The article's insinuation that Pakistan is at bottom a fundamentalist state on the side of the terrorists, is in fact belied by this action. If they thought they could win an election against a modern secularist woman, they would have had the election and trounced her at the polls and taken power legally, and that would be that.
But they were going to lose.
They do *not* speak for the people of Pakistan. That is *why* they are unwilling to let the people of Pakistan speak.
The dirty little secret of the whole war in that the Islamicist nutjobs have no political base, even in the countries they pretend are their homeland. They are a violent faction, not countries.
They use violence exclusively because without it no one would pay the slightest attention to them or their demands. They are too marginal for anyone to need to do so.
And the right solution to them is emphatically not to write off entire countries in which they have no majority and precious little support, as ungovernable or as their own, merely because they commit acts of violence in those places with any frequency.
Instead they need to be defied politically whatever they do, and everyone in the countries concerned (and in all others, frankly) needs to side with those they attack, and annihilate them. The anger generated by this action, within Pakistan, is political capital in this war. It should be cashed, in full, for dead terrorist bodies.
What the world needs now is not handwringing or cleverness, but full throated bloodthirsty *revenge*. Accurately aimed, to be sure. That is the way to beat these people. All of Pakistan would cheer for it, right now. So unload on the bastards up in Waziristan, sweep ruthlessly for Bin Laden and company, *now*.
The elections should also go ahead, showing the terrorists are powerless to stop them, and showing that they lack any political support or base. Remember blue fingers.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945145/posts
“Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today’s events a horrible inevitability. As I always say when I’m asked about her, she was my next-door neighbor for a while - which affects a kind of intimacy, though in fact I knew her only for sidewalk pleasantries. She was beautiful and charming and sophisticated and smart and modern, and everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be - though in practice, as Pakistan’s Prime Minister, she was just another grubby wardheeler from one of the world’s most corrupt political classes.
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.
As I said, she was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions. Rest in peace, Benazir.”