On the long list of people who may or may not have had a hand in Benazir Bhutto‘s assassination — Pervez Musharraf (everyone in Pakistan already believes Musharraf had a hand in her death), al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the militant outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi which doesn’t have close links to al Qaeda, “Hamza bin Laden the son of Osama bin Laden“, “internally-focused Pakistani Islamist militants” who have little to do with al-Qaeda, “all those political and religious factions inside the country that had the motives and resources to kill the former prime minister“, Mike Huckabee — surely one name that also belongs is Bhutto’s herself. (A one-stop shop for most of these theories is here.)

Ever since her return to Pakistan ten weeks ago from exile in Britain, Bhutto had been extracting huge amounts of political capital from the threat of assassination (maybe that’s why so many people figured it was fine to make political capital of the assassination itself?).

And for someone who made so much noise about the threat to her life, and about Musharraf’s refusal to provide her adequate security against these threats, she certainly displayed a cavalier attitude towards actually employing the security protection she had.

When she returned to Pakistan on October 18, and was being taken in a triumphal procession in an open truck that was equipped with a bulletproof enclosure for her protection, she insisted on standing outside the enclosure to be closer to her supporters:

Bhutto herself took risks. She declined to wear a bulletproof vest, and during her 10-hour, slow moving procession through the streets of Karachi on Oct. 18, she refused to use a bulletproof glass cubicle that had been built atop her truck, standing instead along a railing to greet the massive crowds.

The December 27 attempt succeeded only because, leaving a political rally in Liaqat Bagh safe in a “bullet-proof, bomb-proof” car, Bhutto chose to stand in the sunroof opening and wave to the crowd:

Despite Bhutto’s tiredness, she could not resist the chants of the crowd. As the car drove towards the main road, she popped out of the sunroof and started waving amid great cheers. At that instant three shots were heard and she fell inside. A few seconds later a powerful explosion hit the back left of her vehicle.

Hardly the actions of a woman who had reason to fear political assassination, are these?

Benazir Bhutto has rarely been accused over the years of showing signs of personal bravery. (It is only in the last ten weeks that we have heard repeatedly how brave she was to be campaigning this way despite the threats on her life.) Most dispassionate observers have regarded her as a cold and calculating conniver whose main purpose in returning to Pakistan was to exploit (for all that she could) the situation that Musharraf found himself in vis-a-vis the U.S. (This includes exploiting it to negotiate her return to Pakistan in the first place. With the able assistance of Condi Rice, Ph.D.) So it’s not at all clear what game she was playing by constantly and quite unnecessarily exposing herself as a target.

Unless, of course, she herself did not take those threats very seriously. Unless she only hawked them for political purposes without really believing in them at all. In which case, coldblooded though it may seem of me to say so, she was really hoist on her own petard, wasn’t she?