Cui Bono

(For the illiterate pagans out there)

So everyone's heard about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, recently returned from exile, survivor of another attempt on her life during her welcome home celebration about a month ago. Bhutto's family has been involved in Pakistani politics much the same way the Kennedys have been in the United States, the difference being, our dynastic clan offs themselves, hers gets murdered.

She's the fourth Bhutto since Pakistan's independence to die as a result of politics. Her father and two brothers preceded her.

So, obviously, there are two ways to look at this assassination. One: It's another internal Pakistani thing, or Two: The All-Powerful Terrorists are behind it.

Cynicism aside, apply the aforementioned principle from the title and ask yourself, "Who Benefits?"

Well, in this case, it's a little muddy. Everyone seems to benefit from her death. Musharraf's political party has just seen its chief opposition die in a hail of... something (more on that in a moment), and is now a shoe-in to win the upcoming parliamentary elections. Which are, hence, a joke. Al-Queda supposedly hates her, but I think it's more of a pragmatism thing with them; Bhutto would have to be more competent at controlling those cave dwelling loons than Musharraf, who turns a blind eye.

So, who killed her, and why?

Bhutto certainly had her suspicions. She sent CNN an email to be opened only in the event of her death a short time ago. In the email, she lays the blame squarely at the feet of Musharraf.

"I wld [sic] hold Musharaf [sic] responsible," Bhutto wrote to her US spokesman, Mark Siegel, in the October e-mail, which was reported Thursday afternoon by CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "I have been made to feel insecure by his minions, and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld [sic] happen without him."

Blitzer told viewers he received the e-mail soon after it was sent two months ago, but he agreed not to report on it unless Bhutto was assassinated. "It's a story I was asked to report to the world in -- if Bhutto were killed," he said.

Source: Raw Story

It's like something out of a TV drama, isn't it?

The official timeline for the death goes something like this. Bhutto was leaving a rally and got into her bulletproof car. She stuck her head out of the sunroof to wave to admirers, and it all went to hell.

Depending on your version of events, she was shot twice and then the shooter blew himself up; there were no shots, and she died from blunt force trauma, her head hitting part of the car when the attacker blew himself up; she was shot AND riddled with shrapnel when the guy blew himself up.

She was quickly flown home for burial without an autopsy, which complicates matters.

As Bhutto's letter indicates, the state provided security has proven to be utterly useless in keeping her alive, and never seemed to try that hard to begin with. Musharraf certainly had no interest in keeping his chief rival around and operaating, and he made that abundantly clear.

But something more sinister than, well, pretty fucking sinister activities may be going on here.

Police abandoned their security posts shortly before Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's assassination Thursday, according to a journalist present at the time, and unanswerable questions remain about the cause of her death, because an autopsy was never performed.
...
"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," wrote Saeed Shah in an essay published by McClatchy News Service. "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.'"

The reason no autopsy was performed was, as it turns out, a governmental one as well.

Whatever the case, Bhutto's precise cause of death may never be known because of the failure to administer an autopsy. The procedure was not carried out because police and local authorities in Rawalpindi did not request one, according to IBNLive, but the government plans a formal investigation why this was the case.

This does conveniently leave no one in a secure position to challenge the government's Al-Queda sunroof head smack hypothesis, though.

Earlier in the day Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz told a Pakistani news channel, “The report says she had head injuries – an irregular patch – and the X-ray doesn’t show any bullet in the head. So it was probably the shrapnel or any other thing has struck her in her said. That damaged her brain, causing it to ooze and her death. The report categorically says there’s no wound other than that," according to IBNLive.

Source: Raw Story

So what precisely does this mean for Pakistan, the region, and our colossal continuing failure abroad? Hard to say.

Currently the country is being gripped by waves of violence and chaos; the upcoming elections are now a complete farce and will put Musharraf back in power just as he always intended; and whether Al-Queda actually killed Bhutto or not, it's clear that Musharraf wanted to give them every opportunity to do so. The letter from beyond the grave is just icing on the cake.

This is one seriously messed up situation, folks.

(For more details on the aftermath, see this handy Telegraph article)