What we lost.
She is part Radcliffe and Oxford, with an extremely well-stocked mind, full of feminist literature, peace marches, the Oxford Union, and with a very liberated social life. She is also part feudal Sindh, a haughty aristocrat, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy landlords, whose inheritance gave her the right to rule. . . . She is an Eastern fatalist by birth, a Western liberal by conviction, and a people-power revolutionary—who has carefully modelled herself on Evita Perón and Corazon Aquino—through sheer necessity. She is an expensively educated product of the West who has ruled a male-dominated Islamic society of the East. She is a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties. ... Mary Ann Weaver, writing in the New Yorker 14 years ago ...
How we lost her.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is alarming, not least because it makes the most frighteningly unstable major country on earth even more so. It was also perhaps the most foreseeable of historical tragedies. Bhutto, who showed remarkable physical bravery throughout her political career, knew well what could await her. When, on October 18th, she returned to Pakistan from her eight-year exile in Dubai and London, she was greeted in Karachi with a bombing that took more than a hundred lives. Bhutto told reporters that in the event of her violent death investigators should look first to men in uniform. The Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud was among those who, threatened by her liberal secularist principles and her promises to crack down on the militant Islamists, spoke of sending suicide bombers, but Bhutto believed that her most dangerous and capable enemies were in the government. “People like Baitullah Mehsud are just pawns,” she told the Guardian. “It is those forces behind him that have presided over the rise of extremism and militancy in my country.” She singled out retired military leaders and intelligence officers sympathetic to Pakistan’s myriad jihadist factions. ... David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker today
