Madame, - The murder of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's leading opposition figure, coming as it does amid increasingly violent turmoil in the country, can only push Pakistan even closer to the brink of civil war and has made the world a more dangerous place.
The main beneficiaries of this assassination are Islamic extremists. The losers are President Musharraf, democracy and possibly the rest of humanity.
Pakistan has a significant nuclear arsenal. The prospect of these weapons being controlled by a regime sympathetic to jihadists who value death more than life fills me with a dread I have not felt since I was a child in the 1970s trying to make sense of "mutually assured destruction". For the concept of mutually assure destruction to work, one has to value life. - Yours, etc,
Cllr BRIAN MEANEY,
Darragh,
Ennis,
Co Clare.
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Madam, - Your front-page report on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto quotes President Bush's condemnation of "a cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy".
Mr Bush must be aware that the power of the Taliban and other Islamic extremists in the region is primarily a consequence the American response to the Soviet invasion in 1979. The CIA armed and sponsored these fanatics. Interestingly, the young Benazir Bhutto along with the Pakistani military and political elite, enthusiastically supported this policy.
Therefore the fact that this particularly nasty phenomenon returned to wreak havoc on America's ambitions should come as no surprise. It is ironic that Ms Bhutto, who courted the fanatics when it suited her, should be their latest high-profile victim.
Islamic fundamentalists now have a real chance of gaining power in a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Undermining and destroying the Soviet Union may not now have been such a great idea after all. - Yours, etc,
SEAN and ROISIN WHELAN,
Ormond Keep,
Nenagh,
Co Tipperary.