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From The Sunday Times

December 30, 2007

My life with Benazir

Christina Lamb, whose award-winning career began 20 years ago when she interviewed Benazir Bhutto, remembers the woman who was destroyed by the country that bewitched them both

We had just entered Santa’s castle in the pretty Portuguese village of Obidos on Thursday when my phone beeped with the first text message. “Benazir has been critically wounded in bomb attack – in hospital undergoing treatment.”

I think I knew immediately. Obidos styles itself Portugal’s Vila Natal or Christmas Town and it was packed with families oohing and aahing at Nativity scenes scattered with artificial snow and downing cups of local cherry brandy. As I pushed through the crowds to get out and hear my phone, which by then was ringing repeatedly, the elves and Santas all around suddenly seemed sinister.

White Christmas was blaring out of speakers by the old church as I opened a text message. “Agencies reporting Benazir dead.” Everything around me seemed to turn into a blur.

With me were my eight-year-old son and my parents, my elderly father valiantly navigating the cobblestones with his stick. I did not want to destroy their day out. I remembered Benazir’s pride at her eldest child, Bilawal, starting at Oxford two months ago. “They grow up so quickly,” she’d said to me at the time. “Enjoy your son while you can.”

A week after that we’d been together on her bus in Karachi when it was bombed. She narrowly escaped, but I knew they’d get her in the end.

Politics in Pakistan means being out among the people, pressing the flesh. She was never going to hide behind the armour plating her party workers so carefully arranged for her, but would always stand on top of the bus or out of the sunroof of armoured cars. Having seen her father and two brothers killed, she more than anyone knew the risks. I asked her over and over again if it was worth it.

“I put my faith in God and I trust in the people of Pakistan,” she always replied. She was the bravest person I have ever met and, for all her flaws, she was still the best hope for her country.

ALMOST exactly 20 years ago, in December 1987, I woke up in bed in Karachi. The air was damp and sticky and I was breathing in the headachy smell of jasmine. Delicate henna flowers and blossoms twisted across my palms and my feet, and fireworks exploded into red and white stars in the sky. It was day three of the wedding celebrations of Benazir Bhutto and my life had just changed for ever.

Throughout my teenage years I had yearned for adventure. At Nonsuch school for girls in Surrey I was endlessly in detention. Kept after school writing lines, I would gaze out of the window conjuring up far-off worlds. It was Benazir who gave me the chance to reach them.

Her world was utterly different from mine. I’d grown up on a council estate in Morden, the last stop on the Northern line. She had been born amid wealth – the Bhuttos owned great estates – and she had glamour. As a young woman, she knew about power and pain: her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was prime minister of Pakistan but was deposed by the army and executed. She was a star at Oxford – the first Asian woman elected head of the union, flitting around in her yellow sports car – while I was just a spectator a decade later as editor of Cherwell, the university newspaper. Nonetheless, we met and we clicked.

As a graduate intern at the Financial Times in the summer of 1987, I was assigned to a lunch where a man from the Pakistan People’s party (PPP) – her party – asked me if I would like to interview her. Of course I said yes.

She had just announced her engagement and was sitting serenely in her Kensington flat, surrounded by lava lamps and bouquets. Although she often appeared cold and imperious, she could also be warm and girlie, and we struck an instant bond. The resulting interview was my first big article in a national paper and it would decide my destiny.

At the time, General Zia ul-Haq, her father’s executioner, had been president of Pakistan for a decade. Zia’s regime had thrived by facilitating America’s efforts to push the Russians out of neighbouring Afghani-stan, but Benazir was pressing him to hold free multi-party elections.

With all the confidence of my 21 years, I wrote: “There is little doubt that, were fair elections held tomorrow, she would probably win by a substantial margin. Unfortunately for Ms Bhutto politics in Pakistan are rarely determined by popularity; but rather by a daunting triumvirate of generals, businessmen and mullahs with their US sponsors keeping a watchful eye.”

