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Bhutto never would have saved Pakistan
"She seemed more American than Pakistani in her style and attitudes, but beneath the Radcliffe and Harvard veneer she also seemed like thousands of other young upper-class women from Pakistan and India who were floating around London at the time. They called one another by girlish nicknames like "Bubbles", they didn’t take anything very seriously (including their studies), and they seemed destined for a life of idle privilege.
Then Benazir Bhutto went back to Pakistan in 1977, just about the time that Zia had her father sentenced to death in a rigged trial. He was hanged in 1979, and Benazir was thrown into jail for five years. But when she came out after Zia died, she was already the head of the party her father had founded, the Pakistan People’s Party, and by 1988 she was prime minister. She was only 35.
She was prime minister twice, from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996, and she was removed from power both times on corruption charges. The charges have never been proved in court, but the evidence of kickbacks and commissions to her husband, Asif Zardari, is pretty overwhelming. But that was not the real problem.
The problem was that she never seemed to have any goal in politics apart from vindicating her father by leading his party back to power. At the start she was hugely popular, but she wasted her opportunity to make real changes in Pakistan because she had no notion (beyond the usual rhetoric) of what a better Pakistan would look like. Pakistan is already pretty good for her sort of people, so it should not surprise us that there was almost nothing to show for her years in office.
If she had become prime minister again, which was a quite likely outcome of the current crisis, there is no reason to believe that she would have done any better this time. Her assassination just makes it harder to solve the crisis at all.
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Look east to India, west to Iran, or north to China, and, by comparison, Pakistan’s political demography is absolutely feudal. So long as that remains the case, it is absurd to imagine that democracy will solve Pakistan’s problems. I admired Benazir Bhutto’s courage, and I am very sorry that she was killed, but she could never have been Pakistan’s saviour."
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