be due to the fact that there is destabilization going on the frontier province. We've had the incident in Swat with Alpuri, the bomb blasts on Eid ul Azha, as I was in Charsadda yesterday's bomb blasts were in Peshawar. So the destabilization is now by the extremists, is not now relegated to the tribal areas of Pakistan but they have descended into not only the settled areas of frontier province they have descended into Peshawar. So there is an absolute need for both our countries to cooperate closely on terrorism related issues and also on issues of how we can enhance the quality of life of our people by improving economic ties.

"I was pleased to read in the newspapers today that Pakistan and Afghanistan are forming a committee for intelligence sharing. I think this is a good and positive move and I mentioned to the Afghan president that we in the PPP were desirous of seeking good relations with Afghanistan as well as with India. I mentioned that while we were trying to control the extremists and the militants they had turned their guns inward but I said it was still very necessary for us to dismantle these groups; because while some of them may have been formed in a noble cause, for example, some may have taken up the cause of fighting the occupation of Afghanistan or others might have taken up the cause of Kashmir but nonetheless once such people were trained they could always turn their guns on other objects and therefore it was important in the PPP's view that we should seek peaceful means of conflict resolution so that our people did not suffer, our countries did not suffer and our Islamic civilization did not suffer."

Bhutto murder blamed on Pakistan agents

By Richard Elias and Jeremy Watson – The Scotsman 12.30.07

FACTIONS within the Pakistan intelligence service might have been behind the assassination of the country's opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, sources within MI5 told Scotland on Sunday last night.

Pakistan continues to teeter on the brink following Bhutto's death on Thursday as she left a rally for an election in which she was expected to become prime minister. The government has tried to blame militant groups linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, which saw Bhutto's rise to power as a threat.

But security sources in the UK say pro-Taliban factions in Pakistan's feared Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency may have been behind the attack on the charismatic politician, who returned to her homeland from exile only two months ago to fight the election.

Bhutto, 54, blamed rogue elements in the ISI for a suicide bombing that killed 140 people at a rally shortly after her return in October. There were reports last night that just weeks ago, she had sent UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband a private e-mail naming three senior members of government who, she said, wanted her dead.

The source said: "The ISI was responsible for setting up the Taliban during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and there remain parts of the ISI who are desperate to see the Taliban back in power there. They hope that if this happens, it will pave the way for an Islamist state in Pakistan."

Today, Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal will read out his mother's will in a public demonstration that the Bhutto dynasty is still alive. The first-year Oxford University undergraduate is expected by many to be thrust into the forefront of her Pakistan People's Party in the forthcoming elections, due for January 8.

"What will cause major problems is that whoever from Whitehall is involved in those discussions, whether it be mandarins or SIS (MI6], they are dealing with precisely the very people who are, in some quarters, being blamed for being behind the killing of Benazir Bhutto."

Bhutto supporters yesterday dismissed as "ludicrous" a government theory that the former leaded had died after hitting her head on a sunroof and accused the government of a "cover-up" over the real culprits.

Interior ministry spokesman Javed Iqba

l Cheema reiterated the government's claim that Islamic militant leader Baitullah Mehsud was behind Bhutto's killing. Yesterday Mehsud's spokesman contacted a news agency to issue a denial. But Cheema insisted: "We have the evidence that he is involved." He also declined any foreign aid to help investigate the killing.

Rioting continued yesterday but there were no signs that the violence was escalating. Doubts remain over whether the planned elections will go ahead.

• Meanwhile, in a taped video message, Osama bin Laden has pledged to expand al-Qaeda's attacks against Israel. During a 56-minute recording broadcast yesterday, he said: "I would like to assure our people in Palestine we will expand our jihad there. We intend to liberate Palestine, the whole of Palestine from the (Jordan] river to the sea." He threatened "blood for blood, destruction for destruction".

Roger Cohen: Bhutto's death on America's watch

By Roger Cohen – Int. Herald Tribune Sunday, December 30, 2007

In recent years, Pakistan has provided banks that wired money for the 9/11 plot, been the chief source of illicit nuclear proliferation, offered a tribal-area haven for planners of worldwide terrorism, abetted the reconstitution of the Taliban and educated many a suicide bomber in Islamic religious schools.

At the same time, President Pervez Musharraf, the recently retired general in power since a 1999 coup, has received about $10 billion in U.S. aid, much of it to reinforce the Pakistani military in fighting Al Qaeda, the Taliban and global jihadism in South Waziristan and other tribal areas.

