A Bhutto Postmortem

I thought this Daily Kos post from diarist DHinMI regarding the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto today made the following good point...

Pakistan's government has been under the control of the military for much of its history, and often those dictatorships had the sanction of the US. Cold War politics figured heavily in to its history, and the current crisis has its roots in the US/Pakistani creation of the Mujahadeen forces that fought in Afghanistan in the 1980's against the Soviets. While it certainly has huge consequences for the US, this assassination is another chapter in the internal struggles of Pakistan.

It was the creation of those forces for the Afghan war that eventually led to the rise of the Taliban, the creation of al Qaeda, and the radicalization of the mostly Pashtun peoples in the "tribal areas" of Pakistan, where Bin Laden is widely believed to have found a safe haven, most likely with the tacit acceptance of Pakistan's intelligence service, which is believed to be sympathetic to, and probably actively supporting the religious extremists who seek to overturn Pakistan's government. These are the proximate roots of the current struggles in Pakistan.

So, once again, our involvement in the 1980s Soviet-Afghan conflict has sewn another bitter seed (and DHinMI makes the point that this horrific development undercuts Pervez Musharraf even more and hardly plays to any advantage he may have).

Yes, my first reaction is why on earth could we not have found a way to protect this woman who represented us, ostensibly, and I thought that it showed that we have so little clout in that area of the world now that we have to depend on unreliable proxies to do our bidding (i.e., actually trying to support democracy instead of undercutting it), and events like this are the result.

But I don't know what was behind her death, people, and I'm not presuming that I do here. Was it the work of al Qaeda? Perhaps, but until we've established that, Giuliani, among others, should stop calling this "a terrorist attack" (I realize that you have to "consider the source," though).

And Willard Mitt Romney's statement here trying to play down the foreign policy experience of John McCain (flawed though it may be) by saying that he could pretty much find a diplomat to make up his mind for him concerning events like this should terrify any reasonably sane individual who has had to endure the administration of George W. Milhous Bush as have we all (McCain blamed terrorists also prematurely, but not as stridently I think - using this to take a shot at Huckabee was petty, though...and by the way, Barack Obama should serve David Axelrod a big, steaming, heaping dose of STFU for this one).

And I'll bet you think I'm going to link to a statement from John Edwards that captures perfectly how I feel about this.

You're right (Axelrod/Obama/Sargent post also embedded here).

Update 12/28/07: I read that al Qaeda took “credit” for Bhutto’s death today, but that was being investigated; this, however, looks more suspicious than anything (and given Bhutto’s prescience, Bill Richardson looks like a genius for the moment here - kind of invalidates some of what DHinMI said above, though, but oh well).