LONDON, Aug 23: The West’s support for General Pervez Musharraf had made Pakistan a “seedbed” of terrorism, writes former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in The Guardian issue of Wednesday.

She asks: “Why is it that the terrorist trail always seems to lead back to Pakistan?”

“Why are second-generation Pakistani émigrés far more attracted by this pattern of terrorism than other disillusioned Muslims in the West?”

“What is it about Islamabad that puts it at the centre of terrorist plots?”

Benazir writes that General Musharraf “played the West like a fiddle” by offering support in the so-called “war on terror” to keep the United States and Britain “off his back as he proceeded to arrest and exile opposition leaders, decimate political parties, pressure the press and set back human and women’s rights by a generation.”

“The Musharraf dictatorship doles out ostensible support in the war on terror to keep it in the good graces of Washington, while it presides over a society that fuels and empowers militants at the expense of moderates,” she says.