Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Tuesday that the Pakistan government was left with no choice but to use force against the Lal Masjid administration, and it had been right in confronting the militants. She said that Pakistan was facing being taken over by militants if President Pervez Musharraf’s “dictatorship” continued. She said she was “frightened for the future of the people of Pakistan”.“Unfortunately, a military dictatorship needs the external crutch of a militant threat to justify its existence to the international community,” she told Sky News television. “So dictatorship, in my view, fuels extremism rather than contains it, as proven by the emergence of the Lal Masjid complex in Islamabad,” she added. She however said that it was a wise move not to accept a ceasefire, since that would have emboldened the militants.
She said that Gen Musharraf had failed to build a true democracy as he had promised. Instead, she said, his government had exploited the international communityÂ’s concern about terrorism.