Musharraf wouldn’t allow it. If Bhutto had Blackwater or Armor security, she might still be alive, as the assailant probably couldn’t have gotten anywhere near her car.

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Farooq Tariq, general secretary of Labour Party Pakistan, gives an on-the-ground report of what’s happening in Pakistan now. Serious rioting. A general strike has been called.

It is very volatile, unstable, unpredictable, explosive, dangerous, impulsive, fickle and capricious political situation. It never happened before in many years that mass reaction has erupted to this degree.

The general strike was a total success. All roads were empty. No traffic at all. All shops were closed. All industrial and other institutions were completely shut down.

The Army has been given shoot to kill orders. The strike continues.

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Let’s not forget, Benazir Bhutto was removed as president twice because of corruption.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

And that’s from the opening paragraphs - the author is just warming up.

But the assassination may backfire on Islamists (which would be a good thing indeed.)

In killing Bhutto, the Islamists over-reached (possibly aided by rogue elements in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the murkiest outfits on this earth). Just as al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand and alienated that country’s Sunni Arabs, this assassination may disillusion Pakistanis who lent half an ear to Islamist rhetoric.

Extremists often think that violent actions on their part will provoke an overthrow on whatever government it is that they loathe. This rarely happens. Instead the populace, sickened by violence, often turns against them. The best possible move for the US would be to stay out of internal Pakistani politics. Any of the usual arrogant, blundering moves by the US will simply help the extremists. In fact, that’s precisely what they want the US to do.

A creature of insatiable ambition, Bhutto will now become a martyr. In death, she may pay back some of the enormous debt she owes her country.

No she won’t. She’s dead.

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There were multiple snipers shooting armor-piercing bullets, a decoy suicide bomb, and two of the snipers blew themselves up after firing. There was another attack at the hospital.

A working theory, according to this American source, is that Al Qaeda or affiliated jihadist groups had effectively suborned at least one unit of Pakistan’s Special Services Group, the country’s equivalent of Britain’s elite SAS commandos.

Or not. But clearly they were stone cold professionals. With help.

Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday’s rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts.

Tip: FDL, who also has a fascinating piece by someone who knew Bhutto as a student at Harvard and says she was being groomed, even then, to lead Pakistan.

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So how did the assassin get close enough to Bhutto to be able to shoot her at point blank range? And how did they know when she’d be out of the protective bubble of her car? This seems a well-planned hit that had inside help.

The killing was clearly intended to create chaos and a collapse of the government. Indeed, Musharraf may not last in power much longer.

But why would anyone want to see the 4 horseman unleashed? It helps to recall Lenin. The early revolutionary leaders in Russia wanted to have a new democratic government - in effect they wanted to replace the Tsar with a kind of English system. Ms Bhutto = Kerensky.

Lenin had no ambitions to simply take over the existing state - he wanted to create a Theocracy - a new ideal state based on a religion. AQ have the same desire.

But Lenin had a disciplined mass party and enjoyed broad support. AQ has no such support, not even in Pakistan.

They want chaos in Pakistan that will lead to conflict with India. They want the US to back order and Musharraf so that when M falls, the loss for the US will be even greater. They want Europeans to fear the Muslim immigrants and to have a reaction thus building up the tension inside Europe.

But at some point chaos becomes no one’s friend. Even gun runners and drug smugglers need basic societal stability. Once chaos starts, almost by definition, the outcome is unpredictable.

This creates the ideal conditions for a tribal theocracy.

The brilliance of this move is that while I think I can see how it can all turn out, I can’t think of how I would do anything but follow the script that they have forced upon us. Like in 1914, the powder charges have been laid over 40 years. Now the fuse is lit - the bang is inevitable.

Maybe not. We don’t have to take the bait. There’s no need for the US to do anything militarily and every reason to not do so. Perhaps the absolute best thing the US could do, both ethically and in terms of power politics, is to let Pakistan handle their own problem. Not only would the world breathe a sigh of relief that the US is finally acting sensibly, it would also defuse much of the threat from AQ.

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Some thoughtful, if apocalyptic, views on the assassination from blogs

Moon of Alabama

Who did it?

Many people will point to Musharraf, as being behind the assassination, but according to the BBC, someone shot Bhutto and then blew himself up. Suicide bombing is not the hallmark of the Pakistani military, but of the takfiris.

Bhutto had promised to fight the U.S.’s war of terror against the Taliban and takfiris in the tribal North West Frontier State, certainly reason enough for those folks to kill her.

Then there’s the ISI, the shadowy secret police of Pakistan, considered among the best in the world, with murky ties to Al Qaida, Taliban, and more. In reality, anyone could have done it.

Futurejacked

With the death of Benazir Bhutto, we are now entering worst-case-scenario territory. A Pakistan that has devolved into Iraq-style globalguerrilla violence will create a huge node of instability, threatening India and Iran (not that I am losing sleep over that one) and pretty much guaranteeing that Afghanistan will not find stability for decades to come.

A destabilized Iran does no one any good and would simply spread the chaos. Nor does a destabilized Middle East. But we may get that anyway.

Robert Paterson

It has been easy for us to label all of this “Terror”.

I call it the Messy World.

Where there is a belt of so called states where the system shuts down all hope of social progress and produces millions of angry young men as a result. Where in the west, our huge bureaucracies impede any movement and our new belief system of Political Correctness precludes the development of an appreciation for the threat that is before us.

So here we are on the brink.

When extremists jack religion and use it for purposes of political manipulation and control then much madness can result, especially in the absence of any competing belief systems. Given the repressive nature of those regimes, which too often was backed by the US, political dissent was eliminated or marginalized, leaving the angry now no place to go but to Islamists.

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