If a U.S. policy was ever broken, this is it.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the Western-educated former prime minister who returned from exile on Oct. 18 under a flawed U.S.-mediated plan to shift Pakistan from direct to indirect military rule with a civilian veneer, has given the coup de grâce to this botched American attempt to manage a nuclear-armed Islamic state.

It's not clear who killed Bhutto, although hers was a chronicle of a death foretold. Musharraf's government, whose credibility is shot, says that Baitullah Mehsud, a militant of growing influence with links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, was behind it.

That would exonerate the military, whose opposition to the democratic movement Bhutto personified goes back to its execution of her father; the ISI intelligence services who long nurtured Taliban zealots as agents of influence in Afghanistan; and Musharraf himself, who knew Bhutto's vulnerability.

With accounts of the cause of death shifting mysteriously from bullet wounds to the bombing that followed the gunfire, it's too early to discount the possibility that the assassin, or assassins, got some help from Pakistan's many official reservoirs of extremist Islamist sympathy.

Shots to head and chest followed by bombing bear the hallmark of a "shoot and destroy" attack, what British special forces would call a "double tap." It's suspicious that both the crime scene and her car were cleaned up before investigators had access.

Senator Hillary Clinton's call for an international inquiry is a good one. How can Musharraf, who showed his contempt for an independent judiciary by dissolving the Supreme Court in November, oversee a credible investigation? It should be accompanied by a U.S. congressional inquiry into post-9/11 American policy toward Pakistan, the country that the crisis of Islamic civilization has made more dangerous than any.

But some things need no elucidation. First, the United States, out of misplaced deference to Musharraf, failed to secure Bhutto the protection she was demanding. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, visited the United States shortly before her death to plead for help, but was denied the meetings he sought at the top levels of the State Department. Similarly, the Bush administration failed to pressure Musharraf to accept Bhutto family demands for FBI involvement in the investigation of the attempted assassination of Bhutto on Oct. 18. President George W. Bush knew people close to Musharraf had reason to fear Bhutto's ascent to power.

Second, Al Qaeda has turned some of its attention from Afghanistan to the richer rewards of upending Pakistan. "My sense is Al Qaeda might be losing interest in Afghanistan as the center of regional gravity for their struggle and is now focusing fully on Pakistan," said Julian Lindley-French, a military analyst.

Third, Musharraf's ambivalence has hurt U.S. interests, culminating in a murder that shames America. He has safeguarded the nukes but never ensured that his military or intelligence services break from their Taliban baby. Conflict in the border badlands and Afghanistan has kept American money and materiel flowing. This double game must end.

Fourth, years of strong economic growth have expanded a Pakistani middle class that wants democracy's rule of law. Radical Islamist parties constitute a minority: Unlike in the Shah's Iran, democratic forces outweigh the theocratic. A discredited Musharraf can do nothing for Pakistan without credible elections. Credibility requires international monitors or a transitional arrangement allowing all major parties to participate in the vote's organization. The election should be held as soon as possible after the planned date of Jan. 8. A large sympathy vote for Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party is likely.

Fifth, the United States must redirect policy toward forthright support for democracy. The Bush administration has seen the military as a bulwark against extremism. The true bulwark, as Bhutto knew, is the middle class. Barnett Rubin of New York University observed, "If Afghanistan is ready for democracy, Pakistan certainly is."

Sixth, the absence of any engagement with Iran leaves the United States over-dependent on Pakistan for influence in Afghanistan. A great post-9/11 tragedy has been the U.S. failure to build on the Iranian opening that the overthrow of a shared enemy, the Taliban in Kabul, created.

Bhutto's loss is devastating, comparable to Yitzhak Rabin's. Her Kennedy-like family tragedy leaves the fathomless void of what might have been.

I met her more than 30 years ago when we were at Oxford. Arriving late one night at Balliol College, I saw a solitary light in the quadrangle. On a whim, a fellow student and I went to the room. There was Bhutto deep in earnest talk about politics. She was gracious at the intrusion, memorably so.

Of grace and conviction her unusual fusion of East and West was formed. Only Pakistani democracy can avenge, in part, the disappearance of the rare bridge she offered and offset the American mistakes that led to this loss.

My life with Benazir

December 30, 2007, The London Times

Christina Lamb, whose award-winning career began 20 years ago when she interviewed Benazir Bhutto, remembers the woman who was destroyed by the country that bewitched them both.

