[BRIEF NOTE] Bhutto and Pakistan

[rfmcdonald]

Several people have referred to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as a historic event, the sort of shock that will be singled out as a critical event by writers of school textbooks and participants in alternate-history discussions. Easily granted that she was hardly a revolutionary--Bhutto was deeply embedded in Pakistan's feudal power structures, and the allegations of corruption aren't reassuring--she might well have been the last scion of the ancien régime who could have been at least imagined to do something.

Now, she's dead. The ability of the different factions of the ancien régime to govern--the political parties, the state, the military--seems to be in question. After Bhutto, the deluge? I leave it to you to imagine who the Jacobins might be.