assassination constituency

Martyr bangs her head on sun roof. So now it seems that Benazir Bhutto actually died the strangest political death since JFK pitched off that bouncy castle head first into a bucket of poisonous lard.

And still the question remains. Who did the deed? Let’s assume that the actual hit was done by some AQ/Talibanoid grouping, as the Pakistani government say. Let’s remember as well that all mainstream candidates in Pakistan are by definition candidates for the same treatment.

In this light it’s not so much a matter of who killed her – the same kind of people killed her who have been trying to kill Musharraf on several occasions without success. It’s more a matter of who didn’t want her to stay alive enough to protect her, either directly by main force or by employing diversionary tactics upstream using whatever contacts you have with potential assassins You don’t even need to be actively complicit here. You just need to stand there and let murder take its course.

Bhutto fingered a parallel state in the Pakistan army and ISI. These sound like obvious members of an assassination constituency, but it could well be more fluid than that. If we take assassination as a constant in Pakistani politics then if you have any kind of commercial or other interest a politician can help you with then it makes sense to develop the capacity to protect that politician. And if you have the capacity to protect, then it makes sense to cash in on that by developing an interest a politician can help you with. And in all cases you have an interest in protecting the assassins as the source of your power.

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[dsquared]

It's also the case that the ISI parallel state is intimately entwined with the Afghan opium trade, and that as you mentioned earlier, it would not at all be out of the general run of things for the friends of democracy to believe that Benazir Bhutton was of more use to them as a dead and irreproachable symbol of democracy than a living and rather cunning machine politician (lots of the commentary about her has already taken a rather patronising turn with a load of ballsaching on about the Bhutto "dynasty", which is obviously completely different from the Bush or for that matter Wedgewood-Benn families). I suspect that as with the JFK assassination, the puzzle will be trying to find someone who *didn't* have at least enough of an interest in this assassination to make it worth their while going for the main chance once it had happened.