Pakistan in Agony: What Follows Could Be Important for America

Brigitte Gabriel puts the Bhutto assassination into perspective.
FROM FAMILYSECURITYMATTERS.ORG:
Pakistan in Agony: What Follows Could Be Important for America
Brigitte Gabriel
Harvard- and Oxford-educated Benazir Bhutto, who twice served Pakistan as its Prime Minister, was assassinated yesterday by Taliban and al Qaeda supporters in a spectacularly violent act in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. This act threw the country into a spasm of violence on the eve of national elections planned for January 8th. The agony of Pakistan splattered across the small screen was palpable, as was the transformation of Bhutto into a martyr for democracy in the world’s media. That was reflected in comments from leaders in the US, France, India, Russia and even Iran.
The lurking danger in Pakistan is that the former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who was also the subject of a failed assassination attempt, has some skeletons in his closet. He tried to befriend bin Laden as a means of co-opting Al Qaeda. Further, he is allied with Islamist elements in the Pakistani government intelligence service, the ISI, which might facilitate a Taliban-like takeover. It was the late Ms. Bhutto who in recent correspondence accused the ISI of trying to assassinate her.
The prospect of a Taliban-like takeover is daunting. Pakistan is acknowledged to have 60 nuclear heads, developed by the infamous Dr. A.Q. Khan, presently under house arrest. He also facilitated transfer of key nuclear technology to Iran from Pakistan. The fear is that the only bastion of opposition to the Islamists may collapse the largely secular Army of Pakistan. Without that bastion, the country might become another Islamic Republic akin to that in Shia-dominated Iran.

We saw the same scenario play out in Lebanon in 1975 when the volatile situation ended with the breaking of the Lebanese army into half, along sectarian lines. The Muslims took their military equipment and bases and formed their own army, calling it the Lebanese Arabic Army. That plunged Lebanon into a 15 year civil war giving terrorist organizations and supporters around the world a base of operations to launch terrorist attacks throughout the world.

The danger here is the possibility of this happening in Pakistan where you have the foreign element of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters who came from around the Islamic world to fight for the cause. The difference here is that Pakistan has nukes and those nukes, if fallen into the wrong hands, would prove to be a disaster threatening the civilized world and Western style democracies across the globe.
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