Very, very bad

That is the only way to describe the assassination today of Benazir Bhutto, though, to be honest, my first thoughts after I heard the news consisted of three words: "Ahmed Shah Massoud."

Massoud had been one of the key leaders of the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviets in the 1980's. After the Taliban took power, he was a key figure in the Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban. He was smart, charismatic, popular and pro-US. He would have been a great leader for Afghanistan, far better and more effective than Hamid Karzai

But he was assassinated by the Taliban. On September 10, 2001. No one noticed his assassination in the news that day, but I did, and I had a very bad feeling about what was to come. Kinda like what I'm feeling now.

These assassinations were distinguishable. The time and place of Massoud's hit were clearly chosen by the attackers, using the cover of a news interview. Bhutto's assassination was by opportunity, at her own campaign event. But that does not make me feel any better.

First, the suspects (via Michelle Malkin):

The list of suspects could be long. "She has a lot of enemies, no doubt about it," Sehgal says. "Some of them would not leave any stone unturned to leave her dead and buried." Among them:

• Taliban fighters and other Islamic extremists who resent a woman who wants to keep religion out of government and who supports the U.S. war on terror. Bhutto inflamed the militants recently when she said she might allow U.S. forces onto Pakistani soil to hunt Taliban and al-Qaeda forces hiding along the rugged Afghan-Pakistani border. The Taliban threatened to greet her with suicide bombers — but denied responsibility for the bloodshed in Karachi.

• Militant supporters of her estranged brother Murtaza, who was gunned down by police in 1996 during Benazir's second term as prime minister. Murtaza had emerged as a key critic of her regime and head of an armed left-wing Peoples Party splinter group. "He had die-hard supporters who blame her for his death," Sehgal says.

• Members of the military establishment who undermined her two governments and who three decades ago overthrew and executed her father, the charismatic Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

I'm sure our ever prescient intelligence establishment has come up with its own list of suspects, which probably include the IRA and Sendero Luminoso, but I'm guessing it was al Qaida and the Taliban, possibly in conjunction with rogue elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence establishments, including the ever-helpful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, who helped create the Taliban in the first place.

Gosh, now why would they do a thing like this? Mark Steyn:

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.

It gets worse. Andrew McCarthy:

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.

In Pakistan, it is the regime that propounds Western values, such as last year’s reform of oppressive, Sharia-based Hudood laws, which made rape virtually impossible to prosecute — a reform enacted despite furious fundamentalist rioting that was, shall we say, less well covered in the Western press. The regime, unreliable and at times infuriating, is our only friend. It is the only segment of Pakistani society capable of confronting militant Islam — though its vigor for doing so is too often sapped by its own share of jihadist sympathizers.

You wonder why I have a bad feeling about this?

I wonder if a tipping point has been reached. Bob Krumm is calling this "Pakistan’s Archduke Ferdinand." That analysis may be correct. I don't know where Pakistan goes from here. McCarthy's right about Pakistan being full of Islamists -- largely because of Saudi-funded madrassahs (and, hey, didn't they put the "mad" in "madrassah?") -- but as John Derbyshire points out, Pakistan has a "huge" westernized middle class who wants nothing to do with Islamism and who don't deserve what may come next.

But that was not what I was talking about though. I wonder about a tipping point for the American people.

For some time there has been an undercurrent among the American people of frustration with the Islamic world -- the barbarity, the lack of respect for women; the violence at any slight, real or imagined; the intolerance for anyone who disagrees with them and the desire to impose that vision on us, by force if necessary. Our leadership, most notably President Bush and almost the entirety of the foreign policy and Democrat establishments in DC, have not reflected that frustration, but it is definitely there.

Perhaps frustration is the wrong word. Patience, and the rapidly dwindling supply of it, might be better.

The targets of much of that frustration are the Saudis and the Pakistanis, two of our supposed friends who seem to be causing much of the problem. But in the case of Pakistan, Musharraf has an excuse -- his control over the Pakistani armed forces and intelligence services is shaky at best -- and calls for the US to demand his removal from power are stupid for that reason. The Saudis have no excuse.

But I wonder if that frustration will translate into action -- military action. The Bush administration has not exactly been creative in coming up with new tools for advancing US interests, and has been singularly inept in using the tools it already has. But already a significant portion of the US population thinks the Muslim world should just be nuked. We may have a serious possibility of that with a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

But what military options would we have? My own dream of sending in clone troopers to kill every living thing present in the northwest provinces (Taliban/Al Qaida strongholds) or in the madrassahs would no doubt be effective, and in my opinion, should be seriously considered. But, as McCarthy says:

We don’t have the political will to fight the war on terror every place where jihadists work feverishly to kill Americans. And, given the refusal of the richest, most spendthrift government in American history to grow our military to an appropriate war footing, we may not have the resources to do it.

This is a common complaint:

I have a very bad feeling about all of this. The potential for critically destabilizing a flank that was difficult enough as it was, is huge. I’d feel slightly better if Rumsfeld had doubled the size of the Army, and wish Bush and Congress would crank that up. This war is far from over. This war is no artificial Bush creation or figment of anyone’s imagination, and should still be very much part of our own election, wishful thinking notwithstanding.

Oops! And this was a Republican administration, supposed experts in national security, who left us unprepared for this.

How much worse would the Democrats have been? Think Jimmy Carter.

Like I said, I have a bad feeling about this.