Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto

"Ms Bhutto had just addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi when she was shot in the neck by a gunman who then set off a bomb..." - BBC South Asia News

This is disappointing in so many ways. First of course it is a human tragedy, but this is a marker of how bad things have gotten in Pakistan. Let's consider for a moment what has been happening there lately.

The Taliban and Al Qaida have been growing their influence near the border with Afghanistan, and have made several major terrorist attacks in the past few months. The Pakistani military (which is supposedly headed by Musharraf) has been routed, so the US has been funding a questionable militia of local tribal members known as the "Frontier Corps" (-Foreign Policy). The New York Times reports that more than five billion dollars in US aid to Pakistan "more than five billion dollars in US aid to Pakistan has often never reached the military units it was intended for to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and was instead diverted to other programs" (- Yahoo News). Musharraf imposed martial law to keep himself in power by imprisoning supreme court justices who were going to judge his continued rule unconstitutional (- BBC South Asia). And now one of Musharraf's main opponents is killed, assumably by Al-Qaeda linked terrorists.

Questions will be asked if Musharraf was involved, whether members of the Pakistani military (the most powerful group in Pakistan) were involved. Right now we don't know the answer to this; we probably will never know for sure. In the short term we need to closely watch Musharraf, not for what he says, but for what he does to react.

However one thing is certain, the clear losers are all those who had hoped for a democratic Pakistan.