NUCLEAR ELEKTRA

......Hazards Of The Course

A pistol wielding suicide bomber has killed Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi not three miles from where her father Zulfikar Ali was juridically assassinated 26 years ago.

I was at school with the striking and sharp tongued Pinky, who lived at former Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith's house on Francis Avenue , but ate and was tutored in Harvard's Eliot House, where  the security afforded Singapore PM Kew as a Visiting Scholar also assured  her safety. Here's an old snap of her by the portrait of her then-still-living father she presented to her Radcliffe Common Room.

A Pakistan Peoples Party rep who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital, said she died at 6:16 local time, which was about three hours ago. The press says a crowd chanting "Dog, Musharraf, dog",  broke the glass door at the main entrance to the emergency unit. Javed Cheema of the Interior Ministry says she was killed either by her assassin's bullets or shrapnel pellets packed into his suicide vest. At least a dozen others died, and cars are already being torched in Islamabad by riled PPP  crowds. Tomorrow's funeral could be Homeric, with the whole government on the short list for Hades.

A few years after I last saw her-- by the time I got to Pakistan she was in exile -- her brother Murtaza was assassinated in front of her home in the Byzantine aftermath  of the War In Afghanistan that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Seeking strategic depth in her nation's wars with India, she  sanctioned the ISS subsidy of the Taliban, and gave free rein to  the nuclear ambitions of Abdul Qader Khan. What a family. What a life.

Comments

[jens]

You are very right, what a family and what a life. And what a person really. I'm still struck by how much she managed to accomplish as a woman in a Muslim country. Until now I would not, however, have guessed that she was known by the moniker "Pinky".

[Henry Barth]

VAN Galbraith's home, or Ken Galbraith? Ken lived on Francis Avenue. I don't think Van ever did.
RESPONSE
Equivocation is the soul of diplomacy - _Ambassador_ Galbraith's house on Francis Avenue.

I meant Ken of course