BENAZIR Bhutto was my friend. Thirty years ago we met amid turmoil and tragedy.
She, the brave and devoted daughter battling to save her father from the gallows of Pakistan's military rulers.
Me, "a special friend with whom we shared so much through those times of tragedy and triumph", as she wrote in my copy of her biography.
I saw her in Karachi in October, the morning after she survived the first assassination attempt as she returned home from exile.
She called out to me at a press conference: "Bruce, we meet in good times and in bad."
"True," I said, recalling the horror of the previous evening when more than 150 people were killed and many more wounded in the attempt to murder her.
"But I'm not sure whether these are good times or bad. For God's sake, be careful. They're out to get you."
She replied: "We're going to fight this election and win. We're going to restore democracy to the country. Nothing's going to stop us."
A couple of Sundays ago, we spoke again. Pinky, the nickname her friends used, called me in my hotel room in Islamabad. She offered the usual rhetoric about the election, about the military regime, about Pervez Musharraf, about whether to boycott the poll.
But in what was to be my last conversation with her, she showed, again, her other side -- the deep concern for family and friends, even as she doggedly sought a third term as prime minister.
We spoke at length about her mother, Begum Nusrat Bhutto, a glamorous politician now stricken with Alzheimer's disease and living in Dubai with Benazir's husband, Asif Zardari, and the couple's three children.
Before Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged at Rawalpindi central jail in 1979, close to where his daughter died, Begum Nusrat and Benazir led the fight to save him.
When they were not incarcerated by the then military dictator General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, and even when they were, they would work tirelessly to fight the legal and diplomatic battle to stop his execution. Night after night we'd meet clandestinely to hear of the latest manoeuvres among the judges of the Supreme Court hearing the Bhutto case.
She was a girl in her 20s desperately seeking even fleeting relief from her father's fate. The military thugs who killed him refused to allow her to embrace him before he was hanged.
"How could they be so cruel? How could they do this?" she said.
In that single event -- the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto -- lies the genesis of all the potentially cataclysmic events that confront Pakistan following Benazir's assassination.
The military killed her father; and now many will blame her death on circumstances created by the military and its reluctance to give up power.
For her friends, it is a tragedy -- a tragedy for Pakistan and a tragedy for a family that seemed to have everything but now has nothing. Benazir and her father are gone. Her brother Murtaza was killed outside the family home in Karachi. Her other beloved brother, Shahnawaz, died in mysterious circumstances.
Like all politicians, Benazir had detractors -- even within her Pakistan People's Party.
Over the years she'd changed. To many who had long known her, she'd become remote, more calculating, too reliant on political neophytes.
In our last conversation on that Sunday morning in Islamabad, I taxed her about this. "People can say what they like," she replied, "but the one thing they can never accuse me of is failing to show courage when it was needed, and to be unrelenting inthe fight for democracy in Pakistan."
That fight took the life of this most extraordinary woman. She could have done so much to save a country that is the linchpin in the fight against terrorism.
I mourn the loss of my dear friend Pinky. And I fear for the future of Pakistan.
