Why Pakistan Matters

Benazir Bhutto's assassination has plunged the Muslim nuclear power into chaos. Now the Bush Administration must help undo decades of flawed U.S. policy to save Pakistan

David Guttenfelder / AP

Pakistani soldiers are deployed in a city market in Karachi, Pakistan.

As the new self-appointed standard bearers of Pakistani democracy, Asif Ali Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari don't inspire much confidence. One is a feudal aristocrat widely reviled as corrupt and blamed for his wife's undoing when she was the country's Prime Minister in the 1990s. The other, their son, is a bookish Oxford undergraduate who talks of democracy but whose political clout derives entirely from his middle name. Yet there they were, three days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, their beloved wife and mother, proclaiming themselves inheritors of her political fief, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), and assuring...

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