Bhutto's assassination in Rawalpindi

I was shocked but in the end not really surprised to read that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in Rawalpindi yesterday. When we were in Pakistan in 1998, we met two 17 year old boys in Mansehra who bore scars from school rally shootings. They'd been shot because they were supporters of Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

Yes, Bhutto and her husband were probably corrupt, but these moderate, generous, forward thinking, and articulate boys seemed to be the backbone of her party. They explained what the PPP meant to them and explained how Bhutto became prime minister because she was the head of a winning party. Being from the States, party politics was a hard concept to grasp. Harder still was the concept that a woman could be the head of a Muslim state, one in which we'd seen only a handful of women in nearly a month and a half of travel.

I'll always remember how these boys begged us to get into a cab to go 2oo yards up the road because it would be safer for us and them not to be seen by their cousins. When we asked what would happen if we were seen, they said matter of factly that they would be killed. Responsible hosts that they were, they insisted on paying for the ride.

I wonder how much has changed for them in the last 10 years. I hope they still wish for a future for Pakistan that is moderate and open, despite all that the United States has tried to do to make fundamentalist Islam a viable choice.