Eli Lake at the Sun sums up what we know about the Al Qaeda connection to Bhutto’s killing: so far, only an Italian news agency is reporting having heard from Al Qaeda spokesmen confirming the outrage.

Lake considers that the killer may have had ties with ISI, but concludes that:

If Bhutto’s killer was also a member of Pakistan’s military or security services, it does not rule out an affiliation with Al Qaeda or another jihadist outfit.

Fine, fine, some members of ISI probably share kooky dreams of global domination via a resurrected caliphate with other damaged malcontents who call themselves Al Qaeda. If Lake was being more honest, though, the proper way to identify these people would be as ISI first, not Al Qaeda. ISI in Pakistan is a concrete problem for the United States. Framing this in terms of Al Qaeda does nothing to help us understand exactly what we’re up against. It just amplifies “War On Terror” nonsense talk to a shrill pitch.

In the previous paragraphs of your no doubt hastily-composed rant, you assert that:

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism.

Let’s just assume, to be charitable, that you’re eliding nuance for the sake of a clean and forceful argument. So what exactly do you mean by this?

But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.

If ever one needs reassurance that the right’s ideologues are intellectually, strategically and morally bankrupt, one can readily turn to the National Review’s armchair pundits. NR’s website is a comforting place to visit in some perverse way.

Super-reporter Spencer Ackerman gets Bhutto’s close friend and confidante Husain Haqqani on the record thusly:

The whole Pakistani security establishment thinks Pakistan should be governed as a national-security state. She resisted that completely, and that doesn’t get seen enough. She questioned their right to govern.

There’s the crux of it. Look no further.

I hasten to add, without condoning the assassination in any way, that it’s quite possible that they’re correct and she was not.

In perhaps the most unsurprising turn of events of the past decade, Benazir Bhutto was hastily dispatched off this mortal coil, more than likely for threatening the status quo hold on power by the Pakistani military and ISI.

Though in the simplest analysis one may be tempted to point the finger directly at Musharraf, it’s likelier that this was undertaken at the behest of power brokers in the military. Andrew Sullivan, before descending into mawkish memorials, astutely observed:

The assassin was a suicide bomber, but he shot her first, and shot her in the neck. If you were part of the military or ISI, it would be in your interest to shoot Bhutto to ensure she was killed and then blow yourself up both to associate the murder with Jihadists outside the military and to destroy the evidence.

Expect to hear specialists in the coming days blame an inchoate “Jihadism” for the outrage. Jihadists fear democracy, as the narrative goes, and Bhutto was a beacon of hope in a benighted land on the cusp of reclaiming its democratic tradition.

Don’t buy into that simplistic tripe. It’s not about democracy or a threat to Islamism. The only question worth asking is who in the military was responsible. Was it the secularist old guard who feared that Bhutto’s ascendancy would undermine their ability to keep Pakistan together? Or was it an Islamist fifth column within the ISI flexing its muscles?

May you live in interesting times…