As a potential saviour of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was an uncomfortable candidate: dogged by corruption charges that might have resurfaced with new seriousness in Swiss courts in the new year and by a record of calamitous ineffectiveness during her two terms as Prime Minister.

Britain and the United States were not wrong to back her as their preference for the next prime minister, working in tandem with President Musharraf.

She was the best of an unattractive lineup; Pakistan has never been blessed in its politicians, who represent the worst of its society – feudal and fonder of patronage than principle. Western-educated and female, Ms Bhutto appeared to stand for the liberal values that the West wants to encourage in Pakistan.

But Britain and the US may have been too pragmatic by half in putting such weight on so imperfect a figure, and in hoping that her strengths would outweigh her enormous weaknesses: grandiosity, a sense of destiny that she interpreted as licence to do what she wanted and an indifference to the distinction between the interests of Pakistan and her own. They made light of the unpredictability of her policies; in office, she let public spending and debt rise to unmanageable proportions, and she was ambivalent towards the US and India.

Q&A: the murder of Benazir Bhutto

Times South Asia Correspondent asks who had most to gain from killing the Pakistan People's Party leader

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Much of the coverage of her assassination has been reverential and she is rightly credited with enormous courage: she knew the risks but faced them anyway. Even at the start of her political career she had gone almost straight from Radcliffe (where photographs show her sitting barefoot on a bedspread under hippyish posters, indistinguishable from her contemporaries) to a decade of solitary confinement, house arrest and exile.

But that bravery came with, it seemed to me, a casualness about the risk to those near to her. I travelled with her on her aircraft on her return to Karachi in October and was repelled by her assumption that her devoted supporters should be subject to the same risks as her. “Everyone there knew he might die, but came for the sake of democracy,” she said after the blast that killed 140. In that airy phrase, she was disingenuous about the motives of the crowd of hundreds of thousands, many extremely poor. Most had been bussed in from rural villages and Karachi slums by local party bigwigs who were rewarded for the turnout. The morning after the blast, in the hospital, widows, daughters and sisters tried to identify their relatives among the half-corpses. The women said that they were terrified about who would support their families now and expressed little confidence that the party would fill the gap.

She returned to Pakistan only after striking a power-sharing deal with Mr Musharraf that quashed corruption charges against her and her husband. She had always dismissed as politically motivated the charges in Pakistan and Switzerland, and separate inquiries in Britain and Spain. But she chose not to contest them in Pakistan, preferring exile for eight years.

In London, in the weeks before her return, she confided to an Arab woman, who was a journalist and friend, that she was afraid of imprisonment again and would not return until she had secured a promise from Mr Musharraf not to arrest her.

A necessary and practical step, you might say, nothing to do with lack of courage, and her return to politics would have got nowhere without such an arrangement. But the pact with Mr Musharraf and the perception of her closeness to the US damaged her support savagely. Her need to show her independence from both could have made her an unreliable partner for the West.

The amnesty – although still under challenge in the Supreme Court of Pakistan – led Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau to drop its inquiry, on which it says it has spent millions of dollars, into questions of how she and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, funded the purchase of an estate to the south of London and in Normandy, as well as questions about her involvement, through Spanish companies, in the Iraqi Oil-for-Food programme.

But proceedings were still continuing in Swiss courts, where new hearings were possible within weeks, although the amnesty in Pakistan injected new uncertainty.

The Swiss inquiries had been hanging over Ms Bhutto since the late 1990s, shortly after she left office. In August 2003 she and her husband were convicted in absentia in Swiss courts of money laundering and receiving kickbacks from two Swiss companies that were handling Customs inspections for exports to Pakistan during the two periods that Ms Bhutto was Prime Minister. Ms Bhutto and her husband were ordered to pay the Pakistani state $12 million (£6.06 million) and to return a necklace valued at $188,000. Ms Bhutto and Mr Zardari have consistently denied all charges and, on appeal, the charges were automatically quashed, but more serious charges of money laundering were raised against the couple in July 2004 by Vincent Fournier, the investigating magistrate. Those are still under consideration; the funds found in Swiss accounts in 1998, to which the couple denied any link, were frozen at the request of Pakistan.

Mr Fournier confirmed last month that his office had completed its investigation and was passing the case on to the prosecutor. He also acknowledged sardonically the predicament in which the amnesty had put the courts. “It is surprising to note that for ten years Pakistan has constantly pushed us to see that justice is done. And now, in the light of a change of political allegiance, Bhutto benefits from an amnesty,” he said.

Yesterday Alec Reymond, the lawyer for Ms Bhutto in Geneva, said that proceedings against her would be dropped because of her death, although those against her husband might continue. Before her death, he had said that an appeal she had filed could lead to hearings in the new year.

Mr Musharraf and his ministers had put out ambiguous signals this autumn about whether they wanted the investigation to proceed. Some speculated that the prosecution would give Mr Musharraf what he most wanted: the support of Ms Bhutto’s party without the encumbrance of its leader. Her death has given him just that, although in turmoil from which he will find it hard to benefit. But even though Pakistan is rightly in shock, it is hard to imagine that a Bhutto-Musharraf partnership offered a reliable path to a modern and prosperous future.

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