Benazir Bhutto hesitated on the top step, a flicker of nerves flashing across her face. Behind her was the plane from Dubai, the desert metropolis where she has spent much of the past eight years, battling to retain relevancy and waiting for this moment.
Ahead was Pakistan, the fragile, nuclear-armed country she had once run, and hoped to do so again. She paused again on the bottom step, her lips in silent prayer, her eyes filled with tears.
"It's good to be home," she said. "A dream come true."
Call it a personality cult, feudal politics or genuine democracy, but overwhelming street power is the potent calling card of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party. And on Thursday it delivered. A sea of supporters washed up against the fortified bus carrying Bhutto as it crawled through Karachi.
Adolescents waved from tree branches; men danced, jigged and screamed, craning for a glimpse of their leader with the adulation of boyband fans; leather-faced "aunties" -- elderly women supporters -- battled to hold on to the buses, which throbbed with disco music.
"Long live Bhutto!" they chanted, flinging petals into her path. "Benazir for prime minister!"
Bhutto watched from the bus roof top, jammed between party bigwigs in a green shalwar kameez. She smiled, waved, and in a nod to modern addictions, checked her e-mail on her BlackBerry.
She spurned the bulletproof shield that had been installed following threats of suicide bomb squads from Islamist militants. But mobile phone signals were jammed and a team of white-shirted bodyguards circled the bus.
"It's really overwhelming," Bhutto told the Guardian, looking out over the sea of supporters. "And we haven't even reached the main crowd yet."
Acknowledging that it was "not the same Pakistan" she had left, she said: "The militants have risen in power. But I know who these people are, I know the forces behind them, and I have written to General Musharraf about this."
INTACT
The size of the crowd was impossible to gauge. Newswires quoted a government official who said 150,000; Bhutto claimed 3 million. The clear truth, though, was that her party machine remains intact.
"Benazir's program is for the poor. We are just waiting for jobs," said Mansoor Ali Abro, an unemployed 24-year-old laborer who had driven 12 hours from a village in interior Sindh with 1,500 others.
"Criminal man is powerful. Poor man is on the ground," said his neighbor, Mashuk Ali. "I love Benazir."
The journey started in Dubai, where Bhutto bid goodbye to her husband, Asif Zardari -- who used to be known as Mr Ten Percent and has also faced corruption charges -- and two daughters. During her years of exile the local government was always keen not to publicize Bhutto's politics. Yesterday it was easy to imagine why.
Bhutto supporters whooped and yahooed amid the airport's brand-name shops and plastic palm trees. On the flight, as a boisterous Bhutto rally erupted in economy class, flight attendants looked on helplessly.
Bhutto has excited such emotions and expectations before, only to allow them to evaporate in bitter disappointment. Crowds lined the streets in 1986 when she returned from exile in London. But when her second government foundered 10 years later amid scandal and corruption, few were weeping.
This time it will be different, she promised.
"I have gained a lot of experience. I'm older now, and wiser I hope," she said.
Time will tell. For now her fate is tied with that of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who reportedly spent the morning at his army offices in Rawalpindi.
Did she think he was watching on TV?
"You must ask him," Bhutto said. "But I am glad there's been no disruption of my welcome. This is a good sign of reconciliation."
For critics the "reconciliation" is little more than a greasy political deal. Musharraf wants to keep power despite plunging ratings and Bhutto offers a solution. Many of those critics are within her ranks, and she will spend the coming weeks quietly convincing them.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this