What strikes me about discussion on the Bhutto assassination is the rapid scramble by bloggers and other analysts to develop constructs that reflect and reinforce their own biases. The last two days have been a confused series of feints and counterfeints by bloggers who probably couldn’t find Karachi on a map, racing to attribute blame to their favourite whipping boy.

The government of Pakistan, predictably, blames “the Taliban and Al Qaeda”, and will without a doubt be demanding more funding, more weapons and more support from the US to fight “terror”.

Supporters of Musharraf/Bush echo that view, but carefully. Bhutto as victim of Al Qaeda is a useful prop, a beautiful woman slain, blow to democracy, etc. However, they don’t want to focus too much on Bhutto’s actual message, which was that Musharraf is a corrupt dictator whose ineptitude actually put the fundamentalists in power in the Pushtun regions. It’s hard to convincingly mourn this attack on Pakistani “democracy” with a straight face, having accepted its subversion by Bush’s ally Musharraf for the last five years.

Opponents of Musharraf/Bush are tending to characterize this as a government assassination, by omission through lack of adequate security, if not by commission.

I don’t even understand the Conservative Party of Canada well enough to make informed guesses about they’re really up to. When it comes to an environment as alien to me as the inner workings of the Pakistani political process, anything I say would simply be a projection of my own ignorance and my existing biases. Best to wait, I think, until the dust settles a bit before drawing any conclusions.

CBC National did a compilation of Bhutto interviews the day she was killed, including one done just a few months ago by Carol Off. They also included clips from people she’d recently been in contact with, and the common message they received was that Bhutto wasn’t able to get proper security. She wasn’t asking the gov’t for protection, she was trying to bring in her own people but they weren’t being allowed into the country.

It was quite eerie, it was almost like she expected to be killed soon, knowing she was a sitting duck whenever she went out in public. There was an attack foiled the day before the assassination, and if the man that killed her had failed, there probably would have been another attempt the next day.

What I’ve found amazing is how the press have managed to focus in on what seem like pretty trivial details. Did she die from the bullet wounds or from an impact with a handle on the sun roof? As Balb pointed out above, Bhutto did have a very pointed message planned in case of her death but no one seems to be paying much attention to it.

I suppose the announcement that the major opposition parties are contesting the next election is a good thing, even if it has to be delayed for a bit. If the PPP is allowed to run and does, its hard to imagine them not taking control of Parliament. If they don’t run or get cheated out of a win I don’t even want to think about what its going to be like in that country in the coming months…

Bhutto Jr.’s been given a hell of a grad present, but I liked the “Democracy is the BEST revenge.” line, let’s hope it sticks… insha’Allah.

So far there have been two promises of revelations from the Bhutto camp; Wolf Blitzer’s secret memo, and a document Bhutto was “about to release” on the manipulation of the upcoming election. Since she has several million supporters, and since presumably she didn’t write these without support or evidence, I’m wondering when they will actually surface.