Here, from my great compatriot David Warren, is the best Bhutto column of all. I think the “next door neighbor” crack is a reference to me (though it wasn’t in Oxford or at Harvard). But, unlike all her other bestest pals, Mr Warren was never star-struck, even in grade school apparently:

I met her as a child in Pakistan, so let me jump on this bandwagon. I remember her at age eight, arriving in a Mercedes-Benz with daddy’s driver, and whisking me off for a ride in the private aeroplane of then-President Ayub Khan (Bhutto père was the rising star in his cabinet). This girl was the most spoiled brat I ever met.
I met her again in London, when she was studying at Oxford. She was the same, only now the 22-year-old version, and too gorgeous for anybody’s good. One of my memories is a glimpse inside a two-door fridge: one door entirely filled with packages of chocolate rum balls from Harrod’s.

The appointment of her corrupt hubby and teenage son as “co-leaders” of her party tends to confirm David Warren’s point. These Bhuttos are made for walkin’, and one of these days these Bhuttos gonna walk all over you.

That said, if half the rumors running round are true, her murder nevertheless marks another bumpy descent. When Benazir’s unlovely dad was deemed too problematic to allow to live, General Zia had him tried and executed. If, as is widely believed, elements of the Pakistani Army, the ISI, and even General Musharraf’s cabinet had reached the same conclusion about Benazir herself, they didn’t waste time with show trials but simply signed up the nearest suicide bomber. The respective fates of Bhutto pere et fille are themselves a mark of Pakistan’s decline.