Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack at a campaign rally that also killed at least 20 others, aides said.
Bhutto's supporters erupted in anger and grief after her death, attacking police and burning tires and election campaign posters in several cities. At the hospital where she died, some smashed glass and wailed, chanting slogans against President Pervez Musharraf.
Blaming Musharraf is insane. This is giving the jihadis a two-for-one bombing--killing the likely future prime minister and crippling the president and likely future president. Even if it is discovered that some Pakistani security forces cooperated with the attackers, those conspirators would be motivated by jihadi hatred and not love of Musharraf.
The jihadis, the Taliban and al Qaeda, have decided that Pakistan is their main front. Defeated everywhere else, the jihadis since the summer have very clearly abandoned their ceasefire with the Pakistani government that let the jihadis live in the frontier as long as they attacked into Afghanistan. Instead, they decided to target the government.
This new front could be the last jihad:
I have hope that the Pakistanis are experience their own awakening and realize they cannot look the other way and hope for the best.
Still, with the Taliban getting waxed the last two years as they've sent cannon fodder to Afghanistan and jihadis thinking that they could win in Pakistan and possibly believing that the Islamic bomb is there for the taking, we might be seeing the end of the Afghan campaign of the Long War.
Not that the fighting there will end anytime soon. But the fighting in Pakistan may take center stage. With Pakistan's army finally entering the fight and al Qaeda looking to join in, the campaign is broadening. We are seeing the beginning of a general Taliban Campaign that spans Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And with our need to protect supply lines through Pakistan, we may begin to play a far more active role in fighting inside Pakistan.
All those in America who have urged us to abandon Iraq and focus on Afghanistan--with some even demanding we intervene in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden--may find that our dwindling role in Iraq will free us to do exactly that--join the Taliban Campaign in force to team up with Pakistani army forces to suppress the jihadis in the tribal areas and finally hunt down bin Laden.
I called this the Taliban Campaign. With the ceasefire dead, the jihadis are a threat to Pakistan itself. The assasination of Bhutto should be a reminder of this threat to Pakistan. If Pakistani security forces are implicated in letting the murderers through, this too should be a reminder that the jihadis are the threat. Both of these events are clearly part of the Taliban Campaign.
The Pakistanis must stand by their movement to return to democracy and face the real threats from the jihadis to that democracy. And the Pakistanis must root out the jihadis within their ranks while crushing the jihadis who have carved out a sanctuary on the western frontier.
The Pakistanis must embrace their alliance with America and welcome American and NATO help within Pakistan on a larger scale as a useful attack on the rear area of the Taliban Campaign that once focused on Afghanistan but not looks east to target Pakistan.
Pakistanis need to focus on the jihadis who are to blame for the murder of Bhutto and not just lash out at their political opponent Musharraf. If the Pakistanis focus on crushing the jihadis and not making futile deals with the devil, this will be the last jihad.
UPDATE: Wretchard seems onboard with the concept that we are in a broader fight than just Afghanistan:
The second is to forge a broad national strategy around the idea that Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is now the major theater of operations in Southwest Asia. Such a strategy may require military components, but for the moment it requires mostly competent political, intelligence and information operations. It may require joint diplomacy with China, India and Russia; it will require adroit political maneuvering within Pakistan. But above all it will require that we remember the names of our enemies -- the same ones who attacked Manhattan on September 11 -- require we remember their connections eastward to the centers of Islamic radicalism and their addiction to totalitarian processes. But my guess is that many will simply find the mental challenge too hard. Why can't we just "move on"?
As long as our enemies don't tire of killing us, we can't tire of killing them.
UPDATE: Strategypage notes both the shift by the jihadis to the Pakistan front after their defeat in Iraq, and also the great difficulties the jihadis will have winning in Pakistan.
