In the wake of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, maybe only one thing is clear: The mess in Pakistan has gotten messier

Buses burn in Hyderabad, in former Prime Minister Benazir

Bhutto's home province of Sindh, following her assassination

It's still unclear exactly how two-time Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was murdered today following a campaign rally stop in Rawalpindi. It appears that she was shot and her car was the target of a suicide bomber--after the car had pulled away

It's even less clear who is behind the assassination. If we set aside the possibility that President Pervez Musharraf--who is at once the U.S.'s best friend in Pakistan and no friend at all--was involved, and it's not at all clear that this possibility can be set aside, it seems likelier that the movers were supporters rather than opponents of the president. (U.S. policymakers have been trying to ram a Musharraf-Bhutto alliance down the throats of the Pakistanis.)

I've seen it suggested that Bhutto as a martyr may serve the democratic cause in Pakistan more than she ever did in her manipulative and corrupt political life. It's hard to see in the short term, though, where a meaningful pro-democracy movement might come from in Pakistan.

A few things seem relatively clear:

(1) The country was already both a human disaster zone and a powder keg--a nuclear powder keg at that.

(2) The mess is even worse today. The country was already in a state of emergency, and President Musharraf now has the perfect excuse clamp down even further. The scheduled election seems an all-but-certain casualty.

(3) It would be hard to imagine anyone less competent to have a positive influence on the situation than the babbling criminal psychopaths in charge of our foreign policy, who have done more to promote the cause of anti-American terrorism than Osama bin-Laden could ever have dreamed of. (Howie was just writing about the mess that the Bush regime has made of our policy toward Pakistan--dumping $5 billion in without achieving any result, unless you count deepening and hardening anti-Americanism.