jason_els
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This is stated quite openly in her autobiography. It's not different from
Winston Churchill having a lifelong sense that his destiny was to lead Britain. But Bhutto, like Churchill, believed she had important things to accomplish for the country ... and many Pakistanis agreed with her. Hence, the remarkable display of grief.
In that, I can't argue. I do believe that Bhutto truly believed she was the best hope for Pakistan and maybe she was.
If she established a true democracy, then you could also make an argument from justice that her return was ethically justified. Whether she was likely to achieve that is, of course, debatable.
If you believe democracy is justifiable by such means. The ethical paradigm is what's in question, not the methods. I imagine a Pakistani parliament to be something close to disaster. How democracy would work in such a completely polarized society baffles me unless there was an ironclad constitution with the strongest judiciary the world has yet seen.
Perhaps it would make a difference on a very strict Muslim interpretation; I don't know. The cause of death that the government is now speaking of sounds pretty direct to me. To most Pakistanis, she would have been martyred; indeed, they have been throwing the word around a great deal.
If this does not gain her the martyr's crown from very strict Muslims, she was never hoping to get their support in any great measure anyway.
In that I agree. I do believe, however, that there is a respect for authority that transcends the boundaries. It's like the situation in Saudi. While very few Muslims want to live by Wahhabist rules, they respect the piety of the sect and its moral authority. If the ultra-orthodox Muslims of Pakistan could remotely conclude that she wasn't martyred then that would put something of a damper on the enthusiasm of her supporters.
Guns of all sorts are very widely available in Pakistan. I saw shops in Peshawar where machine guns were freely on offer.
I have no idea how available military ammunition is, but I wouldn't doubt that it is surprisingly available. In any case, rogue elements in the military did oppose her, as you go on to argue, so Islamist opponents of Bhutto could easily have gotten such ammunition, even if its distribution normally happens to be relatively restricted.
That may be the case however it still leaves the ridiculous circumstance of doctors determining her death to be first of two gunshot wounds, then of shrapnel wounds and then of hitting her head on a sunroof mechanism. Either the physicians of Pakistan are the most woefully incompetent bunch or the government has an ulterior agenda.
And what were you doing in Peshawar? Nobody goes to Peshawar on a lark. It's not a tourist stop-over by any means.
Not that simple. As President Kennedy said, if anyone really wanted to kill you, they could find a high building and shoot from there. Of course he turned out to be right.
The death of a protectee is the utmost failure of security there is. Her security was completely inadequate for the situation and it has been confirmed her only security detail was one single person. That is far less than Musharraf himself.
This is among the possibilities. But you asserted that "the army assassinated her." The idea that they provided inadequate security falls far short of that claim.
Musharraf travels much like Bush does. There are security sweeps, pat-downs, and coordinated movements to keep him constantly on the move with unpublished routes. That her vehicle stopped was unthinkable. Musharraf always has at least 200 personnel on hand whenever he appears in a public venue. She had one other person. One person does not begin to equate with the security to which Musharraf surrounds himself.
Well, whether they're "essentially sympathetic" to the extremists or merely have rogue elements, one has to say that the assassination seemed utterly predictable before she returned, and quite inevitable after the first deadly blast on the night of her return that killed 150 people.
The question Whodunnit? is still radically open.
I don't think so. That it happened where it did and how it did has the utmost meaning. I don't think that there are rogue elements so much as truly sympathetic leanings. All I have have seen or read, so far, indicates that the Pakistani military is essentially sympathetic to the Taliban and al Qaeda. Whether this information is accurate or not I can't say.
If Musharraf really wanted to keep Bhutto safe he could have. He could have limited her appearances to truly safe venues, provided her with security convoys, loads of safety personnel, a popemobile, and police up the hoo-ha to clear the convoy's path and keep her constantly moving. The government completely failed in that regard. She was standing out of a sunroof in a stopped vehicle surrounded by the public. There is no way in Hell Musharraf would ever be in that kind of situation. It wasn't a question of doing the best with what was possible but of doing the least. She was served-up to the assassin on a plate.