What are the chances?

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, was in Islamabad with Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, on a previously scheduled trip and preparing to meet Ms. Bhutto at 9 p.m. Thursday night when the news of the bombing broke. They watched the news unfold on television in their hotel, with initial reports that she escaped injury giving way to confirmation of her death.

Assassination follows the Kennedy family around in an uncanny way.

There are a lot of things at stake in Pakistan and, unfortunately, I have been disappointed by what I’ve heard from every single politician today, save one. Sen. Chris Dodd was on Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight and he showed very sound judgment. Pakistan cannot go ahead with its elections, yet the Bush administration, Edwards, Biden, Obama, Clinton, and the Republicans all advocated that they do. Not Dodd. Dodd sensibly called for a delay so that Benazir Bhutto’s party can regroup.

I understand why the players wanted to express support for democracy in Pakistan, and also why they wanted America to speak with one voice. It’s critical that America discontinue its reliance on Musharraf, and we need a legitimately elected partner if we are ever going to make progress in tamping down terrorism from the region. But there is no reason for Pakistan to go ahead with the regularly scheduled elections. Nawaz Sharif’s party will boycott and Bhutto is dead. The elections would be meaningless and add no credibility at all to the government.

Here’s something else to think about. Naturally, everyone is telling Musharraf to permit an international investigatory team to enter Pakistan to ascertain what happened and who is responsible for the assassination. Of course, this is unlikely. Either directly or through neglect, Musharraf is suspected of complicity in the murder. He is going to keep control of the investigation. And it shows how deep our problems are that we don’t particularly care whether Musharraf had Bhutto killed or not. If we discovered that he did, it would not be in our interests to let anyone know that. Basically, we are so reliant on Musharraf that he can murder his political opponents with impunity, even when those political opponents are our allies. Why is this?

The first reason is that we are reliant on Pakistan for our (and NATO’s) supply lines to Afghanistan. To a lesser extent, we’d like their assistance and cooperation in hunting down bad guys on the border and tribal regions.

The second reason is their nuclear stockpile, which we rightfully will not allow to fall into the hands of anyone sympathetic to the cause of al-Qaeda.

For both these reasons, the nation will go to war to prevent the dissolution of the Pakistani state. India is also prepared to take preemptive action under certain circumstances. The Natural Resources Defense Council has researched possible outcomes of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India (h/t to Alice). And here is what they have to say about one probable scenario:

NRDC calculated that 22.1 million people in India and Pakistan would be exposed to lethal radiation doses of 600 rem or more in the first two days after the attack. Another 8 million people would receive a radiation dose of 100 to 600 rem, causing severe radiation sickness and potentially death, especially for the very young, old or infirm. NRDC calculates that as many as 30 million people would be threatened by the fallout from the attack, roughly divided between the two countries.

Besides fallout, blast and fire would cause substantial destruction within roughly a mile-and-a-half of the bomb craters. NRDC estimates that 8.1 million people live within this radius of destruction.

Most Indians (99 percent of the population) and Pakistanis (93 percent of the population) would survive the second scenario. Their respective military forces would be still be intact to continue and even escalate the conflict.

The Soviet Union lost roughly 20 million people in World War Two. That number of people could die in two days if the nukes start flying on the subcontinent. It’s hard to exaggerate how important stability is to the region. This is not a place to roll the dice on elections like we did in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. Elections that bring stability are good. Elections that have no legitimacy or that lead to civil war are bad and should not be pushed for flawed ideological reasons.

There are short and long term strategies that need to be thought out and combined insofar as possible. Our long term policy has to be affordable in dollars. And it has to involve rolling back our forward basing strategy that has led to so much blowback. Yet, in the short-term we have troops in harms way in Afghanistan and we must do all we can to keep Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from getting into the wrong hands.

In the long-term we need to share more responsibility for non-proliferation and we can best protect ourselves by not causing incitement. No one is going to take a loose nuke and detonate it in Olso or Montevideo. That’s because Uruguay and Norway don’t base their troops in 144 countries and invade other countries on false pretenses. We must stop making people want to kill us if we want to be safe.

But, in the short-term we do not have the luxury of changing our basing strategy…we need to keep a powder keg from going off that could easily require a military draft and total mobilization of the country, and that could, with some bad breaks, result in a nuclear shooting war costing tens of millions of people their lives and doing severe damage to environment.

I think it’s obvious that we need to get our troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible.

These are just some initial thoughts from a guy who warned you that things might come to this.