I predicted – wrongly – that “it could be a long time before Ms Bhutto takes her father’s place at the head of the country”. And I added judgmentally: “If she ever does attain power it is uncertain, given the vagueness of her policy prescriptions, whether this elegant soft-spoken lady will be able to deliver.”

Despite my less than friendly verdict, that autumn a large, gold-inscribed invitation to Benazir’s wedding landed on my mat in a rented room in Walsall. I had moved on from the FT to a traineeship at Central TV. Our area encompassed the M1 and M6 motorways, where young people were often killed in drink-driving accidents. There was nothing harder than knocking on the doors of their families and asking for a photo.

One drizzly December day I drove round and round Spaghetti Junction trying to find the turn-off for the Birmingham Bullring, where I was assigned to interview two firemen who were trying to beat the world record for time spent wearing gas masks. It was so cold that the cameras kept seizing up. By the fifth take even the firemen looked bored.

A few days later, however, I arrived at 70 Clifton Road, the Bhuttos’ Karachi home. Like a huge Christmas tree, the house was festooned with lights. Inside, preparations and festivities had been under way all week.

Weddings in Pakistan are a matter of face. Combine that with Benazir’s fanatical perfectionism, and you have a recipe for high tension. To the dismay of her aunties, she was refusing to accept the traditional trousseau from the bridegroom’s family.

Instead of the 21 to 51 sets of clothes usually presented to the bride, she had set the limit at only two. Instead of gold bangles all the way up each arm, she said she would wear glass, explaining: “I am a leader – I must set an example to my people.” Nor, she said, did she have time for the traditional week’s purdah. Instead she kept nipping out to the office.

All the same, the aunties told me how pleased they were that Bibi – as they called her – was settling down.

Was she in love? Announcing her engagement, she had said less than enthusiastically: “Conscious of my religious obligations and duty to my family, I am pleased to proceed with the marriage proposal accepted by my mother.” Everyone told me that an arranged marriage was better because you went in with no preconceptions and learnt to love each other.

The morning before the main celebrations Benazir underwent the painful process of having all her body hair removed. No screams were heard. She had, after all, endured years of detention in Pakistan, including 10 months in solitary confinement.

The main event took place in a multicoloured marquee in the garden, where bowers of jasmine and roses led to a tinsel-bedecked stage. Here, Benazir sat next to her husband-to-be, Asif Ali Zardari, on a mother-of-pearl bench and said yes three times to become a married woman. Sugar was ground over their heads so their lives would be sweet.

Taking a break along Clifton beach, I paid a man with a scrawny parakeet a few rupees for it to pick me tarot cards. “You will be back within a year,” he predicted. I was.

After all the late-night discussions of how to overturn dictatorship in Pakistan, there was no way I could go back to the death knocks in Birmingham. I went to see the FT and got a vague agreement that they would pay for whatever they published by me. I bought a bucket-shop flight to Lahore and packed everything I imagined I would need to be a foreign correspondent, including a tape of Mahler’s Fifth, a jumbo bag of wine gums, a lucky pink rabbit, a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and a bottle of Chanel No 5 that my boyfriend’s mum had got at trade price. I could hardly carry the suitcase.

The foreign editors in London were all more interested in Russian-occupied Afghanistan than in Pakistan, so I headed for the frontier town of Peshawar and – like most journalists there – spent much of my time going back and forth across the border.

“Going inside”, we called it. When you were out you spent all your time attempting to get in; and once in, living in caves on stale bread and trying to avoid landmines and bombs, you desperately wanted to be out.

I celebrated my 22nd birthday in a kebab shop in Peshawar’s Old Story-tellers’ Bazaar with flat chapli kebabs followed by yellow cake with a candle on top. The night ended with a moonlit swim in the pool of the Pearl Continental, where proper correspondents stayed. There were other things to celebrate that night: May 15 1988 marked the start of the withdrawal of the Soviet army, which had occupied Afghanistan since Boxing Day 1979.