We had just entered Santa’s castle in the pretty Portuguese village of Obidos on Thursday when my phone beeped with the first text message. “Benazir has been critically wounded in bomb attack – in hospital undergoing treatment.”

I think I knew immediately. Obidos styles itself Portugal’s Vila Natal or Christmas Town and it was packed with families oohing and aahing at Nativity scenes scattered with artificial snow and downing cups of local cherry brandy. As I pushed through the crowds to get out and hear my phone, which by then was ringing repeatedly, the elves and Santas all around suddenly seemed sinister.

White Christmas was blaring out of speakers by the old church as I opened a text message. “Agencies reporting Benazir dead.” Everything around me seemed to turn into a blur.

With me were my eight-year-old son and my parents, my elderly father valiantly navigating the cobblestones with his stick. I did not want to destroy their day out. I remembered Benazir’s pride at her eldest child, Bilawal, starting at Oxford two months ago. “They grow up so quickly,” she’d said to me at the time. “Enjoy your son while you can.”

A week after that we’d been together on her bus in Karachi when it was bombed. She narrowly escaped, but I knew they’d get her in the end.

Politics in Pakistan means being out among the people, pressing the flesh. She was never going to hide behind the armour plating her party workers so carefully arranged for her, but would always stand on top of the bus or out of the sunroof of armoured cars. Having seen her father and two brothers killed, she more than anyone knew the risks. I asked her over and over again if it was worth it.

“I put my faith in God and I trust in the people of Pakistan,” she always replied. She was the bravest person I have ever met and, for all her flaws, she was still the best hope for her country.

ALMOST exactly 20 years ago, in December 1987, I woke up in bed in Karachi. The air was damp and sticky and I was breathing in the headachy smell of jasmine. Delicate henna flowers and blossoms twisted across my palms and my feet, and fireworks exploded into red and white stars in the sky. It was day three of the wedding celebrations of Benazir Bhutto and my life had just changed for ever.

Throughout my teenage years I had yearned for adventure. At Nonsuch school for girls in Surrey I was endlessly in detention. Kept after school writing lines, I would gaze out of the window conjuring up far-off worlds. It was Benazir who gave me the chance to reach them.

Her world was utterly different from mine. I’d grown up on a council estate in Morden, the last stop on the Northern line. She had been born amid wealth – the Bhuttos owned great estates – and she had glamour. As a young woman, she knew about power and pain: her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was prime minister of Pakistan but was deposed by the army and executed. She was a star at Oxford – the first Asian woman elected head of the union, flitting around in her yellow sports car – while I was just a spectator a decade later as editor of Cherwell, the university newspaper. Nonetheless, we met and we clicked.

As a graduate intern at the Financial Times in the summer of 1987, I was assigned to a lunch where a man from the Pakistan People’s party (PPP) – her party – asked me if I would like to interview her. Of course I said yes.

She had just announced her engagement and was sitting serenely in her Kensington flat, surrounded by lava lamps and bouquets. Although she often appeared cold and imperious, she could also be warm and girlie, and we struck an instant bond. The resulting interview was my first big article in a national paper and it would decide my destiny.

At the time, General Zia ul-Haq, her father’s executioner, had been president of Pakistan for a decade. Zia’s regime had thrived by facilitating America’s efforts to push the Russians out of neighbouring Afghani-stan, but Benazir was pressing him to hold free multi-party elections.

With all the confidence of my 21 years, I wrote: “There is little doubt that, were fair elections held tomorrow, she would probably win by a substantial margin. Unfortunately for Ms Bhutto politics in Pakistan are rarely determined by popularity; but rather by a daunting triumvirate of generals, businessmen and mullahs with their US sponsors keeping a watchful eye.”

I predicted – wrongly – that “it could be a long time before Ms Bhutto takes her father’s place at the head of the country”. And I added judgmentally: “If she ever does attain power it is uncertain, given the vagueness of her policy prescriptions, whether this elegant soft-spoken lady will be able to deliver.”

Despite my less than friendly verdict, that autumn a large, gold-inscribed invitation to Benazir’s wedding landed on my mat in a rented room in Walsall. I had moved on from the FT to a traineeship at Central TV. Our area encompassed the M1 and M6 motorways, where young people were often killed in drink-driving accidents. There was nothing harder than knocking on the doors of their families and asking for a photo.

