Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Butto, a Harvard alum, has been assassinated by a gunman/suicide bomber as she was addressing a political rally.

The exact circumstances surrounding the assassination were still unclear. Senior officials in Ms. Bhutto’s party said she had finished addressing the rally and was sitting in a car waving at the crowd when she was hit in the head by a sniper in a nearby building. They said the car moved on for another 50 yards before a suicide attacker blew himself up.

Other witnesses described a single assassin opening fire on Ms. Bhutto and her entourage, hitting her at least once in the neck and once in the chest, before blowing himself up.

This is a terrible and ominous tragedy.

Butto was not the great democratic hope of Pakistan, true. She had an imperial vision for leadership in her country, and she and her husband were not exactly ideal reformers.

Nonetheless, she represented a threat to the entrenched and corrupt status quo, as well as a figure who seemed like a real friend to the United States, critical of the Al Qaeda-friendly Pakistani intelligence service and the lackluster efforts to track down Osama bin Laden in whatever Pakistani mountain range he has taken as his refuge.

This horrific act of violence will only beget more violence, and further imperil hopes for a credible election in Pakistan, where voting was supposed to take place in January.

As they would have said in an earlier, simpler time, this is FUBAR.

The implications and consequences will reveal themselves in the days, weeks, months and years to come. For now, let us take a minute to consider the sacrifice of a woman who loved her country and gave her life to try to save it from chaos, anarchy and violence. Would our president and vice-president take the same risks that Benazir Bhutto did?