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Washington: America's most senior diplomats yesterday paid a visit to the Pakistani embassy in Washington to sign the condolence book for Benazir Bhutto, whose assassination has put an abrupt end to US plans for power sharing in the troubled south Asian country.
For much of this year Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has tried to persuade Bhutto and President Pervez Musharraf to work together.
She did so in the hope that an election victory for Bhutto's party would bolster political stability by giving that country's government the democratic legitimacy Musharraf lacked.
The policy was supposed to come to fruition in parliamentary elections on January 8. Instead, Rice and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, found themselves publicly mourning Bhutto's demise.
But while the assassination is a brutal reversal for US policy, in the short term it is likely to make the Bush administration's stance on Pakistan more straight-forward.
Analysts and officials indicate that in the current chaotic circumstances, the Bush administration is set to stand by Musharraf.
"The very clear answer in my mind is that the administration will stick with Musharraf," said Daniel Markey, previously a State Department official responsible for south Asia and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
"There is not much stomach in the administration for shifting gears precipitously on this. There's too much nervousness about a sudden change that could unravel things."
Redoubled efforts
President George W. Bush has expressed his strong appreciation of Musharraf's efforts in the "war on terror".
But as the year wore on and Musharraf's political standing in Pakistan sunk further, Rice and other diplomats redoubled their efforts to enable an understanding between the Pakistani president and Bhutto to reduce political pressures within the country. Now that option has disappeared.
"This is a huge shock to the Pakistani political system and the Pakistani people," a senior administration official told Financial Times. "There's a three-day official period of mourning. The government and the political parties will then have to decide how to move forward and it is not in our interest, and it wouldn't be right, to second-guess them at this point."
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