One drizzly December day I drove round and round Spaghetti Junction trying to find the turn-off for the Birmingham Bullring, where I was assigned to interview two firemen who were trying to beat the world record for time spent wearing gas masks. It was so cold that the cameras kept seizing up. By the fifth take even the firemen looked bored.

A few days later, however, I arrived at 70 Clifton Road, the Bhuttos’ Karachi home. Like a huge Christmas tree, the house was festooned with lights. Inside, preparations and festivities had been under way all week.

Weddings in Pakistan are a matter of face. Combine that with Benazir’s fanatical perfectionism, and you have a recipe for high tension. To the dismay of her aunties, she was refusing to accept the traditional trousseau from the bridegroom’s family.

Instead of the 21 to 51 sets of clothes usually presented to the bride, she had set the limit at only two. Instead of gold bangles all the way up each arm, she said she would wear glass, explaining: “I am a leader – I must set an example to my people.” Nor, she said, did she have time for the traditional week’s purdah. Instead she kept nipping out to the office.

All the same, the aunties told me how pleased they were that Bibi – as they called her – was settling down.

Was she in love? Announcing her engagement, she had said less than enthusiastically: “Conscious of my religious obligations and duty to my family, I am pleased to proceed with the marriage proposal accepted by my mother.” Everyone told me that an arranged marriage was better because you went in with no preconceptions and learnt to love each other.

The morning before the main celebrations Benazir underwent the painful process of having all her body hair removed. No screams were heard. She had, after all, endured years of detention in Pakistan, including 10 months in solitary confinement.

The main event took place in a multicoloured marquee in the garden, where bowers of jasmine and roses led to a tinsel-bedecked stage. Here, Benazir sat next to her husband-to-be, Asif Ali Zardari, on a mother-of-pearl bench and said yes three times to become a married woman. Sugar was ground over their heads so their lives would be sweet.

Taking a break along Clifton beach, I paid a man with a scrawny parakeet a few rupees for it to pick me tarot cards. “You will be back within a year,” he predicted. I was.

After all the late-night discussions of how to overturn dictatorship in Pakistan, there was no way I could go back to the death knocks in Birmingham. I went to see the FT and got a vague agreement that they would pay for whatever they published by me. I bought a bucket-shop flight to Lahore and packed everything I imagined I would need to be a foreign correspondent, including a tape of Mahler’s Fifth, a jumbo bag of wine gums, a lucky pink rabbit, a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and a bottle of Chanel No 5 that my boyfriend’s mum had got at trade price. I could hardly carry the suitcase.

The foreign editors in London were all more interested in Russian-occupied Afghanistan than in Pakistan, so I headed for the frontier town of Peshawar and – like most journalists there – spent much of my time going back and forth across the border.

“Going inside”, we called it. When you were out you spent all your time attempting to get in; and once in, living in caves on stale bread and trying to avoid landmines and bombs, you desperately wanted to be out.

I celebrated my 22nd birthday in a kebab shop in Peshawar’s Old Story-tellers’ Bazaar with flat chapli kebabs followed by yellow cake with a candle on top. The night ended with a moonlit swim in the pool of the Pearl Continental, where proper correspondents stayed. There were other things to celebrate that night: May 15 1988 marked the start of the withdrawal of the Soviet army, which had occupied Afghanistan since Boxing Day 1979.

The supply of American Stinger missiles, which could down Soviet planes, had turned the war around. For the mujaheddin, who had humiliated the largest army on earth, these were glory days, before jihad became a dirty word. For Pakistan, it was the start of a tumultuous series of events that would raise Benazir to power but ultimately take her life.

Zia announced party-based elections in which Benazir would be able to take part. Later he announced at a press conference that parties would not be allowed. I stuck up my hand. As a tall, blonde English girl in a sea of Pakistani men – none of whom seemed concerned by his turnaround – I was handed the microphone.

“Why have you changed your mind about holding party-based elections, as you said when you announced them?” I asked.

“I did not say that,” Zia said. He was lying. “Yes, you did.” A gasp ran through the Pakistani journalists, and people tugged at me to sit down. But Zia smiled, thanked me for respecting his country’s culture by wearing the traditional salwar kameez and invited me to make an appointment for an interview.

We met at Army House in Rawalpindi, where he served me tea and again smiled disarmingly. His lips were thin and his teeth big: I wondered if he had smiled as tightly when he ordered the hanging of Benazir’s father along the road in Rawalpindi jail. He talked for more than an hour about everything from Afghanistan to the state dinner he had attended in Paris when President Mitterrand had told him to take off his long black tunic, thinking it was a coat. “I had to tell him I had nothing on underneath.”