The supply of American Stinger missiles, which could down Soviet planes, had turned the war around. For the mujaheddin, who had humiliated the largest army on earth, these were glory days, before jihad became a dirty word. For Pakistan, it was the start of a tumultuous series of events that would raise Benazir to power but ultimately take her life.

Zia announced party-based elections in which Benazir would be able to take part. Later he announced at a press conference that parties would not be allowed. I stuck up my hand. As a tall, blonde English girl in a sea of Pakistani men – none of whom seemed concerned by his turnaround – I was handed the microphone.

“Why have you changed your mind about holding party-based elections, as you said when you announced them?” I asked.

“I did not say that,” Zia said. He was lying. “Yes, you did.” A gasp ran through the Pakistani journalists, and people tugged at me to sit down. But Zia smiled, thanked me for respecting his country’s culture by wearing the traditional salwar kameez and invited me to make an appointment for an interview.

We met at Army House in Rawalpindi, where he served me tea and again smiled disarmingly. His lips were thin and his teeth big: I wondered if he had smiled as tightly when he ordered the hanging of Benazir’s father along the road in Rawalpindi jail. He talked for more than an hour about everything from Afghanistan to the state dinner he had attended in Paris when President Mitterrand had told him to take off his long black tunic, thinking it was a coat. “I had to tell him I had nothing on underneath.”

By the time I left I had some good lines, particularly his belief that the US no longer felt it needed him now the Russians were leaving Afghanistan. In my efforts to concentrate on what he was saying, however, I had pressed the wrong button on my tape recorder. When I switched it on later, the tape was blank. I made an embarrassed call to his military secretary. As it was a dictatorship, they too had recorded the interview. Shortly afterwards a man in uniform arrived bearing a copy of their transcript and a box of sweet-smelling mangoes.

My gaffe had a dramatic coda. Three weeks later, Zia was killed when his plane crashed with all the top military on board. That night I was on News at Ten just after the bongs, being interviewed by Sandy Gall and looking slightly startled. Live satellite broadcasts were virtually unknown in those days.

To everyone’s surprise, the new army chief, General Aslam Beg, announced that the elections would go ahead. Zia had scheduled them for November because he had been informed that Benazir was expecting a baby then and would be unable to campaign. But for once she had out-witted him. Knowing his spies would obtain her medical records, she had managed to have them swapped and was actually due in September.

Her detractors were not so easily thwarted. Military intelligence (ISI) put its weight behind her opponents in the Muslim League and main religious parties. They airdropped leaflets showing an old photograph of her mother in a cocktail dress dancing with President Gerald Ford. They referred to mother and daughter as “gangsters in bangles”.

Benazir’s PPP emerged as the largest party but 16 seats short of a majority. While the army dallied, her lieutenants made desperate overtures, often of a financial nature, to win the support of small parties and independents. Days turned into a week, then two weeks, and editorials around the world thundered that Benazir must be allowed to form a government.

On the 15th day, in an indication of who really pulls the strings in Pakistan, she had a meeting with General Hamid Gul, director of ISI; tea with the US ambassador; and dinner with the army chief. The next day, official security replaced the the PPP activists guarding the gate of the house where she was staying. At 35, she was going to be the first female prime minister in the Muslim world.

That night many of the people who had been at the wedding gathered with her to celebrate again – it was hard to believe it had been less than a year – but Benazir looked pensive. For power did not come without compromise. To the consternation of some of her closest advisers, she had agreed that the military would still control Pakistan’s nuclear programme and Afghan policy.

These were far from the only challenges. After years of dictatorship, everyone expected jobs and patronage from those now in power. Her followers regarded her as Queen Bountiful. Everywhere she went she was mobbed by supporters waving petitions demanding jobs as recompense for their sacrifices during martial law. Under 11½ years of dictatorship an awful lot of people had suffered for the PPP. With the treasury coffers empty, she could satisfy few of them.

