"Benazir Bhutto always understood Washington more than Washington understood her. Ms. Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition leader and two-time prime minister, who was assassinated in Rawalpindi on Thursday as she campaigned for the office a third time, had a more extensive network of powerful friends in the capital’s political and media elite than almost any other foreign leader. Over the years, she scrupulously cultivated those friends, many from her days at Harvard and Oxford. She was rewarded when her connections — at the White House, in Congress and within the foreign policy establishment — helped propel her into power in Pakistan.
"But in the end, with yet another American administration behind her, Ms. Bhutto’s Washington network only underscored how little the United States fathomed the feudal politics of South Asia, and its own ability to control events in the cauldron of Pakistan. 'I always thought this was roughly how it would end for her, but I didn’t think it would happen today,' Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador and a longtime friend of Ms. Bhutto’s, said in an interview on Thursday.
"A descendant of a feudal landholding family in Sindh, a southern province, Ms. Bhutto was raised in a mansion in the Karachi seaside neighborhood of Clifton and educated at Christian convent schools. She arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1969 as a primly dressed 16-year-old, bewildered by American customs. 'I was amazed at how people talked to their parents — not enough respect,' she later told The Washington Post."
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