By the time I left I had some good lines, particularly his belief that the US no longer felt it needed him now the Russians were leaving Afghanistan. In my efforts to concentrate on what he was saying, however, I had pressed the wrong button on my tape recorder. When I switched it on later, the tape was blank. I made an embarrassed call to his military secretary. As it was a dictatorship, they too had recorded the interview. Shortly afterwards a man in uniform arrived bearing a copy of their transcript and a box of sweet-smelling mangoes.

My gaffe had a dramatic coda. Three weeks later, Zia was killed when his plane crashed with all the top military on board. That night I was on News at Ten just after the bongs, being interviewed by Sandy Gall and looking slightly startled. Live satellite broadcasts were virtually unknown in those days.

To everyone’s surprise, the new army chief, General Aslam Beg, announced that the elections would go ahead. Zia had scheduled them for November because he had been informed that Benazir was expecting a baby then and would be unable to campaign. But for once she had out-witted him. Knowing his spies would obtain her medical records, she had managed to have them swapped and was actually due in September.

Her detractors were not so easily thwarted. Military intelligence (ISI) put its weight behind her opponents in the Muslim League and main religious parties. They airdropped leaflets showing an old photograph of her mother in a cocktail dress dancing with President Gerald Ford. They referred to mother and daughter as “gangsters in bangles”.

Benazir’s PPP emerged as the largest party but 16 seats short of a majority. While the army dallied, her lieutenants made desperate overtures, often of a financial nature, to win the support of small parties and independents. Days turned into a week, then two weeks, and editorials around the world thundered that Benazir must be allowed to form a government.

On the 15th day, in an indication of who really pulls the strings in Pakistan, she had a meeting with General Hamid Gul, director of ISI; tea with the US ambassador; and dinner with the army chief. The next day, official security replaced the the PPP activists guarding the gate of the house where she was staying. At 35, she was going to be the first female prime minister in the Muslim world.

That night many of the people who had been at the wedding gathered with her to celebrate again – it was hard to believe it had been less than a year – but Benazir looked pensive. For power did not come without compromise. To the consternation of some of her closest advisers, she had agreed that the military would still control Pakistan’s nuclear programme and Afghan policy.

These were far from the only challenges. After years of dictatorship, everyone expected jobs and patronage from those now in power. Her followers regarded her as Queen Bountiful. Everywhere she went she was mobbed by supporters waving petitions demanding jobs as recompense for their sacrifices during martial law. Under 11½ years of dictatorship an awful lot of people had suffered for the PPP. With the treasury coffers empty, she could satisfy few of them.

As I reported at the time: “Bhutto already has the biggest cabinet in Pakistan’s history and an entire battalion of advisers, known locally as the ‘Under19 team’ or ‘Incompetence Incorporated’.

“This is not patronage politics, however. In the new government’s terminology it is people’s politics. When ministers ignore their government work to spend all day arranging jobs for their voters and licences for their patrons, this is not corruption or nepotism it is people’s government. Using the same ploy, they have renamed many of the country’s schools as people’s schools, and thus claim to have created thousands of new schools.”

Bhutto often complained that she was “in office but not in power”. Real power remained with the army, which at any moment could bring the whole thing to an end as it had with her father. It had never really occurred to me before to question democracy as a system. But I was impressed by the Pakistani military officers I met, many of them Sandhurst-trained. It was hard not to sympathise with those who argued they were a better option than some of the leading politicians – feudal scions, used to peasants kissing the hem of their coats, who switched sides to stay in power.

Most of the army’s unease about what they referred to derisorily as the “democratic experiment” came from the growing perception that Pakistan had never had such a corrupt government. The central figure was Benazir’s husband, Asif, who went from being known as Mr Ten Percent to Mr Thirty Percent. As the Financial Times correspondent, I often met foreign businessmen who told me that they were being openly asked for kickbacks to secure government contracts.

“They’re about as subtle as a train wreck,” said one. When I tried to bring this up with Benazir, her eyes narrowed angrily. I was angry with her myself about something else. How could she as a female prime minister do nothing about laws that meant a woman’s evidence was worth half that of a man and that she could not open a bank account without her husband’s permission?

