The Turning Point of 2007

Every year, discussions about Benazir Bhutto tend to oscillate between nostalgia and political symbolism. Yet the most consequential question is not what she represented, but what Pakistan lost when she was assassinated in December 2007.

Her death is often remembered as a personal tragedy, a national trauma, or an attack on democracy. It was all three. But it was also something else: a strategic turning point that may have altered the trajectory of Pakistan’s security policy, its relationship with militant groups, and its approach towards Afghanistan.

Counterfactual history is always speculative. Nevertheless, there are moments when the intentions of a political leader are sufficiently clear to permit reasonable conclusions about what might have happened. Benazir Bhutto’s final political campaign was one such moment.

The agenda she returned with

When Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 2007 after years in exile, she did not come back merely to contest an election. She arrived with a defined strategic agenda.

At the centre of that agenda was a fundamental reorientation of Pakistan’s policy towards Islamist militancy.

She publicly argued that the Taliban represented a direct threat to Pakistan’s future. Unlike many political actors of the period, she made little distinction between various strands of militant extremism. Whether operating in Pakistan or Afghanistan, she viewed such groups as part of a broader ideological challenge that would eventually destabilise the entire region.

Her position was explicit enough to provoke equally explicit threats. Baitullah Mehsud, then the leader of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), openly declared that she would be targeted. Bhutto was therefore fully aware that her campaign against militant networks carried mortal risks.

Yet she persisted.

The assassination attempt in Karachi shortly after her return demonstrated the scale of those risks. The successful attack in Rawalpindi months later removed not merely a politician but arguably the strongest civilian advocate of a decisive confrontation with militant extremism.

The road not taken

The central question is what might have happened had Bhutto survived and become prime minister, as many observers expected she would.

The answer begins with Pakistan’s subsequent response to the TTP.

Following her death, successive governments and elements within the security establishment oscillated between military pressure and negotiated accommodation. Agreements were repeatedly struck with militant groups. Temporary ceasefires were secured. Financial incentives were offered. Local arrangements were reached and subsequently collapsed.

The result was a cycle of appeasement followed by renewed violence.

Political support for negotiations extended beyond the state bureaucracy. Many influential voices argued that militants should be engaged rather than confronted. Some described them as misguided citizens rather than irreconcilable insurgents. The prevailing belief was that accommodation might succeed where force had failed.

Events would eventually prove otherwise.

Only after years of escalating violence—and particularly after the horrific attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar in 2014—did Pakistan embark on the comprehensive military operations that significantly weakened militant networks.

The critical point is timing.

Had Bhutto survived, there is a strong argument that the confrontation would have occurred much earlier. Her publicly stated position suggested little appetite for negotiations with organisations she regarded as existential threats. Military operations that ultimately took place in 2014 may well have begun in 2008 or 2009.

Whether such an earlier campaign would have permanently eliminated militancy cannot be known. But it is difficult to dispute that the Pakistani Taliban would have faced a much more hostile political environment from the outset.

Afghanistan and the strategic dilemma

Bhutto’s second major divergence concerned Afghanistan.

For much of the post-2001 period, Pakistan’s strategic establishment viewed the Afghan Taliban through the prism of regional competition and geopolitical influence. The objective was often perceived as limiting the influence of rival powers and shaping Afghanistan’s political order in ways favourable to Pakistani interests.

Bhutto appeared unconvinced by that logic.

She repeatedly warned that distinguishing between “good” and “bad” Taliban was strategically unsustainable. Extremist movements, she argued, could not be neatly compartmentalised according to national boundaries. Groups tolerated for geopolitical reasons would eventually generate security challenges of their own.

Subsequent developments have lent weight to that concern.

The return of the Taliban to power in Kabul has not produced the strategic stability many anticipated. Instead, Pakistan continues to grapple with cross-border militancy, renewed TTP activity and growing security challenges along its western frontier.

Bhutto’s preferred alternative remains hypothetical. Yet her statements suggest she favoured a broader political settlement in Afghanistan rather than the outright restoration of Taliban rule. Such an approach would have aligned more closely with power-sharing arrangements than with the pursuit of military victory by any single faction.

Whether such a settlement was achievable is uncertain. That she would have pursued it appears far less doubtful.

Beyond security

To view Bhutto solely through the lens of counterterrorism, however, is to miss another dimension of her political legacy.

By 2007 she was no longer the politician who had first entered office in the late 1980s. Years in opposition, exile and confrontation with state institutions had altered her outlook.

Her final political project increasingly centred on coexistence between democratic institutions and the security establishment rather than perpetual confrontation. The Charter of Democracy, signed with Nawaz Sharif in 2006, reflected an attempt to establish rules for civilian politics that transcended individual rivalries.

Its underlying objective was straightforward: to create a political order in which civilian governments could govern responsibly and complete their constitutional mandates.

That vision remains only partially realised.

Pakistan continues to struggle with tensions between civilian authority and unelected centres of power. The debate over civilian supremacy, which Bhutto considered central to democratic consolidation, remains unresolved nearly two decades after her death.

The legacy of an absence

History rarely offers certainty. Benazir Bhutto might have faced the same institutional constraints that confronted every Pakistani leader before and after her. She might have compromised. She might have failed.

Yet the significance of her assassination lies precisely in the fact that those possibilities were never tested.

Pakistan did not merely lose a former prime minister. It lost the opportunity to discover whether a different strategic vision—one that rejected accommodation with militancy, questioned support for the Afghan Taliban and sought a more durable balance between civilian and military authority—could have altered the country’s trajectory.

The Pakistan that emerged after 2007 was shaped by choices made in her absence.

Whether it would have been a better Pakistan had she lived is impossible to prove. That it would have been a different Pakistan is much easier to argue.