Today, 27 December 2025, marks the eighteenth death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto. She sacrificed her life courageously while resisting the agenda of fanatics and terrorists in Pakistan. She fought relentlessly against forces bent on turning Pakistan into a theocratic-cum-militant state, so that it could never progress towards egalitarianism and democracy.
Since the tragic assassination of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto on 27 December 2007, Pakistan has been continuously entrapped in dreadful conflicts and grave crises, constitutional, political, and economic. Tragically, the country lacks leadership capable of pulling the state out of this perpetual mess.
The prevailing catastrophic situation has not emerged all of a sudden. It is not a result of long military rule and controlled democracy alone, but also due to the utter failure of civil leadership under the Decade of Democracy (2008–18). The so-called Decade of Democracy was followed by nearly four years (August 2018 to April 2022) of a hybrid-regime experiment, with the coalition government of Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Since then, we have hybrid-plus arrangements!
The political crisis following the first-ever successful vote of no-confidence against an elected (sic) Prime Minister was further accentuated by sixteen months’ misrule of the alliance government of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM). Pakistan, now under the second tenure of Shehbaz Sharif as Prime Minister, backed by the establishment, lacks legitimacy as he was installed after the open manoeuvring of the results of the general elections of 8 February 2024.
In today’s Pakistan, there is not a single leader who matches the vision and determination of Benazir Bhutto to regain what we have lost domestically and internationally.
After multiple terms by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Muslim League (Nawaz), many call these musical chair games. The alliance government of PDM and the coalition government of PTI also proved that they lacked the agenda to make Pakistan a true democratic polity and a welfare state. The same is true for the incumbent government.
It is tragic and shameful that the state machinery has utterly failed to unveil the real hands behind Benazir’s assassination even after a lapse of eighteen years. After the trial lingered for nearly a decade, the verdict in 2017 by the Anti-Terrorist Court was disapproved by the PPP, which accused General Pervez Musharraf (late) of hatching a conspiracy for her assassination. In retaliation, the General accused Asif Ali Zardari of being the main beneficiary; the well-known motive theory was applied by him.
The terrorist Taliban group was also involved in the suicide attack on Benazir Bhutto’s procession in Karachi in October 2007, which killed nearly 140 people, but Benazir survived
An online book (Inqilab Mehsood South Waziristan: From British Raj to American Imperialism) by Abu Mansoor Asim Mufti Noor Wali, a senior Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader, released on 30 November 2017, claimed that his group was behind the 2007 assassination of Pakistan’s first woman Prime Minister. The book further revealed, “The terrorist Taliban group was also involved in the suicide attack on Benazir Bhutto’s procession in Karachi in October 2007, which killed nearly 140 people, but Benazir survived.” Many experts cast doubts on the authenticity of these claims.
Notwithstanding the claims by TTP, the fact remains that the state of Pakistan, to this day, has failed to comprehend and punish the real assailants and their abettors. Our criminal justice system (sic) also stands utterly exposed.
On 31 August 2017, the first trial court sentenced two ex-police officers to prison (presently on bail), acquitted five suspected militants, and labelled the late Pervez Musharraf a fugitive for failing to appear in court. As per press reports, appeals against the verdict were fixed for the first time after five years on 9 February 2023 by the Lahore High Court, but proceedings are yet to be concluded.
The wages of appeasement towards militants, failure of law enforcement forces against them, and their alleged protection by certain quarters within the state culminated in the most lamentable, barbaric incident in Peshawar on 16 December 2014, when seven terrorists of TTP launched an attack on the Army Public School.
Clad in the uniform of the Frontier Corps, TTP’s death squad entered the school from the rear. They stormed the premises and held it in a one-hour siege. They moved from classroom to classroom, killing innocent students and staff, nearly 150 lost their lives, and many hundreds received serious injuries.
Unfortunately, even to this day, the TTP’s trained terrorists are attacking with impunity our men in uniform, members of law enforcement agencies, and even innocent civilians. This is after many acclaimed successes by our armed forces in various well-planned military operations in the aftermath of the Peshawar carnage.
Indeed, many deadly attacks after the Peshawar school incident by militants were successfully countered by our security agencies and brave armed forces. However, the ability of terrorist outfits to strike without challenge is still intact. It raises serious national security concerns and vital questions about the effectiveness of our anti-terrorism strategy.