Worst of all was the notorious Hudood Ordinance, under which if a woman was raped she needed to produce four male witnesses to the penetration. If she failed she would be imprisoned for sex outside marriage. I had visited jails full of girls who had been raped. Yet, instead of worrying about this, Benazir spent her time on trivial matters such as working out place settings for banquets.

In Benazir’s world you were “either with us or against us”. My invitations to dinners at the prime minister’s house dried up. I began getting anonymous phone calls asking if I was being paid by the opposition. It wasn’t long before the army started plotting. One afternoon, one of Benazir’s ministers stopped by at my apartment looking flustered. He told me a group of army officers had been arrested to foil a coup plot. At the monthly meeting of nine corps commanders, four had openly spoken against her.

After other sources confirmed what the minister had said, I filed my story. A few evenings later, two men in grey salwar kameez and dark glasses – the hallmark of ISI – rang my doorbell. I was driven to the Rawalpindi military cantonment where I was questioned about my “links with British and Soviet intelligence”. I could not believe they were serious. They presented me with a file headed “Activities of Christina Lamb”. It contained many of the things I had done and some I hadn’t. There were photocopies of personal letters, and there was also some information that could have been passed on only by a good friend.

I was questioned all night and warned that it would be in my interests to leave the country. Early next morning, I was driven back to Islamabad. My flat had been ransacked. Two cars and a red motorbike appeared on the street corner and followed me everywhere. I was determined not to be driven out, but my enemies had the last word. The interior ministry refused to renew my visa and I was asked to leave the country. The local press described me as either an Indian spy or the “Pamella Bordes of Pakistan”. To my outrage, one article even claimed I had rented room 306 of the Holiday Inn to entertain.

As I drove to Islamabad airport, I notice fresh graffiti on the wall. “We apologise for this democratic interruption,” it read. “Normal martial law will be resumed shortly.” A few months later, on August 6, 1990, Benazir woke to the news that troops had surrounded ministries, television and radio stations. The president, flanked by the service chiefs, announced that her government had been dismissed for “corruption, mismanagement and violation of the constitution”.

For more than a decade, my work took me elsewhere in the world – to Latin America and Africa – but I went back and forth to Pakistan and was there for Benazir’s triumphant reelection in 1993 and her removal once more three years later amid accusations of nepotism and the undermining of the justice system. That was the first time I saw her in tears. I married Paulo, a Portuguese journalist, and in July 1999 – three months after a Pakistani court had found the exiled Benazir guilty of corruption – our son, Lourenço, was born. I thought about giving up the peripatetic life of a foreign correspondent to write books and be more of a mother. But on September 11, 2001, I stared over and over again at the film of the second aircraft hitting the second tower of the World Trade Center.

“Mummy, Mummy, plane crashing!” shouted two-year-old Lourenço. I felt a familiar shivering in my guts. I knew I had to go back.

As in the old days, the lobby of the Serena hotel in Quetta, the Pakistani city just across the border from Kanda-har, was full of ISI agents in salwar kameez and aviator glasses. Pakistan was again under a military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in 1999. Benazir was out of the picture, living in exile in Dubai with her husband and two daughters.

Even if Musharraf was genuine in his professed support for the American war on the Taliban, it seemed naive to think that ISI would meekly obey. A key paradox to Pakistan is that, while it is nominally an ally in the war on terror, its powerful military intelligence has another agenda. ISI made the Taliban what they were by channelling weapons to them in Afghanistan’s years of chaos during the 1990s, and supporting them was an ideology, not just a policy. When I began investigating reports from contacts that ISI was still supplying arms to the Taliban, the men in aviator glasses struck. I was arrested at 2.30am in my hotel room, as was Justin Sutcliffe, the photographer working with me.

We spent the next two days being interrogated in an abandoned bungalow. Fortunately Justin had managed to smuggle in a mobile phone. While I made a loud fuss to our captors, he phoned from the toilet for help. Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, intervened. On the third day we were deported as a threat to national security. Three months later, after the abduction and beheading of Daniel Pearl, the American investigative reporter, we wondered what might have happened had we not had that phone. There were signs of ISI methodology in the Pearl case.

Pakistani military intelligence couldn’t stop us getting into Afghanistan via Iran to cover the flight of the Taliban. I managed to get home to England again for Christmas, arriving on the morning of December 25. It was a shock to go from a land of dust and hunger to an enormous lunch of turkey with all the trimmings at my parents’ house and a mountain of presents under the tree for Lourenço. I couldn’t help snapping at him for leaving food on his plate, though I knew he was far too young to understand.

