Responsibility for her murder remains unclear, although there has been a dubious claim from one self-styled al-Qaida leader in Afghanistan, and an Italian website has claimed that Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaida's commander in Afghanistan, told its reporter in a phone call, "We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat (the) Mujahideen."
But it is clear that one crucial component of the political disruptions that plague Pakistan has been the Islamist extremism that has seen terrorist attacks this year hit Morocco, Algeria and other Arab states. A similar process of Islamist radicalization and political upheaval grips Bangladesh. In the middle lies India, like a great multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural rock that divides the Arab from the Asian Islamic world.
Some five million Indians and up to three million Pakistanis live and work in the Gulf states, and send home some $25 billion a year in remittances. One of the striking features of this year's financial upheavals has been the growing economic links between the Arab world and South Asia, not simply in booming India's growing appetite for Arab oil and Iranian gas, but in direct investment of Arab money in refineries, real estate, banking and infrastructure.
Indeed, when the Saudi monarch visited India last year, he overruled his advisers who warned that investments in India would undermine Pakistan by saying, "India is a special case."
Benazir Bhutto's base during her eight years of exile was in the booming Gulf port and financial center of Dubai, and her husband is now based there, looking after their motherless children. Her political rival Nawaz Sharif spent his exile in Saudi Arabia, which exerted its own pressure on Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf to allow his return.
Saudi funds and Egyptian arms fueled Pakistan's support for the Mujahedin who fought the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Pakistan's nuclear researches are reliably reported to have depended on Saudi finance. Certainly the nuclear technology marketing network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan depended on the use of Dubai as an entrepot.
In short, Pakistan and India are important players in the changing constellation of the Middle East, where the financial center of gravity has already shifted from the old Levant dominated by Egypt and Syria to the oil-rich Gulf states.
Such changes bring new opportunities as well as new challenges, and if there is one tiny hint of a silver lining in the tragedy of Bhutto's assassination it is that India and the Gulf states now have a direct interest in shoring up some kind of stability in the failing state of nuclear-armed Pakistan. That means in turn that there are new players like India in the emerging coalition of states that see a direct interest in moving beyond the old, intractable quarrels over Israel and Palestine.