Benazir Bhutto Killed in Pakistan (UPDATED – Newest Updates on Top)

UPDATE 9: Mike Huckabee is simply an embarassment right now.

With about 150 supporters crowded around a podium set up on the tarmac of Orlando Executive airport (and about 20 Ron Paul supporters waving signs outside) Mike Huckabee strode out to the strains of “Right Now” by Van Halen and immediately addressed the Bhutto situation, expressing “our sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.”

Apologies? For what is he aplogizing? I don’t think he has any clue. I think it’s his basic reaction – apologize for something, anything. And dig this limp statement.

He said the assassination is a reminder that here in the US, we are lucky to vote “not with bullets but with ballots,” and said “I guess we are sometimes lulled into failing to appreciate the magnitude” of the democratic process.

What in the world does that mean? Did he even think before he let that flaccid platitude slip from his lips and flop onto the tarmac? His gut reactions to too many important things are just horribly wrong.

This guy shouldn’t even get a tour of the Oval Office, never mind letting him sit behind it for four years.

(via Instapundit)

UPDATE 8: The President released a video statement saying that the Bhutto’s killers should be “brought to justice”. I honestly don’t know what that means anymore in the context of the war we’re fighting. Apprehending terrorists means that any number of misguided “civil rights” groups will take up their cause, pleading and suing for their release. A civil trial means lengthy hearings for things that aren’t crimes but acts of war.

I don’t want to see the killers “brought to justice”. I want them dead as I want every Islamist fighting the war against freedom and democracy dead.

(via Hot Air)

Of course, Hugh Hewitt can’t resist plugging Romney and citing “calm and capacity, energy and experience”.

I certainly think Romney has the “calm” bit down. I’d chalk that up to dispassion or general disinterest. He’s shown a lot more energy about plenty of other subjects and not so much on this subject. Perhaps he has. I think Hewitt’s doing a lot of exaggeration, though. A lot.

UPDATE 7: John Podhoretz calls today’s murder, “The End of the Primary’s Holiday from History”. Terrorism and fighting the Islamists is likely to move right back to the top of the stack. Expect this to shuffle the order a bit in both parties, at the foreign policy lightweights get rightly creamed by the people who have at least bothered to do their reading.

Let me just interject here that Fred Thompson has most certainly done his homework on the Islamists.

UPDATE 6: Al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility. Well, sure they have. Why wouldn’t they? It’s not like they lose much from doing so. And they get to look stronger in the eyes of the Pakistani Islamists, at the very least. One wonders if the hit was in response to Bhutto’s meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the strong statement she made afterwards.
Before the rally, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, Bhutto met with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the end of his two-day visit here and told him that if she is elected prime minister she will work with him to fight terror.

“We, too, believe that it is essential for both of our countries, and indeed the larger Muslim world, to work to protect the interest of Islamic civilization by eliminating extremism and terrorism,” she said after their meeting.

So far as I know, Karzai is still in Pakistan. It’s possible that this is a message both to him and Musharraf. Karzai has been putting serious heat on the Islamists in Afghanistan, which is what’s driven many of them into Pakistan. Musharraf was turning up the heat in the Swat region, which was putting them in a serious pinch between both countries. Perhaps this is the “back off” response. I don’t think it’ll work, but it may distract Musharraf enough to give the Islamists time to regroup and hide again.

UPDATE 5: Mark Steyn says that Bhutto would never have been acceptable to a great number of Pakistanis and that our diplomats pushed her forward far too hard, and likely to her death.

Since her last spell in power, Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation. “Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything,” I wrote last month. “It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate.” The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They’d arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a “united” “democratic” “movement” and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them. That’s what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get ‘em round a table. But none of those representatives represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan. Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir’s, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that “the whole of the western world” was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime’ll get you a cup of coffee.

His point about saying much while knowing very little about Pakistani politics is exactly why I refrained from comment on Musharraf’s machinations the past couple of months.

Hot Air, in a sweeping roundup, says that the rumblings of civil war have begun. Perhaps and perhaps not. It could be little more than talk. We’ll have to see – and help as much as the Pakistani government needs from us.

UPDATE 4: Rudy Giuliani looks to be the first Presidential candidate out of the gate with a statement.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a tragic event for Pakistan and for democracy in Pakistan. Her murderers must be brought to justice and Pakistan must continue the path back to democracy and the rule of law. Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere — whether in New York, London, Tel-Aviv or Rawalpindi — is an enemy of freedom. We must redouble our efforts to win the Terrorists’ War on Us.

UPDATE 3: Michelle Malkin notes that this was the fourth attempt to kill Bhutto since she returned to the county in October, just two months ago. I’ve decided to flip the updates and put them above the main post to make them easier to read.

UPDATE 2: Varying news reports say that the bomber fired several shots at Bhutto as she was leaving the rally, then blew himself up. Fox is reporting that she dies in surgery, which seems to match the initial timeline and the reports that the death announcement came at the hospital. Gateway Pundit has those stories and several others, including video of the ambulance leaving the scene.

Via Instapundit, Jules Crittenden smells Islamists behind this and I don’t see any reason to disagree. I think it’s very likely that the Islamists got an assist from a faction inside Musharraf’s government working against him. He gains next to nothing by backing Bhutto’s assasination and is in a weaker position to quell the unrest that this is likely to cause now that his position is civilian. My concern is that there may well come another coup attempt as Islamist-friendly people inside the Pakistani military see an opportunity.

We should be watching this very carefully. President Bush needs to lean into Musharraf as closelty as he can to lend whatever assistance he needs. We can not afford to let Pakistan explode right now and, lacking a credible leader outside of Musharraf right now, we can not leave him out on a limb.

UPDATE: Pajamas Media is rounding up stories on this, as they come available. Check there for more good information.

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Original Post:

Reuters and others are reporting that Benazir Bhutto, the Pakiststani politician who has been opposed to Musharraf’s rule there and who only recently returned from exile, has been killed in Rawalpindi by a suicide bomber. The attack apparently killed about 20 others.
This is a very bad thing for the country which has only recently managed to stabilize itself from the earlier unrest that prompted Pervez Musharraf to declare martial law and essentially lock the whole country down. He had recently gotten the okay from the Supreme Court there to run for another term as President and has resigned his position as General. Bhutto has returned to her home nation to again run for the position of Prime Minister against Musharraf and another former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif (who, like Bhutto, had recently returned to Pakistan from exile). She and Sharif had apparently recently been talking about uniting to prevent any hanky-panky with the polls during the election.

With Bhutto dead, Musharraf no longer in direct control of the military, and Sharif still dodgy on whether or not he rejects the Islamists in Pakistan and their ways (there were some credible reports that Sharif had been in repeated contact with Osama bin Laden inthe early 1990s), Pakistan could easily slide back into the barely-contained turmoil it had only recently left.

I’ll update this post more as better news comes available.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, The World At Large