As I reported at the time: “Bhutto already has the biggest cabinet in Pakistan’s history and an entire battalion of advisers, known locally as the ‘Under19 team’ or ‘Incompetence Incorporated’.

“This is not patronage politics, however. In the new government’s terminology it is people’s politics. When ministers ignore their government work to spend all day arranging jobs for their voters and licences for their patrons, this is not corruption or nepotism it is people’s government. Using the same ploy, they have renamed many of the country’s schools as people’s schools, and thus claim to have created thousands of new schools.”

Bhutto often complained that she was “in office but not in power”. Real power remained with the army, which at any moment could bring the whole thing to an end as it had with her father. It had never really occurred to me before to question democracy as a system. But I was impressed by the Pakistani military officers I met, many of them Sandhurst-trained. It was hard not to sympathise with those who argued they were a better option than some of the leading politicians – feudal scions, used to peasants kissing the hem of their coats, who switched sides to stay in power.

Most of the army’s unease about what they referred to derisorily as the “democratic experiment” came from the growing perception that Pakistan had never had such a corrupt government. The central figure was Benazir’s husband, Asif, who went from being known as Mr Ten Percent to Mr Thirty Percent. As the Financial Times correspondent, I often met foreign businessmen who told me that they were being openly asked for kickbacks to secure government contracts.

“They’re about as subtle as a train wreck,” said one. When I tried to bring this up with Benazir, her eyes narrowed angrily. I was angry with her myself about something else. How could she as a female prime minister do nothing about laws that meant a woman’s evidence was worth half that of a man and that she could not open a bank account without her husband’s permission?

Worst of all was the notorious Hudood Ordinance, under which if a woman was raped she needed to produce four male witnesses to the penetration. If she failed she would be imprisoned for sex outside marriage. I had visited jails full of girls who had been raped. Yet, instead of worrying about this, Benazir spent her time on trivial matters such as working out place settings for banquets.

In Benazir’s world you were “either with us or against us”. My invitations to dinners at the prime minister’s house dried up. I began getting anonymous phone calls asking if I was being paid by the opposition.

It wasn’t long before the army started plotting. One afternoon, one of Benazir’s ministers stopped by at my apartment looking flustered. He told me a group of army officers had been arrested to foil a coup plot. At the monthly meeting of nine corps commanders, four had openly spoken against her.

After other sources confirmed what the minister had said, I filed my story. A few evenings later, two men in grey salwar kameez and dark glasses – the hallmark of ISI – rang my doorbell. I was driven to the Rawalpindi military cantonment where I was questioned about my “links with British and Soviet intelligence”. I could not believe they were serious.

They presented me with a file headed “Activities of Christina Lamb”. It contained many of the things I had done and some I hadn’t. There were photocopies of personal letters, and there was also some information that could have been passed on only by a good friend.

I was questioned all night and warned that it would be in my interests to leave the country. Early next morning, I was driven back to Islamabad. My flat had been ransacked. Two cars and a red motorbike appeared on the street corner and followed me everywhere.

I was determined not to be driven out, but my enemies had the last word. The interior ministry refused to renew my visa and I was asked to leave the country. The local press described me as either an Indian spy or the “Pamella Bordes of Pakistan”. To my outrage, one article even claimed I had rented room 306 of the Holiday Inn to entertain.

As I drove to Islamabad airport, I notice fresh graffiti on the wall. “We apologise for this democratic interruption,” it read. “Normal martial law will be resumed shortly.” A few months later, on August 6, 1990, Benazir woke to the news that troops had surrounded ministries, television and radio stations. The president, flanked by the service chiefs, announced that her government had been dismissed for “corruption, mismanagement and violation of the constitution”.

For more than a decade, my work took me elsewhere in the world – to Latin America and Africa – but I went back and forth to Pakistan and was there for Benazir’s triumphant reelection in 1993 and her removal once more three years later amid accusations of nepotism and the undermining of the justice system. That was the first time I saw her in tears.

