Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928-1979), Pakistan's president and then prime minister, mobilized his country's first mass-based political party around a socialist ideology and highly independent foreign policy.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was born on January 5, 1928, in Larkana, a small town in the province of Sind. Although he came from a major landowning family in Larkana, he was brought up in cosmopolitan Bombay, away from the feudal environment of his ancestral home. After completing his high school education in Bombay, he proceeded to the University of California at Berkeley from which he graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. At Berkeley he became interested in socialism and delivered several lectures on the feasibility of socialism in Islamic countries--a theme which would dominate his party's manifesto 20 years later. Bhutto continued his education at Oxford, where he studied law.

Bhutto advocated a nonaligned foreign policy for Pakistan and opposed...