The carnage in Quetta of 8 August 2016, killing seventy and injuring over one hundred, was another great jolt to the entire nation. It was documented in a detailed inquiry report prepared by Qazi Faez Isa, who retired as Chief Justice of Pakistan, then a judge of the Supreme Court. Since no action was taken on the report, there was another wanton attack on Quetta’s Police Training Centre on 23 October 2016, killing fifty-nine cadets and injuring 116.
Even after eighteen years since the tragedy of losing the great leader Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s state has failed to punish her assailants and the forces behind terrorism
The Peshawar tragedy of 16 December 2014, the sad killings of General Sanaullah Niazi, Lieutenant Colonel Touseef, and others on 15 September 2013, Bashir Ahmad Bilour, senior and respected leader of the Awami National Party (ANP), and others on 22 December 2012, bomb blasts at many places, and attacks on armed forces and civilians by militants since 2001, are all links in a single chain. These have been openly claimed by TTP and/or other banned militant or religious outfits, all proxies of neo-colonialists in their well-designed ‘New Great Game’.
At one point, PML(Nawaz) and PTI were advocating a “truce” with terrorists. PTI received their wrath, losing Law Minister Israrullah Gandapur and many others after sharing power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), an ardent and open defender of militant Islam.
It is obvious that there exists a ‘Grand Design’ under the ‘New Great Game’ aimed at keeping Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Iran, and India, especially in the wake of China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), in turmoil by certain powers. This needs to be analysed and understood in its entirety if our civil-military leadership wants to overcome the menace of militancy.
The ghastly attacks on GHQ Rawalpindi, PNS Mehran Base in Karachi, PAF Base at Kamra, the intrusion in Abbottabad, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and campaigns against Libya, Iran, Syria, and other Muslim states should be seen in the perspective of keeping the threat of fundamentalism alive by some hidden hands. They admitted having created monsters like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and provided them with billions of dollars.
All these are well-designed ploys, observes Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan, in his masterpiece The Great Game Continues. His core argument is that “the purpose is not to eliminate the ‘Islamic threat’ but to contain it within manageable limits and to spawn the next generation of terrorists.”
In Pakistan: Drug-trap to Debt-trap, a detailed discussion is available on how the late neo-colonialists invented new enemies and eliminated the older ones as part of the ‘New Great Game’. Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan says, “The Islamic threat created through Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS, etc., is a leverage to intervene in countries for self-aggrandisement. In the case of Pakistan, its prime goal is distancing Islamabad from Beijing and exploiting energy resources abundantly found in Balochistan, and, in the long run, perhaps derailing the US administration’s well-laid plans to bring Afghanistan to heel and to dominate Central Asia and its oil-rich Caspian Sea Basin.”
The phenomenon of fundamentalism is complex and riddled with many puzzles. It cannot be understood without studying the foreign policy of the United States, in which terrorism, drugs, arms, and war play a pivotal role. This is not a recent phenomenon.
From the early part of the twentieth century, US leaders have been using arms, drugs, and war hysteria as tools to advance their foreign policy objectives. Terrorism is a tool in the hands of certain forces that want to impose the New World Order in the wake of 9/11.
Analysts and scholars have yet to examine the assassination of Benazir Bhutto from the perspective of the ‘New Great Game’ unleashed by powers at war in this region with economic interests. Benazir gave her life resisting the designs of those who support militants to wreck Pakistan, providing them pretext to intervene physically in the name of safeguarding nuclear arsenals.
Even after eighteen years since the tragedy of losing the great leader Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s state has failed to punish her assailants and the forces behind terrorism. The responsibility for this rests collectively on the civil-military leadership and judiciary.
Benazir, as the leader of the poor and dispossessed, will always live in the hearts of Pakistanis. If the legacy of Benazir is to prevail, people from all walks of life must work hand in hand to resist and counter the forces of exploitation, bigotry, extremism, fanaticism, and fascism, which are part of the New Great Game’s aims at controlling South Asian and Central Asian resources through the bogey of Islamic militants, with the ultimate objective of containing socialist China, defiant Iran, and undermining nuclear Pakistan.