I married Paulo, a Portuguese journalist, and in July 1999 – three months after a Pakistani court had found the exiled Benazir guilty of corruption – our son, Lourenço, was born. I thought about giving up the peripatetic life of a foreign correspondent to write books and be more of a mother. But on September 11, 2001, I stared over and over again at the film of the second aircraft hitting the second tower of the World Trade Center.

“Mummy, Mummy, plane crashing!” shouted two-year-old Lourenço. I felt a familiar shivering in my guts. I knew I had to go back.

As in the old days, the lobby of the Serena hotel in Quetta, the Pakistani city just across the border from Kanda-har, was full of ISI agents in salwar kameez and aviator glasses. Pakistan was again under a military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in 1999. Benazir was out of the picture, living in exile in Dubai with her husband and two daughters.

Even if Musharraf was genuine in his professed support for the American war on the Taliban, it seemed naive to think that ISI would meekly obey. A key paradox to Pakistan is that, while it is nominally an ally in the war on terror, its powerful military intelligence has another agenda. ISI made the Taliban what they were by channelling weapons to them in Afghanistan’s years of chaos during the 1990s, and supporting them was an ideology, not just a policy.

When I began investigating reports from contacts that ISI was still supplying arms to the Taliban, the men in aviator glasses struck. I was arrested at 2.30am in my hotel room, as was Justin Sutcliffe, the photographer working with me.

We spent the next two days being interrogated in an abandoned bungalow. Fortunately Justin had managed to smuggle in a mobile phone. While I made a loud fuss to our captors, he phoned from the toilet for help. Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, intervened. On the third day we were deported as a threat to national security. Three months later, after the abduction and beheading of Daniel Pearl, the American investigative reporter, we wondered what might have happened had we not had that phone. There were signs of ISI methodology in the Pearl case.

Pakistani military intelligence couldn’t stop us getting into Afghanistan via Iran to cover the flight of the Taliban. I managed to get home to England again for Christmas, arriving on the morning of December 25.

It was a shock to go from a land of dust and hunger to an enormous lunch of turkey with all the trimmings at my parents’ house and a mountain of presents under the tree for Lourenço. I couldn’t help snapping at him for leaving food on his plate, though I knew he was far too young to understand.

It was clear that the war for Afghanistan was not over – and that the real story was in Pakistan. Again and again I found myself being drawn back there. The West could send as many troops as it liked into Afghanistan but if it could not staunch the supply of Taliban fighters from madras-ahs in Pakistan, it would never resolve the problem. And this was where Benazir came back into the story.

As Pakistan became less and less governable, America began to put pressure on Musharraf to reach a political accommodation with her in the belief that together they could save the country from becoming a nuclear-armed Islamist state.

It was never a realistic scenario. Musharraf told me in November 1999, just after he seized power, that he blamed her more than anyone for the situation Pakistan was in.

“You’re a friend of Benazir’s,” he said. “Well you should know this. More than anyone she had the brains and the opportunity to change Pakistan and she didn’t do it, instead spending her time making money. As long as I am here she will never be allowed back into power.”

Having overthrown her twice, and with their project for the resurgence of the Taliban looking successful, were the military fundamentalists going to let her back a third time?

Benazir and I had made up over the years. She sent us a large crystal bowl for a wedding present and we often met for lunch near her flat in Kensington during her years in exile.

She said she enjoyed having time to play with her children in Hyde Park but it was clear she was depressed at seeing her political ambitions wash away, complaining she could not even get meetings with officials in London and Washington. When she moved from London to Dubai, it seemed as if much of her time was spent doing yoga and shopping. She had a weakness for chocolate and ice cream and had put on weight. Her shelves were full of self-help books.

I was in Karachi two months ago when, after long negotiations, she said goodbye to her two anxious daughters in Dubai and flew home after eight years in exile. Despite the risks she knew she was taking, I hadn’t seen her look so happy for years. The old fire was in her eyes. She cried as she got off the plane.

