The controversy remains, if only because no group has claimed responsibility for killing her.

Benazir Bhutto’s violent demise was indeed a tragedy foretold from that day not too long ago when press reports revealed that the United States had arm-twisted an increasingly unpopular Pervez Musharraf to agree to a brokered power-sharing deal with her. In a country of 160 million seething with anti-American sentiment, the Bush Administration’s open attempt to shoe-horn Benazir back into Pakistani politics from exile was the proverbial kiss of death; it left little doubt as to her pro-American proclivities.

Soon after her return to Pakistan from exile, she made herself even more of a target by asserting that she was not opposed to America’s military operations under the rubric of its ‘war on terror’ in Pakistan’s fiercely tribal areas, even expressing a willingness to allow disgraced nuclear scientist AQ Khan to be interrogated by the US, something Musharraf has to date stubbornly refused to permit. The dictator was merely playing to the gallery, of course, aware that Khan is idolized by his countrymen.

In death she’s being eulogized as a great democrat. In life, both her terms as Prime Minister were marred by widespread charges of massive corruption and of having siphoned more than $1 billion from Pakistan’s treasury while in office, most of it stashed away in Dubai. In fact, Switzerland convicted her of laundering nearly $11 million. [Sri Lanka cannot, I’m afraid, claim the prize for having had the region’s first publicly acknowledged ‘Mr. Ten Percent’ – that under-the-table honour goes to Benazir’s hubby, Asif Zardari.]

What’s also being overlooked is that Bhutto while in office financially and militarily supported and strengthened Afghanistan’s extremist Taliban government that came to power in 1996 merely to ensure beneficial and lucrative trade routes to Central Asia.

Wrote playwright Wajahat Ali, a Pakistani Muslim American described as ‘neither a terrorist nor a saint’: "Mere hours after her assassination, Bhutto was both praised as a ‘shaheed’ [a martyr], ‘a beacon for democracy’, ‘a model of progress’, ‘a loyal friend to democracy’, and condemned as ‘a traitor’, ‘a US puppet’, and everything in between. When extremism, political fervor, and selfish interests marry, the resulting progeny is usually instability, uncertainty and violence; commonsense, rationality, and moderation are generally aborted."

What does Benazir’s exit portend for the US, for Musharraf, and for their US-led joint-venture scam known as the ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan as well as Pakistan itself? Just a week before the assassination, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates went on record that al-Qaeda had re-established itself in Pakistan’s ungoverned area along its border with Afghanistan.

About that time, Pakistan’s former President of the Supreme Court Bar Association, a prominent critic of Musharraf, told it like this: "The US supports dictatorships that suit its interests. It is never interested in the masses of Pakistan. The power sharing between Benzair and Musharraf will only perpetuate military hegemony."

Having knowingly looked away while Pakistan surreptitiously entered the exclusive nuclear club via the back-door, the US now finds itself having to face reality on two major fronts vital to its foreign policy and its security: A major worry is whether the assassination sets off a chain of events that fractures Pakistan politically, raising the danger of Pakistan’s arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear warheads being stolen by al-Qaeda allies embedded in the nation’s own armed forces.

And then there’s the war in Afghanistan.

Truth to tell, if America’s muscle-flexing worldwide has everything to do with the planet’s dwindling resources, especially oil, its cozy relationship with Pakistan’s dictator has everything to do with that same oil’s refined version - fuel. Robert Bryce, Managing Editor of Energy Tribune, reckons that without Musharraf's cooperation, the 26,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban would run out of fuel within a matter of days.

The US military burns about 575,000 gallons of fuel per day in Afghanistan. About 80 percent of it comes from refineries in Pakistan. Without Musharraf’s supplies, the US forces in Afghanistan would have only one fuel supply, coming via a logistics line that extends more than 1,000 miles from northern Afghanistan all the way to refineries in Baku, Azerbaijan and Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan.

Some 700 tanker trucks deliver the fuel and some of the trucks take a month or more to make a round trip delivery from their starting points in Pakistan. According to Army Colonel Dan Jennings, on some occasions, the US military had as much as 4.7 million gallons of fuel in transit between Pakistan and Afghanistan. "We've had trucks show up as much as 90 days after they were initially loaded," Jennings said.

The logistics line carrying fuel from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan into Afghanistan is somewhat precarious. Fuel from the refinery in Baku is loaded on rail cars, put on barges that then traverse the Caspian Sea. When they land in Turkmenistan, they follow a circuitous rail route through Uzbekistan before they arrive at the Afghan border where the fuel is then transferred to trucks. The long supply lines to the Caspian Sea underscore the importance of the Pakistani fuel.

Greg Wilcox, a retired Army officer commented on America’s predicament, "We don’t have any choice. We got kicked out of Uzbekistan so we don’t have any bases there. We can’t survive in that region without Musharraf. We are tied to him whether we like it or not."

Whoever killed Benazir, General Musharraf’s regime will undoubtedly be the greatest benefactor of her death. Another rival who may have been willing to see her dead are the Chaudhry Brothers - former Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervez Illahi and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain of the Pakistan Muslim League Q, the political partner of Musharraf. The Chaudhry Brothers were the bitterest opponents of Benazir’s homecoming and tried unsuccessfully to stop President Musharraf from doing a deal with Bhutto.

Murtaza Shibli, Editor of Kashmir Affairs writing from London noted: "History shows that a sensational political murder usually brings out a sympathy vote for the party that lost its leader. Benazir’s death might act as a catalyst to unite the Pakistani nation and strengthen their resolve to fight the menace that has engulfed the country thanks to its willingness to act as proxy to the alien interests in the region. [But will Pervez, the dictator parading as a democrat, behave like his real-life democrat counterpart, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and accept a popular ‘no’ vote gracefully?]

Were Musharraf to escalate operations against al-Qaeda militants in the border areas, that also could complicate the situation in Afghanistan, said J. Alexander Thier, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan. "If done in a significant way, it will stir up a hornet’s nest, which may well result in a surge in Afghan violence."

There is, of course, the very real possibility that a post-Benazir Pakistani government could turn hostile to US interests, which would radically alter the entire nature of the US war in Afghanistan.

Retired Pakistani Brig. Naeem Salik, now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University, touched on that very point. "If there is a break in US-Pakistan relations . . . it wouldn’t be possible for anyone in power in Islamabad to continue to allow the transit facilities and the flow of logistic support for US forces in Afghanistan."

George seems to have dug himself a hole on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border too.