Buzz!

Hive Mind? Or...? You decide.

Like many others, I've seen the Benazir Assassination as the critical event of this Astrological Year of Endings. We recognize instinctively that even though we don't know what happened exactly, and probably never will, what happened is huge and it is quite likely to be the precipitating incident for whatever happens in the New Year. We recognize, too, that what could happen in the New Year is appalling.

Like many others, I've been bouncing around between news and analysis sources the last few days, hoping to stumble on to something that can give us some hope. But no. There's nothing. It's yet another fine mess engineered -- at least in part -- by those geniuses who brought us so much catastrophe already.

I found that I seemed to be channelling Spencer Ackerman and Josh Marshall, even though I hadn't been to TPM more than once during the immediate period after the assassination. I highly recommend following their posts on the matter. Like the rest of us, they may be wrong, but they are deeper into the intricacies of the story than most of us would ever want to be.

Juan Cole has been an invaluable resource.

His colleague Barney Rubin is running rings around practically every other analyst out there. Earlier I linked to Rubin's WSJ article on the Musharraf Problem, but I would like to urge everyone to read Scott Horton's interview with Rubin for Harpers.

I'm as ignorant as anybody else about where this is all going to lead. But something tells me that the Busheviks have fucked up so bad in their reliance on Benazir, and their butt boy Musharraf is in so much domestic hot water, that nothing any of them try to do now will save the situation. Literally, it is up to the Pakistani military to keep the lid on (sort of) or... let 'er rip.

The only question remaining is how bad will the blowback be? And how far will it spread?

Oddly enough, here's who might come out the unquestioned winner:



Revenge for Afghanistan and the Fall of the Soviet Union?

¿Quién sabe?