I was the only journalist among about 15 family, political colleagues and friends on the open top of her campaign bus that night when two bombs went off. We were incredibly lucky to escape. When a woman tried to steer me towards an ambulance I realised I was covered with the blood of some of the 140 victims.

Benazir survived that attack but it was a brutal awakening to just how much her country had changed since she had packed her bags and fled to London in 1998. The next evening I sat with her in her small book-lined study in Karachi. She was dressed in sombre grey silk with a black armband and told me she had had just under four hours’ sleep and had woken up with blood in her ears from the effect of the blast.

“I haven’t felt weepy yet but it suddenly hit me at about 5.30am that maybe I wouldn’t have made it,” she said. “I kept thinking of the noise, the light and the place littered with dead bodies. Everything seemed lit up.”

On the wall of the study was a child’s spelling certificate, a reminder that Benazir may have been a politician but was also the devoted mother of Bilawal, 19, Bakhtawar, 17, and Asifa, 14. I saw her brush her fingers across their photographs when we got back to the house after the Karachi bombing and I asked what she had said to them.

Iknew how hard it had been to hear from my husband that he and our son had seen television pictures of the explosion and that Lourenço had asked matter-of-factly: “Do you think Mummy survived?”

“The first thing I thought of after the bomb went off was the children,” she said. She admitted it had been hard speaking to them that morning.

“They kept saying, ‘Mummy are you okay? Mummy are you okay?’ They had been desperately keen to come with me, and I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t want you to come.’

“The worst thing is hurting them, making them fearful,” she added. “I feel children need their parents. Losing my father was the worst thing that ever happened to me and I was 25 – they are still much smaller. I worry about the effect on them.”

However, she insisted they understood that she had to go back. “My mother comes from Iran and many of her relatives and friends never went back home, so I used to think I didn’t want to be one of those people who’d lost their country.”

I will never forget seeing Benazir on her bus, like Boadicea riding her chariot, standing at the open front, refusing the entreaties of her security to stay behind the armour-plated shield. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement and a speckled dove with an injured leg perched on her shoulder.

“This is why I came back,” she said. “Look at the crowds, the women, the children who have come from all over. These are the real people of Pakistan, not the extremists.”

In the end she paid the ultimate price. When I got home from Portugal on Friday the first thing I opened from a pile of post was a Christmas card from Benazir sent from Islamabad. It said, “Praying for peace in the world and happiness for your family in 2008.”

It really made me cry.

© Christina Lamb 2007

Small Wars Permitting by Christina Lamb will be published by HarperPress on January 21 at £8.99. Copies can be ordered for £8.54 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

This is what I believe is History in Making, loosing her was like loosing a hope! A valueable leader for a thankless nation!

suleman, karachi, Pakistan

I'm an avid of Pakistan's politics. Having read the history of Pakistan, I don't believe in ruling the country with force. We have tried it and had enough of it. Multi-ethnicity and pluralism have their own fallouts but can make a country a heterogeneous melting pot if these concepts are respected. PPP, party of ZAB and BB, was the only anti-establishment force in the country. It is too obvious to track their enemies. Democracy is not dependent on genesis as proclaimed by the military stalwarts. To end the military intervention, there is a need to roll back their corporate interests from where they extract their strength. Backend nexus of military and ideological forces has to be axed.

Saba, Lahore, Pakistan

Thank you, Christina Lamb, for making another world story into a humanly understandable piece.

Consolations to you on losing a friend.

Respectfully,

Morgan Russell

Morgan Russell, Vienna , AUSTRIA

Despite the fact that Ms Benazir Bhutto, first ever female prime minister of a Muslim world,
was not a sitting prime minister though her assassination would be remembered as an event that shook the world. Virtually every single news media of the world was exclusively focused on her assassination. World political leaders did not lose a moment in condemning her cowardly assassination.

