ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- On Friday, the day of Benazir Bhutto's burial in her ancestral village, Pakistanis were still struggling to grasp that she was dead.
The capital city and the military seat of Rawalpindi, where she was killed, were shut up tightly, with security forces guarding key roads. Except for a few small demonstrations, the streets were silent as people stayed glued to TV scenes of her storied career and the cortege bearing her home.
We will probably never know the identity of the assassins. There is no credible government investigating body, and many Pakistanis will doubt official assertions that al-Qaida did it. But, whoever killed her, we do know who stands to gain most: Islamic militants who threaten neighboring Afghanistan and want to carve out bases inside a nuclear-armed Pakistani state. They will cheer Ms. Bhutto's demise, because she was the leader most committed to fighting them if she had become prime minister for a third time.
Her slaying is a warning to Pakistanis - and us - of the growing threat posed by Islamist expansion. But most Pakistanis still don't seem to realize they're in the midst of a widening war that threatens their country. Rather than wake them up, Ms. Bhutto's death is likely to make it harder to fight that war.
"It is the rare person," said Jugnu Mohsin, publisher of Lahore's Friday Times newspaper, "who admits that the principal contradiction in Pakistani life, which will destroy us if we don't do something about it, is religious extremism."
It is more comfortable for Pakistanis, including much of the intellectual elite, to blame America for creating Pakistan's jihadi problem. They have reason. But what Ms. Bhutto recognized was that these extremists were not just reacting to U.S. policy but also actively threatening her country.
Yes, America helped create Pakistan's current mess. Back in the 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia funneled billions of dollars via Pakistan's intelligence agencies to Afghan and foreign jihadi groups fighting the Soviet Union. After the Soviets lost, many of those foreign jihadi fighters migrated over the porous border to Pakistan. After 9/11, they were joined by Taliban and al-Qaida fighters that America drove out of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden supposedly is hiding in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
