bhutto

assassination is a weird thing.

one gets the sense in history that assassination is less antithetical to a healthy democracy than maybe it really is. this, i believe, is not so with the assassination of bhutto today. politics on the subcontinent are much harder to quantify than I think most realize. I've often said I thought the world as we know it will end there, as india and pakistan obliterate each other and the rest of the world for good measure.

but this post is about bhutto. if anyone had the ability to move pakistan further from the brink, i think it was her. musharef is a somewhat less skilled tito; he's holding it together, not particularly gracefully but the real fear is what happens when he stops doing so. bhutto however, regardless of what you thought of her, was capable of real change. sad that i have to use the past tense now to describe something hopeful.