The assassination of Benazir Bhutto will keep the pundits busy for days if not weeks as they endlessly anal-ize (GI-speak for talking out of your fourth point of contact) the matter.

Unsurprisingly, the American Corporate Media are treating the story as if it’s all about them, which is to mean (breathlessly) how will this affect the Presidential horse race and Sophomore Class King or Queen of the Prom? Yesterday we were treated to ghoulish discussion among the bobbleheads about how Ms Bhutto’s death is good for Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. Or maybe it’s good for Mitt Romney. Or maybe for Barack Obama. Anyway, it’s got to be good for someone.

Parents will recognize this reaction. If you’ve raised children you’ve undoubtedly noted that 5 year olds consistently live in a centric universe. Everything revolves around them, and so it is with the children of our corporate media.

If Ms Bhutto’s assassination doesn’t impact the horse race then it means the children with the microphones are no longer important!

Frequent commenter Shanks opined that possibly the Pakistani security forces failed to discover the assassin with his pistol and bomb because there was a dark plan to slip a couple of “special weapons” to the evil Iranians in the ensuing chaos, but he knows that’s not realistic, and was just winding my watch stem to see what happened.

This assassination was intended to remove a domestic danger to the status quo in Pakistan. Whether the agent(s) of change were set in place by President Musharraf, the ISI or some other entity like a-Q may eventually be determined.

I will tell you this: a-Q tends to use the bomb for assassination. They attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 by bomb. They attacked the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam by bomb in 1998. The attacked the World Trade Center again in 2001with flying bombs. And you will remember that Ahmed Shah Masood, the “Lion of Afghanistan” was killed by a-Q proxies with a bomb concealed in a video camera on the same day the WTC was successfully destroyed. Of the almost 4,000 US troops killed in Iraq, the majority have died by bomb, either placed and fired off by a-Q or by the Iraqi resistance in imitation.

The gun is more a weapon favored by Westerners, but do not impute anything special to this fact because it has been used throughout the Arab world. The bomb is just more spectacular, and perhaps more certain.

Attaturk points out that there are many correlations between deaths in the Bhutto family and the Pakistani military, taking up a cut from a report from a McClatchy article this morning.

The assassination occurred in this garrison city housing the headquarters of the Pakistan army, an institution that has always seemed opposed to Bhutto. A couple of miles away across Rawalpindi, a previous military regime had executed her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first democratically elected prime minister, in 1979, when she was 26.

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. As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: "Willing to die for Benazir."[emph added]

To drive the point home, Attaturk adds,

When people just dismiss the anger of Pakistanis at Musharraf and the military regime in Pakistan over Bhutto's death, the lack of context is staggering. Not only because Benazir Bhutto's close relations were killed at the hands of the military; but because even if her death was not directly caused by the regime, it set in place the forces that probably did.

I certainly don’t know anything about political assassinations, because I will deny that’s a skill set the US Army teaches its soldiers. But if I wanted to take a very important political target I wouldn’t use just one hitter. I might have a gunman in close in case the opportunity presented itself, and I might back him up with a dedicated zealot willing to kill himself (and the target) with a bomb. (This would also ensure the gunman couldn’t talk later.) In case of failure I’d also have a couple of teams along the route of retreat, possibly with sophisticated anti-vehicle weapons, like RPGs. And I would need a spotter at middle distance to advise the cutoff teams whether the first attack failed, to alert them of the target’s approach.

I’m not saying anything. I‘m just saying eventually the truth will surface.

In the meantime, let’s examine some of the consequences. The US plan to use Ms Bhutto as a moderating influence on President Musharraf is in tatters, just in case they were ever serious about letting the flowers of democracy blossom in Pakistan. That would be a first, by the way, because they haven’t shown any interest in democracy in Iraq or the US, but it did look good in newspapers.

The resultant civil unrest throughout Pakistan seems to require a harsh hand to clamp down right now. Perhaps fortunately, President Musharraf recently made some changes in the national Supreme Court, who will most likely endorse any suggestions he has for emergency measures to restore calm. And he’s no longer commander of the Army, so there’s that clear arms-length distance to ensure propriety if he declares martial law.

We’ve poured billions of dollars into Pakistan, claiming that it is a bulwark in the fight against the International War of Terror™ and for our troubles we’ve gotten A Q Khan giving nuclear reactor and weaponry information to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Our best friend President Musharraf sentenced Mr Khan to house arrest after pardoning him.

The Taliban and a-Q have been proliferating in safety in the North West Provinces, specifically Waziristan. The Pakistani Army seems unable to deal with the G’s up there. There were plans to use American Special Ops personnel in the North West, starting in January in an effort to track down some of the G’s hiding places.

There was great play about Secretary of State Rice going to Pakistan in order to straighten out President Musharraf and his working arrangement with Ms Bhutto, thereby restoring some degree of domestic and international legitimacy to a strongman, and now that’s down the tubes.

A man blinking in dazzled despair might ask how many more ways can the Bu$h malAdministration screw the pooch in Pakistan?

Juan Cole asks at Salon.com:

With Bhutto gone, does Bush have a Plan B?

Dec. 27, 2007 | The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday provoked rioting in Islamabad and Karachi, with her supporters blaming President Pervez Musharraf, while he pointed his finger at Muslim extremists. The renewed instability in Pakistan came as a grim reminder that the Bush administration has been pursuing a two-front war, neither of which has been going well. Bush's decision to put hundreds of billions of dollars into an Iraq imbroglio while slighting the effort to fight al-Qaida, rebuild Afghanistan, and move Pakistan toward democracy and a rule of law has been shown up as a desperate and unsuccessful gamble. The question is whether President Musharraf now most resembles the shah of Iran in 1978. That is, has his authority among the people collapsed irretrievably?

The article is well written, and quite authoritative, as Professor Cole’s work tends to be. If you’re unfamiliar with the entire history of Pakistan as the wellspring of charismatic Islamic fundamentalism, this would be a good quick primer. But to answer Professor Cole’s question,

The obvious answer is that the Bu$h malAdministration doesn’t do “Plan B’s,” as many will remember from the Iraq Study Group report of earlier this year.

Professor Cole continues:

Pakistan's future is now murky, and to the extent that this nation of 160 million buttresses the eastern flank of American security in the greater Middle East, its fate is profoundly intertwined with America's own. The money for the Sept. 11 attacks was wired to Florida from banks in Pakistan, and al-Qaida used the country for transit to Afghanistan. Instability in Pakistan may well spill over into Afghanistan, as well, endangering the some 26,000 U.S. troops and a similar number of NATO troops in that country. And it is not as if Afghanistan were stable to begin with. If Pakistani politics finds its footing, if a successor to Benazir Bhutto is elected in short order by the PPP and the party can remain united, and if elections are held soon, the crisis could pass.

Several observers have noted that the Bhutto family is the PPP, and apparently there is no nationally known politician waiting in the wings.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, a political rival of Ms Bhutto, had returned from exile at the same time as Ms Bhutto, and he had also been the target of an unsuccessful sniper attack yesterday. He was ousted as Prime Minister when General Musharraf staged his coup in 1998. Since he was convicted of terrorism by the Supreme Court and blocked from participating in national politics for 21 years, it would seem he is barred from replacing Ms Bhutto as a candidate for Prime Minister. Since he is technically still under ban, its unlikely he will be able to run in the January elections.