It was clear that the war for Afghanistan was not over – and that the real story was in Pakistan. Again and again I found myself being drawn back there. The West could send as many troops as it liked into Afghanistan but if it could not staunch the supply of Taliban fighters from madras-ahs in Pakistan, it would never resolve the problem. And this was where Benazir came back into the story.

As Pakistan became less and less governable, America began to put pressure on Musharraf to reach a political accommodation with her in the belief that together they could save the country from becoming a nuclear-armed Islamist state. It was never a realistic scenario. Musharraf told me in November 1999, just after he seized power, that he blamed her more than anyone for the situation Pakistan was in.

“You’re a friend of Benazir’s,” he said. “Well you should know this. More than anyone she had the brains and the opportunity to change Pakistan and she didn’t do it, instead spending her time making money. As long as I am here she will never be allowed back into power.”

Having overthrown her twice, and with their project for the resurgence of the Taliban looking successful, were the military fundamentalists going to let her back a third time? Benazir and I had made up over the years. She sent us a large crystal bowl for a wedding present and we often met for lunch near her flat in Kensington during her years in exile.

She said she enjoyed having time to play with her children in Hyde Park but it was clear she was depressed at seeing her political ambitions wash away, complaining she could not even get meetings with officials in London and Washington. When she moved from London to Dubai, it seemed as if much of her time was spent doing yoga and shopping. She had a weakness for chocolate and ice cream and had put on weight. Her shelves were full of self-help books.

I was in Karachi two months ago when, after long negotiations, she said goodbye to her two anxious daughters in Dubai and flew home after eight years in exile. Despite the risks she knew she was taking, I hadn’t seen her look so happy for years. The old fire was in her eyes. She cried as she got off the plane. I was the only journalist among about 15 family, political colleagues and friends on the open top of her campaign bus that night when two bombs went off. We were incredibly lucky to escape. When a woman tried to steer me towards an ambulance I realised I was covered with the blood of some of the 140 victims.

Benazir survived that attack but it was a brutal awakening to just how much her country had changed since she had packed her bags and fled to London in 1998. The next evening I sat with her in her small book-lined study in Karachi. She was dressed in sombre grey silk with a black armband and told me she had had just under four hours’ sleep and had woken up with blood in her ears from the effect of the blast.

“I haven’t felt weepy yet but it suddenly hit me at about 5.30am that maybe I wouldn’t have made it,” she said. “I kept thinking of the noise, the light and the place littered with dead bodies. Everything seemed lit up.”

On the wall of the study was a child’s spelling certificate, a reminder that Benazir may have been a politician but was also the devoted mother of Bilawal, 19, Bakhtawar, 17, and Asifa, 14. I saw her brush her fingers across their photographs when we got back to the house after the Karachi bombing and I asked what she had said to them.

I knew how hard it had been to hear from my husband that he and our son had seen television pictures of the explosion and that Lourenço had asked matter-of-factly: “Do you think Mummy survived?”

“The first thing I thought of after the bomb went off was the children,” she said. She admitted it had been hard speaking to them that morning.

“They kept saying, ‘Mummy are you okay? Mummy are you okay?’ They had been desperately keen to come with me, and I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t want you to come.’

“The worst thing is hurting them, making them fearful,” she added. “I feel children need their parents. Losing my father was the worst thing that ever happened to me and I was 25 – they are still much smaller. I worry about the effect on them.”

However, she insisted they understood that she had to go back. “My mother comes from Iran and many of her relatives and friends never went back home, so I used to think I didn’t want to be one of those people who’d lost their country.”

I will never forget seeing Benazir on her bus, like Boadicea riding her chariot, standing at the open front, refusing the entreaties of her security to stay behind the armour-plated shield. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement and a speckled dove with an injured leg perched on her shoulder.

“This is why I came back,” she said. “Look at the crowds, the women, the children who have come from all over. These are the real people of Pakistan, not the extremists.”

In the end she paid the ultimate price. When I got home from Portugal on Friday the first thing I opened from a pile of post was a Christmas card from Benazir sent from Islamabad. It said, “Praying for peace in the world and happiness for your family in 2008.”

It really made me cry.

[Disclaimer: The content of this news bulletin does not necessarily reflect the view or policy of the Afghan Government, unless specifically stated as such. The collection of articles and commentaries from Afghan and international news sources is provided for informational purposes, and accuracy of the news is the responsibility of the original source.]