The politics of assassination

Rich Lowry:

The roll call of U.S. allies in the Middle East and its neighborhood has always read like a target list: Maliki, Karzai, Sistani, Musharraf. One bullet or one suicide blast could wipe out all our work and rip apart a strategically important country.

Assassinations have steadily picked off pro-Western politicians in Lebanon, and one of our key tribal allies in Western Iraq, Sheik Satter, was murdered shortly after meeting with President Bush. But since Sept. 11, we have been lucky. There have been no assassinations of true geo-strategic significance, except perhaps that of anti-Syria former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, whose killing prompted a popular backlash that ended the Syrian occupation of his country.

Until now. Until Benazir Bhutto was killed in a shooting and suicide bombing at the end of a political rally in the city of Rawalpindi. Until her return to Pakistan from exile a few months ago, met immediately with threats to kill her from Islamic extremists, ended in a tragedy that is still shocking even if it seemed inevitable.

It's always been the assassin's conceit that he can move history with a single blow. Sometimes, as most infamously with Gavrilo Princip's shot that precipitated World War I, he succeeds. But it is much harder to do in stable, institutionally mature democracies where established parties can be as important as a single man or woman. Pakistan, alternately ruled by civilian kleptocrats and generals, is not such a country. Bhutto will be hard to replace.

In keeping with the clannishness of Pakistani politics, her Pakistan Peoples Party was entirely dependent on her (authoritarian-style) leadership. Her civilian rival, Nawaz Sharif, who also recently returned from exile, is soft on Islamic militants and has even been accused of having taken bribes from Osama bin Laden. That leaves President Pervez Musharraf, increasingly isolated politically, without a decent civilian ally with whom to try to broaden his support as his country totters from this latest blow.

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For the terrorists, murder rather than persuasion is the very stuff of politics. It's no accident that the thunderclap that heralded the horrors of Sept. 11 was the assassination in Afghanistan of the anti-Taliban guerrilla fighter Ahmad Massoud. Where it has no majority support and no democratic inspirational leaders of its own, al-Qaida can always kill and hope to gain in the resulting whirlwind.

As Iraq during the past year shows, chaos needn't prevail. But we have more leverage over Iraq than Pakistan, where we have no troops and not necessarily even a dependable ally in power, and Afghanistan, where we are operating in a cumbersome arrangement with NATO forces that have been struggling to take the fight to the Taliban. As our Iraq policy spiraled downward in 2006, it benefited from the sort of thorough rethinking that we now need to bring to bear to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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For awhile, poison was the favored tool to those who sought power through murder. In Rome and Spain it was some times done at a rapid rate to overturn succession by accident of birth. One Russian king is rumored to have eaten nothing but hard boiled eggs that were served still in their shell in order to avoid poisoning.

Democracy is lest prone to this type of succession battle, but we have had our own epidemics of assassination. The word itself comes from a group of Islamic fanatics who called themselves teh assassins. They were based in Syria originally and their specialty was killing other Muslim leaders. In that context, the Bhutto murder comes from an unfortunately rich tradition of Islam.

This murder will roil for a while, but if Pakistan can avoid the chaos that the murderers intended it can use it as a springboard to more democracy, not less.