Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27. Few people, including Bhutto herself, thought she was safe in Pakistan. Last October, on the very day she returned from exile to Karachi, scores of her welcoming supporters had been killed near her motorcade, victims of at least two suicide-bomb attacks.

Much of the official international reaction to Bhutto’s assassination used canned expressions of sympathy or outrage, alongside the occasional call for finding those responsible for the crime. That task will be difficult, because there are at least three versions of the events that actually led to her death. One conveniently has the actual shooter finishing the job by becoming a suicide bomber. What is not disputed is that militant Islamists were behind the killing. Groups are tripping over each other to take the credit.

The talking heads on TV and the pundits in print simply shrugged their shoulders: Pakistan is such a lawless state (true enough) that murder is like a trip to the grocery store. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who on his way to discover democracy was “encouraged” only a few weeks ago to relinquish his dual roles as president and military chief, has suddenly become the great Western hope for maintaining order in the boiling cauldron that is nuclear-armed Pakistan.

What most wags don’t understand is that Pakistan’s 30-year battle for its soul has spawned many of the world’s recent malignancies and conflicts. Those include the Iranian Revolution, the rise of radical Islamism, and the proliferation of al-Qaeda and its various offshoots, including Osama bin Laden himself.

Arguably, it all started nearly 30 years ago with the execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father.

Ten years earlier the world had been a simpler place. The Cold War was simmering between the Soviet bloc and the West. Throughout the world, it was “our SOBs versus their SOBs.” Outside of the U.S. and its allies, the nuances of democracy, human rights, and freedom of the press were just that. Secular post-colonial regimes sprang up all over in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Many countries sought refuge with the Soviets. As for “our countries,” if we did not like the regimes there, we tried to replace them with others more to our liking, often through military intervention: the Philippines and Marcos, Chile and Pinochet, Greece and the Junta Colonels. Supporting repressive clients was the order of the day: Franco in Spain and, very important to this story, the Shah in Iran.

That decade was crucial to the social development of the U.S. Anti-war, anti-establishment, and anti-“military/industrial complex” sentiments, along with race and gender issues, formed the dominant liberal mentality that still permeates the national debate today.

If Henry Kissinger represented the simplistic conservative view of the world and its politics, the equally simplistic liberal view was that we could entice the world to our notions of democracy and civic life if only we would stop supporting people like the Shah, Marcos, and Pinochet. And of course, we should get out of Vietnam and similar conflicts. What we gravely missed is that large swaths of the world, headed by Moslem societies, did not buy into our notions.

Pakistan was really the first. Against the backdrop of the ongoing unrest in Iran, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and shortly thereafter had him hanged. Neither the CIA nor Kissinger liked Bhutto. He was certainly not one of our SOBs, having uttered the famous “We will eat grass” line in reference to the extent to which Pakistan would go in obtaining the nuclear bomb.

But not only was Zia not a Western democrat, he was the first to unleash the pent-up Islamism in a country whose existence, after splitting from India, was based on that very religion. He framed his intervention not in the context of the Cold War, but in bringing Pakistan back to true Islam. It was in Pakistan where the practice of the Islamic faith became one and the same with militant Islamism. Bhutto, to many of his countrymen, was not a good Muslim. Functioning in the cream of Pakistani society, where supporters and opponents were blood cousins, Bhutto was a Westernized dandy in impeccably cut suits. He was in the tradition of Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh, who in the 1950s was deposed thanks to a coup engineered by the CIA.

Zia’s tenure in Pakistan, drawing heavily from tribal sensibilities, created a military and intelligence apparatus that was profoundly Islamist. That apparatus spread to neighboring Afghanistan and eventually influenced the Taliban. There, Islamists and bin Laden never really wanted to play along or be cast in the Cold War. Certainly they did not mind getting military aid from the West in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. For us, at the time, the enemy of our enemy was our friend.

If there is any event that destroyed much of idealistic liberalism in the United States (the other one surely must be Al Gore’s recent anthropogenic global warming debate), it is the takeover of Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978, right at the time of the Bhutto trial in Pakistan.

The replacement for the roundly criticized Shah was not a paragon of Western values, but rather a man intent on returning an evolving modern country to the Middle Ages. This had a devastating impact on Jimmy Carter’s policies and brought Ronald Reagan from the political fringes to the presidency of the United States. It changed America for decades.

The political correctness of today is tested by questioning the difference between Islam and virulent Islamism in Pakistan. We are stuck with Musharraf. A nuclear-armed Pakistan is not something to let fall to Islamists, or to a regime that is vague about the subject. The U.S. must take a very aggressive posture, and Musharraf or his replacement must be forced to clean house. But for starters we need to elect a president here who does not exhibit the amazing ignorance or lack of judgment that some candidates showed after Bhutto’s assassination.

(On a personal note, as a graduate student at Stanford University in 1978, I headed the “Committee to Save Bhutto Now.” When he was in prison, we persuaded the university to offer him a professorship, hoping that Zia would pardon him and let him come to the United States. It did not work.)