BENAZIR Bhutto, Pakistanâ€™s most internationally recognisable and outspokenly leader, will be remembered by country men Whatever her ideological belief was. She left a mark on Pakistanâ€™s politics that she can never be airbrush her out of history. Starting life as the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto she became
in due course a force in her own right. she chose a life that was marked by struggle than acquiescence.
Benazir Bhutto and her party represented politics of the federation of Pakistan. In these troubled times, this is of paramount importance.

Abid Mushtaq, Quetta, Pakistan

How did the Ministry of the Interior 'discover' the communications of Baitullah Mehsud so quickly after the assasination of Benazir Bhutto? Was the government listening in for some time to Mehsud's conversations? And if
so, did they overhear the preparations for the suicide bomber attack?

Abid Mushtaq, Quetta, Pakistan

I was at Oxford at the same time as Benazir and although I didn't know her personally, I occasionally used to see her around the place. She always had this smouldering sex-appeal. Her senseless assassination has left me feeling profoundly shocked and has hit me almost as hard as the death of Diana a decade ago.

Simon R. Gladdish, Swansea, Wales

Yet again religion causes death followed by destruction, and yet more death.

All in the name of whatever God or prophet the "evil doers" (sorry GB) profess to serve.

Peace in our time?

Marc, Antrim, N Ireland

Democracy in Pakistan is what the terrorists want, as most Pakistani's are religious and would vote for the religious parties. 2 out of 5 provinces are already governed by the Islamic Alliance who were voted in.

So the only person who would really suffer from democracy in Pakistan is Musharraf.

andrew, High Wycombe,

Even if the crime had been committed by Fred Nerk of Leongatha
al-Qaeda would still say they did it.
The whole thing is reminiscent of Lawrence (of Arabia). Many people would have wanted her dead. Especially President Musharraf who was noticeable by his absence. Also, why on earth was she allowed to put her head out of the car?
I'm not a conspiracy theorist but, to me, al-Qaeda are too obvious an answer. Idealists who were frightened she would become too pragmatic. The pragmatists who were frightened that she might suddenly get a conscience and go straight? The list goes on. Indeed, we may never know the truth.

Venise Alstergren, Melbourne, Victoria 3142, AUSTRALIA

There are several ways to solve Pakistans problems.

A country like Pakistan (multi-ethnic) can only be ruled by force.
The Iraqis were better off, peaceful and having womens rights under Saddam; everyone knows it.
If rebellion breaks out in Pakistan you would have to do what Saddam would do to set an example to all the others. What Saddam would have done is exactly what the British would have done when they had some.

This would sit strangely with the Americans though who need Musharraf. A merica cannot afford to punish Musharraf, besides Pakistan is a lot bigger than Iraq. I wager its people far fiercer aswell.

You could break the country up on ethic lines, though the EU wouldn't approve that idea.

Alexander, the Romans and probably our own governments knew and know that enforcing a multi ethnic culture is the best way to divide, subdue and control a population through fear and paranoia.

Having a population of feroscious Muslims complicates the picture.

Keith Bentham, Wigan, Lancashire

Buttho said in an interview that if she dies it will be Mushariff behind it.

It is really that much of a leap to believe that Mushariff, who is against democracy, would have extremist views and knows extremists who would gladly kill an innocent and defenceless woman who threatens their extreme views?

kim, london,

Any previous significant attacks from Al Quaeda have resulted in swift admittance and self appraisal, why not this one ?

Scott, Glasgow, Scotland

''They were very brave boys who killed her.â€...bravery to kill a unarmed woman? what a depraved ideology!

gabe, dublin, ireland

"The terrorsits" did it. Of course.
But who were the terrorists?

Buttho represented democracy.
Islamic extremists are averse to democracy, but so is the current Mushariff administration.

People on the street in Pakistan blame Mushariff. Mushariff and the Bush administration are sure its Al Quaida.

One thing is for sure. We will never know the truth.

Jasper, Tokyo, Japan