Once upon a time, many, many Christmases ago, a crowd of Pakistani generals sat on the knee of Uncle Sam, aka Santa, and asked him to load up the sleigh with guns and drop them in Islamabad.
"Ho, Ho, Ho," replied Santa. "Have you been good little generals?"
"No we haven't," they replied.
"That's okay. If you promise that you will be good and that you'll help kick the Soviet Grinch out of Afghanistan, you'll wake up in the morning and find all the guns you want under the tree."
"Goody," the generals said.
"One last thing," said Sam/Santa. "When you are finished beating up the Soviets you have to clean up your room, be nice to the tribesmen and put all the guns away like good little generals. Okay?"
"Sure Santa," they said.
This morning the word reached the White House, Benazir Bhutto was killed. She had been identified by the White House as the best hope for Democracy in the country. The killing was as predictable as bloodshed at a frat house party decorated with automatic weapons and kegs of beer.
Pakistan is a "nation" created by the perverse whims of British cartographers at the end of English rule in the subcontinent. The biggest piece of the pie was India, a Hindu state. The other pieces were Islamic concentrations first called East and West Pakistan (now Bangladesh and Pakistan). The fact that the new boundaries not only created phony countries, they also disenfranchised millions upon millions of people.
While the biggest problems were identified as Hindu vs. Muslim, there were also the tribal problems in parts of northern Pakistan where people didn't buy into the new British designation. Those tribes bow to Islamabad when convenient (or forced) and ignore it when they like. The only stability since then has been provided by military government. The British map did not create a country it merely forced a number of non-cooperative ingredients into the same pot.
As the British Empire died the American one was born. The difference we relied on bribery (aka "foreign aid") and influence (aka "trade concessions") rather than control enforce our wishes. Sometimes in this less than perfect world people aren't always going to behave the way we'd like.
The Pakistan problem started in the 1980s. The US was happy to have a balance against nuclear India and, later, even happier to have a staging ground to oust the Soviets from neighboring Afghanistan, a pivotal event which led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
The deal with the devil was that we had cast our lot with military hardliners and doubled our bet by increasing their access to arms.
When domestic turmoil started to spiral out of control earlier this decade, we politely asked the generals to do "something." We gave them a laundry list of suggestions from free elections to increased civil rights. We didn't come up with any solution that would make the country governable without constant and massive force.
Bhutto and her friends in Washington saw an opportunity for her to return from exile as a symbol of democracy, a Muslim Corazon Aquino. The idea was that she would help the transition from military rule to civilian. Among the problems was that she was no great Democrat--she had fled the country in the face of credible corruption charges. The other is that she had no traction against the Islamic fundamentalists in the tribal region.
Her death was as predictable as a car wreck on an icy road. The country has been skidding downhill since the day in November when she returned and barely escaped an assassination attempt.
So where does that leave us?
Right back where we started. Musharraf and the other generals (who might well get rid of him to give the whole affair a guise of change) will tell Washington that there are two options: military rule or Islamic fundamentalists taking hold of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.
We will encourage them to behave themselves. But once you give a kid a weapon with ammunition you surrender your authority to tell him what to do.