Plumb Bob Blog

12/27/2007 (2:57 pm)

Bhutto Assassinated

I can’t find it on the news feeds yet, but Michelle Malkin reports that Benazir Bhutto, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan and recently returned to Pakistani politics after receiving amnesty from current Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf, has been assassinated.

She was killed this morning at a rally of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party at Rawalpindi, near Islamabad in Pakistan, in a combined bombing and shooting attack.

According to Adnkronos International, al Qaeda is claiming credit for the attack. The report claims:

“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen,” Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English. Al-Yazid is the main al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.

However, this has not been confirmed by any other source yet. I don’t find this entirely credible; Bhutto was not a strong ally of the United States and had limited political power. I can understand al Qaeda’s discomfort with the possibility of a woman leading Pakistan, but she has led twice before without violent reaction from wahabists.

The Bush administration’s Middle East strategy has relied on building prosperous, stable, free republics in the region. Cooperation from Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan on the east and south, has been essential to freeing Afghanistan from the Taliban, and was touted as a major achievement of the Bush administration in 2002.

Supporters of Bhutto are rioting in parts of Pakistan, and it remains to be seen whether representative democracy can survive the chaos in Pakistan. Clearly, this assassination adds to the chaos.

Read about Bhutto on Wikipedia.

Added a few minutes later: This AP report was posted 30 minutes ago on Yahoo.

Added at 4:30 PM: Hot Air has a very thorough spread on the assassination, with some links to the previous assassination attempt back in October.

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