I was shocked yesterday to hear of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, news of which stared up at me from the morning paper with 9/11-like gravitas. I haven’t followed Pakistani politics closely since I was studying in Edinburgh, but my suspicion — and that of most major news organisations, if not the rampaging Sindhi mobs — is that president Pervez Musharraf is probably innocent of wrongdoing. He had less to gain from killing Bhutto than from seeing her beaten (fairly or otherwise) in the general elections on January 8. Now he is faced with civil unrest on a massive level: trains have been burnt, and cars overturned, in Hyderabad; mourners are swarming across Bhutto’s home state of Sindh in the wake of her funeral; and the army has been given orders to shoot unruly protesters on sight. Many observers now think that the elections, if they proceed as planned, will be seen as a slight to Bhutto’s memory, further inflaming popular sentiment. For Musharraf, things will get much more complicated from here. (And then there’s the question of the suicide bomber(s): you can’t just hire these guys out of the Yellow Pages).

But none of this precludes an attack from somewhere within the echelons of the Pakistani army, long known for its covert fundamentalist sympathies. That Bhutto was shot in Rawalpindi, the nerve-centre of the army, raises some suspicions. However, the involvement of one or other of Pakistan’s radical Islamist groups, perhaps with army backing, seems the most likely. The question of motive is probably moot: like the anarchists of old, the aims of Muslim fundamentalists are so boundless as to justify virtually any act. (It is worth remembering that Musharraf himself has narrowly escaped several assassination attempts by Islamists). Until Pakistan becomes a bona fide Islamic sharia state on the ninth-century model, any hint of moderation, let alone liberal democracy, is like a red flag to a bull. A Bhutto victory in the election would also have been a victory for Pakistani democracy, and a threat to shadowy groups like Jamaat-e-Islami, which, like most insurgent groups, thrive under the heavy hand of military rule.

Although founded as a secular state after partition in 1947, Pakistan has had an intimate, yet unstable, relationship with Islam. During the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistani leaders toyed dangerously with Islamist rhetoric. Anticipating Samuel P. Huntington, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto argued that the drive towards a Pakistani nuclear weapon was justified in civilisational, rather than specifically nationalistic, terms: ‘the Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilisations have nuclear capability… only the Islamic civilisation [is] without it’. This was echoed by radical Islamist groups such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, for whom the merest whiff of nuclear disarmament was evidence of ‘treason’ (and, presumably, apostasy as well). After overthrowing Bhutto in 1977, General Zia ul-Haq ramped up Pakistani support to the Afghan militias in an attempt to bring them within Islamabad’s orbit and get one up on India in disputed Kashmir. Then, in the early 1980s, as civil war engulfed Afghanistan, Zia began funneling large amounts of weapons and supplies to the US-backed groups fighting the invading Soviets. Religious madrasas — now hotbeds of fundamentalism — were constructed across Afghanistan, while the hill-bound mujahideen got plenty of practice taking pot-shots at demoralised Soviet conscripts.

The story of the Taliban’s rise out of the ashes of civil war has been told and retold since 9/11, but the key development here is its continued rise — not in Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan. Since 2001, Pakistan (and the world) has experienced the blowback of its policies during the 1980s. Bhutto’s assassination is only the latest in a string of Islamist outrages, the last of which, an attack on Bhutto’s convoy in October, killed over 130, even though it missed its main target. Around the same time, radicals in the remote North-West Frontier Province rebelled against the government, setting up parallel sharia administrations in villages across the region, which is now poised on the brink of civil war.

Christopher Hitchens is right to point out Bhutto’s own culpability for the creeping ‘Talibanisation’ of her country — as prime minister at the end of the 1980s, she gave similar levels of support to Islamist radicals as her predecessors had. But Bhutto’s re-election would have been a genuine success for Pakistani democracy, now hopelessly moth-eaten and fraying at the edges. One can’t help note the sombre irony: for all the hopes she raised upon returning to Pakistan in October, Benazir Bhutto’s political career, sadly, seems to have carried the seeds of its — and her — own destruction.

In other news, I hear Cambodia now has its own pro-standard golf course, carved, with typical entrepreneurial aplomb, out of a patch of jungle not far from Siem Reap and the Angkor temple complex. According to AFP, this ecological monstrosity will bring in much needed tourist revenue. But I’m more interested to find out who owns and runs it, and also how they plan to keep it lush and green in the dust-bowl of dry-season Cambodia. While I’m there next year, I might take a bus down, play a few holes and investigate for myself.