The photo above was taken just moments before Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today in Pakistan. Personally, I am stunned to think that she would expose herself as a target that way, but I suspect that she understood the risk. Surely no one can be surprised by this turn of events.
I’ve been trying to follow a variety of discussions around the Internet about the incident. So far this MetaFilter thread is pretty good if you ignore the usual nonsense going on. In that thread a couple of people have linked to this recent London Review of Books article by Tariq Ali which offers quite a bit of background on the Bhutto family and their role in Pakistani politics for the last 30 years or so.
It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that the assassination is the work of the ISI (the Pakistan secret police) either with the direct approval or knowledge of Pervez Musharraf. The other major political figure in Pakistani presidential politics, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has already publicly accused Musharraf, as have some of Bhutto’s supporters in her party. Musharraf has taken quite a gamble that the army can outlast the rioters and that the situation won’t devolve into outright insurrection. He probably doesn’t have to worry too much, since we just gave him $300 million in aid, $50 million of which was specifically for military use.
Ironically, Bhutto had gone back to Pakistan at the behest of the U.S., which wanted to use her as a bit of political leverage against Musharraf. She might yet be useful as a martyr, but Musharraf has to most to gain from this situation by consolidating his own power a bit more, making him that much harder for the Americans to push around.
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