It's an old story for Benazir Bhutto. House arrest. Detention. Imprisonment. Threat of detention. Exile, internal or external. The once and future prime minister of Pakistan (like her late father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed on dubious charges in 1979 after serving as Pakistan's prime minister from 1973 to 1977) has redefined the meaning of shuttle diplomacy in her 54 years: from high glamor to the highest levers of power to disgrace and humiliation to Faustian deals she regrets no sooner after making them, whether it's with the Pakistani military or, her latest, with Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's prodigiously insecure dictator.

Bhutto, flirting with Musharraf's severely weakened power base, thought she could broker a deal for herself for the prime ministership, ending her latest exile (in Dubai, this time). She got the deal, only to return home to an assassination attempt, then to Musharraf's "second coup" as he suspended the Constitution and declared what looks awfully like martial law. Bhutto metamorphosed, as she so often has, into Pakistan's voice of freedom and democracy, only to earn herself more house arrests and the promise, on Monday, of a week-long detention if she went ahead with plans to march a-la-Selma (Benazir wants to lead her flock from Lahore to Islamabad, 131-mile distant as the crow flies, although nothing, in Pakistan, flies as the crow).

Musharraf's junta is claiming to be protecting Bhutto, of course. It's for her own good, the junta claims. Don't want her assassinated by militants. The general protecting the damsel, yes? What fabulous gall. But so it goes when a general's labyrinths of power have become such that he can no longer tell the difference between Machiavellism and mendacity.

Does that make Benazir Bhutto a hero--the Benazir who spent her jeans-clad years at Harvard and Oxford never hesitating to whistle the latest tunes of feminism or protest the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Not exactly. Bhutto's past is too clattered by the noisome dust of corruption and misrule to give her a clean bill of heroism. But look at Pakistan's other great, and perhaps greatest, hero: none other than Abdul Qadeer Khan, better known by his isotopian initials A.Q.Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's, and Islam's, atomic bomb. No man more venal, if not lethal, has ever walked the Subcontinent, yet he has the status of an Einstein wrapped in the glamor of a Bono. Pakistanis like their heroes to radiate more than textbook propriety.

In that sense, Benazir Bhutto fits right in. If you're scoring at home, here's a profile of Bhutto with all her ups, downs and dashes through half of Pakistan's young history.

See also:

• Profile: Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf
• Pakistan: Country Profile
• Karachi: Portrait in Pictures