On a hazy winter day in 1994, I drove with then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to the dedication of Pakistan’s first women’s police station. A controversial and bold initiative, it would be a place where Muslim women would feel more at ease discussing abuses like rape with female officers rather than frequently skeptical male ones. The new police post was in Rawalpindi, the city where Bhutto would be killed 13 years later.

As we raced along the wide avenues of Islamabad in a caravan of security vehicles, I asked Bhutto if she’d like to see her children go into politics, too. She was in her second term as prime minister, following in the footsteps of her father, who also held that post but was overthrown in a military coup and executed in 1979.

“No, never,” she said with conviction. “Politics in Pakistan is much too dangerous.”

“What, then, would you like to see them to do?” I asked the first woman ever elected leader of a Muslim country.

“I would like to see my son become a lawyer,” she replied. “And I’d like my daughter to be a social worker.”

Embracing such a stereotypical role for her daughter epitomised the contradictions of Benazir Bhutto, who served Pakistan amid great expectations and who ended up disappointing many of her strongest advocates, including members of her own family.

Her political career was born, as it died, of personal and national tragedy.

“I suddenly sat bolt upright in bed at 2 am,” she wrote in the opening of her autobiography, Daughter of Destiny: An Autobiography describing the night her father was executed.

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