Friday, December 28, 2007

Bhutto Killed by AQ?

Definitely possible, but look at the BBC bit:

Pakistan says it has strong proof that al-Qaeda assassinated opposition politician Benazir Bhutto at an election rally on Thursday.
The interior ministry said it had intelligence indicating Baitullah Mehsud, whom it called an "al-Qaeda leader", was behind the killing.

Baitullah Mehsud is a wanted pro-Taleban militant leader based in the South Waziristan tribal region.

Ms Bhutto has been buried in her family tomb amid scenes of mass grieving.
Nice way of saying "Pakistan is on fire." Not the most stable country right now, and a lot of people are really, really angry at The General-Slash-Dictator over this.

But did he do it? Probably not. Still, again, here's the problem: any announcement of "intelligence" out of Pakistan is very, very suspect. The ISI has enough people with pro-Taliban, pro-AQ leanings that the people feeding this information might be somewhat-to-entirely suspect... and if there was a connection to the Pakistani government, there's pretty much no way that anybody in said government is going to admit it. Whistleblowers are in short supply in dictatorships.

I still think that the MO of AQ doesn't fit this case. Maybe it was just the individual in question, but generally Islamists don't execute this sort of "hit". They usually just explode, or shoot, not this sort of thing.

It may well be what it seems at first glance. I'm fully willing to accept that. I'm just concerned whether enough Pakistanis will believe so.

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