Benazir Bhutto Assassinated (yet another sad day for democracy)

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.
 

Nrets

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I think in the future, we will all be literally fighting for our survival once we see the true enemy emerge. I am not speaking of terrorists by the way. I will see you guys in 2008, the years are getting closer to the emergence of the real threat at hand.Are you a sheep(typical human being) or a warrior fighting for the real cause.

I know what you are saying. I actually had a professor tell us last semester that chaos is one of the likely scenarios in the upcoming decades. He called that the Mad Max theory. The option that we are currently pursuing is called big government. It involves increasing control over people by government. Basically everyone becomes slaves to a system that makes sure to distribute increasingly scarce resources to a handful of rich countries, the poor countries just basically starve.
There is one option that does not involve anarchy and reconciles government with the rapidly approaching exhaustion of resources. That one is ecologial democracy and it would involve placing restrictions on every level of everything we do to make this more sustainable.
The final option is we could move into space, that was called the Star Trek theory. The problem is that depending on the Star Trek theory to get us out of the impending Malthusian disaster is sort of like assuming that out of 12 guys you will find a footlong penis. (just to bring this back to LPSG topic)

That said, I realize that in my own life, I am still going to be the same person after the fall, so I go about life as usual.
However, I am a warrior. Always have been. Always will be. Even when I am lying in fear in a hospital bed or crouching in a dark alley or dying in a freaking field of slaughter, there will be a fighting spirit in my soul.
Even when I talk about society on some large penis site in some futile effort to elevate myself above the insecurity about my penis, there is some warrior thing going on, I am a warrior.

Point is, in spite of my personal reasons for being attracted to these doomsday scenarios, this guy has a point. I am a History major, and all of my classes have sort of talked about the impending ecological disaster to some extent. So even though my shaky childhood makes me crave the Mad Max outcome, it is important that people start looking beyond what the people who hold the assets are telling us, cause the longer we do, the closer it is going to get to too late.
The mass extinction of species that is currently going on could spread like wildfire and then we will be truly SOL.
What is going on in the Islamic world is portrayed as being about religion by the Western media. If my inclinations are right, and 85&#37; of the time they are, it isn't really about religion at all. It is the fact that young Islamic men growing up in the mid east were promised a comfortable life with a large family when they came of age. They are becoming heavily disillusioned on an enormous level as they realize there is not enough resources to go around to give them what their parents had.

The loss of Bhutto is sad. It is a sad day for democracy. It is sad for me cause I do enjoy the American standard of living. But her assassination does seem to represent a disillusioned society rather than some small group of terrorists.
Western media always calls the oppostion in these countries terrorists. IN the El Salvador civil war, they called the FMLN (peoples national liberation front) a terrorist faction. Today the FMLN is one of the 2 major political parties in that country.

Bottom line is that democracy is not going to work the way Bhutto wanted it to in Pakistan
 

dreamer20

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As another analyst pointed out, there was no autopsy and her husband, already in trouble with the Pakistani government, possibly declined an autopsy in return for government forgiveness.

He must be a very addle minded analyst. Her husband was abroad when he was told the tragic news, that she was shot. He later learned the authorities did not permit an autopsy and eventually the Pakistani government decided to state her death was not caused by an assassin. As a result of the Pakistani government's suspicious actions her widowed husband concluded that they cannot be trusted. Thus he stated tonight that he would only allow her body to be exhumed and autopsied by impartial, foreign investigators.