Having said that, other allegations are also not based on evidence, hence, it is needless to argue over those.

What needs to be argued is what Pakistan will be after her. Her political assassination to remove her from the political scene has rendered us hopeless as a nation! Indeed BB was a brave, courageous woman; we have no leader to compare with her. Muslim League is not grounded in people, the others are nationalist parties, Imran Khan types are going around asking people not to vote, they don’t even believe in the political process.

Finally, her death has cast an ugly smear on us as a nation that is barbaric and intolerant of anything that represents modernity or opposition to the mainstream. I mourn the tragic demise of my country’s image too! Pakistan after Bhutto will be a society that won’t have modern face, as BB represented modernity in the true sense of the word. She has been correctly named as Shaheed –e- Jamooriat, i.e., Martyr for Democracy, by independent TV channels. Pakistanis have never faced such grief. We are ashamed for not protecting our daughter; it is culturally also a smear on us. She could have stayed abroad and run her political campaign as does Altaf Hussein, but despite threats to her life she came back to lead the nation and she raised new hopes in us. She inspired the Pakistani men and women, youth and even children (the majority of protestors are youth of Pakistan and even older children); this is significant that Bhutto’s ideology has once again been born. I was a young girl when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, BB’s father, was murdered. I supported his call for ending oppression, he remained my leader after death and then his Daughter gave us the hope no other elader could. So how naïve if anyone thinks BB’s removal from the scene won’t affect Pakistan. There will be the youth of Pakistan who will remember her for her leadership and sacrifice and will take her agenda forward.

Though truly speaking, right now the PPP has been orphaned. Who will replace her we don’t know, but untill that time PPP will be struggling again and for many years to come. Even if it will come to power through a vote of revenge, without BB’s leadership it will face a lot of difficulties. And these difficulties will be reflected as difficulties for the people of Pakistan and for Pakistan as a country. It’s naïve to say such great leadership’s loss for Pakistan won’t matter because by saying this we are denying history, ZAB’s assassination and the result was extension of the military rule of Zia, a draconian period and irreparable harm to the nation which we are still suffering from, including suffering from his Jihadis.

Leadership is so important for people, for masses. We as a nation can easily get used to not having one and laspse into nothingness and accept dictatorship as well as militancy. Wasn’t this the case during BB’s exile? So the aftermath of BB’s assassination will be a lifeless nation, hopeless nation, accepting without questioning, and our children won’t have any ideals to be inspired from. Who will they have, Chaudhry’s Musharraf and his cronies, hair transplanted Sharif brothers who relied on BB’s wisdom untill recently to take decisions, senseless Imran?

The whole point is it will be a country without a leadership, which actually grew through a struggle against oppression. We will be a nation without a vision, without dreams and hopes. And this is worst than all other issues. What a shame we couldn’t protect our sister our daughter. I’m ashamed.

As a Pakistani, I do not think that the assassination of Ms. Bhutto is a great loss for Pakistan. As you have pointed out, she failed to achieve any significant improvements in the lives of ordinary Pakistanis. In fact, she has used both of her terms as Prime Minister of this very poor nation for the embezzlement of millions of dollars and has encouraged her husband Asif Zardari to become the cancer for the Pakistani society.

She may be the darling of the western media and the establishment because she was their puppet and was willing to forego the interests of her nation (Pakistan) to carry out the western agenda.

The western media may portray her as a champion of democracy, but we all know that she did not practice any democratic norms in her own party. She had no elections in her own party and she declared herself as chairperson for life for her party. Even in her will, she wrote that after her the leadership of the party should remain with her spouse and descendants.

I sincerely hope that the West will learn from the assassination of Ms. Bhutto. It should respect the will of Muslim countries to choose their own leaders without interference from the West and to not like unelected western puppets such as Pervez Musharraf, Mahmood Abbas or Mubarak.

Dr. Humad Khan

Please let me start by juxtaposing a few quotes:

“… to an earlier [i.e., the early modern] age, the world of ‘full human personality,’ replete with diverse passions, appeared as a menace that needed to be exorcised to the greatest possible extent.”
Albert O. Hirschman The Passions and the Interests 1977

“Writers such as Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, and Robert Bellah conceive of religion as a special kind of symbol system which evokes a sense of ultimate, transcendent, encompassing meaning. But what this concept does, in addition to drawing on the social sciences, is to save religion from the onslaught of post-Enlightenment positivism.”
Robert Wuthnow The Restructuring of American Religion 1988

The current film, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a “comedy” and not a “history,” makes light of the irony of Israel’s role in securing weapons in the fight of the mujahidin against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

But at the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” after pouring a billions dollars into weapons for the mujahidin, Congressman Wilson’s glib but ominous understatement that “we fucked up the endgame” by not providing money for “education” alludes to the importance of culture in social change.

The transformation of the mujahidin into the Taliban is important in part because it implies broader, transcultural as well as social theoretical issues that have, I think, crucial relevance to what’s going on in Pakistan and that are important to understand if we are going to develop mutual understanding between the cultures of the West and the Middle East.

After 9/11, there was some acknowledgment by U.S. administration officials of the U.S.’s lack of knowledge of Arabic as a language. Yet both religion and language are equally important keys to understanding any culture.

A September 2004 British Chatham House briefing paper, “Iraq in Transition: Vortex or Catalyst?”, shows awareness of the ethnic and religious complexities of Iraq and the surrounding region. In 2004, however, it seemed there was not a lot of evidence of this kind of consciousness in the Bush administration or the national press.

Even now, years after the shock of 9/11 and the fiasco of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq since 2003, there does not seem to be a lot of historical-critical knowledge of the history of humanity’s major religious traditions and their sacred texts, including Islam, as well as the complexities of international politics of the Middle East in the present administration, State Department and CIA.

I may be wrong on this but what administration foreign policies, especially but certainly not only in the last eight years, seem to stress is a narrow political realism focused myopically national security, oil and national self-interest – culture be damned – which seems to me self-defeating.

Decades ago, Fouad Ajami, in The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (1981), said that the Iranian Revolution was sparked by, in addition to the Shah’s connections to the U.S., a kind of cultural imperialism from the West.

You say the U.S. cannot afford to repeat the mistake of making Pakistan into another Iran. But hasn’t that already happened? Pakistan appears to be awfully close to being a U.S. vassal.

But the problem may be even deeper.

Consider, for example, what Max Weber said concerning what he called the problem of meaning and how the very conditions of modern societies tend to undermine moral and religious meaning.

For example, in the “Sociology and Types of Salvation” Weber writes of a “malaise” specific to modern women and men the source of which is the loss of a framework of meaning in which moral actions such as forgiveness make sense. Although Weber was focused on Protestant Christianity (Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 1991 [1922]), it seems there might be parallels in various forms of Islam in terms of the tension between tradition and modernity Muslim cultures experience.

I’d be interested if you find this sorts of considerations helpful in making sense of Pakistan, the transformation of the mujahidin into the Taliban and 9/11?

If so, is it possible to communicate this kind of perspective to members of Congress, State Department diplomats and administration officials in the White House as well as to your students in the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service? And, if such a perspective, which recognizes the depth of culture, is not cultivated, how can we avoid, as you put it, “another iteration of the same flawed approach”?

If not, what is the alternative?

If it isn’t too general and abstract, do you think such a perspective – sensitive to 1) “culture” defined as the ways in which any group or society understands themselves and their situation and to 2) the tensions between tradition and modernity – could make a significant difference in how U.S. foreign policy is formulated and carried out – after Bhutto in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle East?