The government calculated that by eliminating Mr Bugti it would undermine the insurgency. This logic underpinned its counter-insurgency strategy, with Mr Musharraf often blaming the war on the rebellious Bugti and Marri chiefs and another aged chieftain, of the smaller Mengal tribe. It reckoned that few Baluchis, nationalist or not, would shed tears for Mr Bugti, who was arrogant and reckless, terrorised dissident kinsmen and political opponents, and betrayed his allies.

It should have reckoned differently. Antediluvian though he was, Mr Bugti was quite successful in casting himself as the champion of every angry Baluch. More progressive Baluch nationalist groups, furiously opposed to the feudal system that enriched Mr Bugti and his dissolute relatives, gave tacit support to his campaign. And indeed, another Baluch insurgent group, the Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA), is believed to include well-educated, city-raised youths as well as bearded tribesmen.  ~The Economist

I am curious where this habit of personalising regimes and political and religious movements comes from.  Apparently Musharraf also has this habit and acts on it.  If only Bugti dies, all will be well in this poorly governed, exploited and abused region….Well, so much for that hope. 

The death of Bugti calls for some reflection on Americans’ habits of personalising all foreign conflicts.  The fight is always against the dictator or leader, even if the only people who ever seem to get killed in these fantastic anti-dictator wars are the people.  Interventionists like to talk about the fascism of “our” enemies, but they are the ones who always seem unduly obsessed with leaders here and abroad; they certainly seem to take foreign despots’ megalomania a lot more seriously than their longsuffering subjects do (could that be because they are assiduously cultivating their own cult of leadership here?).  Part of this problem, I’m sure, is based in the fiction we tell ourselves as we bomb other countries that we aren’t really at war with the people we’re bombing–we’re at war with the political leadership (while in the same breath justifying the bombing of civilian targets by saying that they had it coming, lousy dictator-supporting bums!).  We’re from the United States government, and we’re here to free you, “we” say, as a cluster bomb drops on your neighbour’s house.  But there must be something at once more insidiously propagandistic and stupidly pop cultish about our fixation on the leaders of other countries as embodiments of evil: call it agitprop-meets-Entertainment Tonight, the two-minute celebrity hate. 

I wonder: are we incapable as a people of thinking about foreign policy problems without casting them as a movie with an arch-villain pulling the strings?  It makes the resolution much more straightforward: knock off the henchmen and then push the arch-villain into a boiling pit of oil, or some such.  If only the problems of the world could be resolved as easily as mediocre action movies routinely are.  But many Americans seem to be unable to take a foreign threat seriously unless we can imagine the arch-villain there, sitting in his lair or a cave (or his “bunker”–there’s always got to be a bunker, doesn’t there?), preferably stroking a white cat and seeking to kill James Bond…I mean, freedom. 

Because people obsessed about Hussein himself, they thought that removing Hussein was a kind of panacea.  Then, when that silly idea was quickly discredited, the conventional wisdom was that catching him would “break” the insurgency and would be a “turning point.”  (We have had enough “turning points” in Iraq to come around full circle and begin the entire cycle again.)  Then it was Zarqawi’s turn, but his death did not “break” the insurgency, either.  Notice that, for whatever reason, we no longer have a central villain invoked as the face of evil in Iraq.  However, our political class cannot long do without one, which may explain the new obsession with the incomparably bizarre Ahmadinejad.  Why do we attribute a cult of leadership, indeed the Fuehrerprinzip itself, to people who do not really possess it in the way that we think they do?  The followers of these men do not crumble the moment their leader has fallen (they are not the dim-witted alien mercenaries from The Fifth Element, but relatively savvy trained killers who have learned during the insurgency to operate relatively independently of any other group).  But enough about them.  Back to Bugti. 

Ironically, the late Bugti was not someone who seems to have had nearly as many admirers in life as he does now in death, which is common for divisive figures who die in the name of a resistance or rebellion and become in death an untouchable symbol of that rebellion.  In killing him, Musharraf miscalculated horribly, since the man came to symbolise Baluchi nationalism most in the moment when he was struck down.  This is often the case with insurgencies and rebellions–charismatic or ruthless leaders can sometimes achieve as much by becoming a hallowed memory as they could have done by staying alive and making more enemies.  However horrid his methods or brutal his acts (and it should be noted here that Bugti was a hardened political schemer, but hardly a terrorist), once a rebel has become a symbol to be worked up into legend and song he can be more dangerous to his enemies dead than alive.