Benazir Bhutto Pictures
Article "Don Zardari" From one end of the country to the other, Pakistan is threatened by unrest and terrorism. Meet the longtime jailbird tasked with keeping it together - Nicholas Schmidle, National Post Published: Wednesday, March 04, 2009
BACKGROUND ON ASIF ALI ZARDARI AS BRIDEGROOM/HUSBANDLast fall, during Asif Ali Zardari's first foreign trip as head of state, the Pakistani President met with Sarah Palin in New York City.
Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and oft-described playboy, looked delighted as he greeted--and then charmed-- the vice-presidential candidate. He called Palin "gorgeous" and then added, "Now I know why the whole of America is crazy about you." Palin blushed. When a handler asked Zardari and the Alaskan Governor to continue shaking hands, Zardari quipped, "If he's insisting, I might hug."
Zardari's comment created a stir back home. Stories about the incident splashed across the front pages of Pakistani newspapers. The imam of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, the site of a pro-Taliban rebellion in the summer of 2007, issued a fatwa against Zardari, claiming that his behaviour was un-Islamic and inappropriate for the leader of a Muslim state.
Zardari's clumsiness presents a serious problem, not only for his country but for the United States. Since 2001, Washington's approach to Islamabad has been less a matter of international relations than personal diplomacy, focused narrowly on the country's head of state. This is partly a matter of necessity: Pakistan lacks the civil institutions and governmental continuity that make deeper relationships possible. And, as Bush officials geared up for war in Afghanistan, they cherished their newfound, one-call-can-do-it-all ally, Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf promised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the Afghan border and showed that he was trying to normalize relations with India to boot.
But by late-2006 the Taliban was stronger than ever and al-Qaeda had reconstituted itself inside Pakistani territory, Washington began looking for someone new. The pro-American Bhutto seemed just the person, despite her previous, less-than-successful turns as prime minister. But those plans crumbled when Bhutto was assassinated in December, 2007. Then Musharraf resigned last summer, effectively leaving Zardari, at least in the eyes of many American officials, as the last, best hope for the United States.
Spent 8 years of the 11 years in Jail
It's an enormous responsibility and one that few expected Zardari ever to assume -- not least because he had spent eight of the last 11 years in jail. He had been charged with corruption, money-laundering, murdering his brother-in-law and evading taxes. Once, he allegedly attached a bomb to a businessman's leg and ordered him to withdraw his money from the bank. Zardari has often behaved more like a don than a democrat.
That will matter little to the United States if he proves to be a capable leader. But it's worth considering just how many U. S. interests are at stake in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed, Talibaninfested, economically desperate nation of 170 million people. Washington urgently needs Islamabad's help in fighting al-Qaeda and restoring stability to Afghanistan. And, as questions grow about Pakistan's complicity in November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the United States craves a leader who can prevent full-scale war with India. Accomplishing all this would tax even the most gifted politician. Is the man who flirted with Sarah Palin up to the task?
1980s
In the mid-1980s, Benazir Bhutto, who had taken over the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) between her father's overthrow (in 1977) and hanging (in 1979), asked her mother to find her a suitable husband.
Unmarried women in Pakistan attracted scandal, and Bhutto needed to be able to meet with male party workers at night without creating a controversy. Meanwhile, Zardari's parents had been shopping around Asif.
While the Bhuttos represented a political dynasty and were among the biggest landholders in Sindh, the Zardaris were, in the words of The Guardian, "looked down on as Johnny-come-latelies." But Bhutto was ultimately willing to overlook the social stigma of "marrying down." She was reportedly attracted to Zardari's sense of humour and open-mindedness. The two married on Dec. 18, 1987.
Benazir Bhutto Pictures
Bride - December 18, 1987
I asked Zardari if he ever felt that Bhutto was out of his league. "I imagined myself as a knight in white armour," Zardari said. (He habitually muddles cliches.) "I don't think I fathomed what she was until I married her. I just couldn't grasp the ... giganticness of her personality," he added. "There is a saying in my language: 'The camel only finds out that there is something taller than him when he comes beneath a mountain.'"
Career Woman
In the ensuing years, Zardari seemed to settle into his role as Bhutto's number two. He stabled his horses at the prime minister's house and spent his time doing business, bolstering his unctuousness with her political influence.
Shaheen Sehbai, a reporter who covered the parliament during those years and who is now an editor of the English-language newspaper The News, remembers Zardari as someone who could be "warm and dapper" in public, and a "very ruthless Mafioso type" in private.
Rumours of Zardari's glad-handing and arm-twisting swirled around the parliament soon after Bhutto first took power in 1988, according to Sehbai: "We used to hear all the time that Zardari was on the take."
1990
In August, 1990, Bhutto's government was dismissed on charges of corruption and abuse of power, and Zardari was thrown into jail.
1993
He stayed there until 1993, when Bhutto returned to power, bailed out her husband and named him minister of the environment and, later, minister of investment.
1996
In seesaw fashion, Bhutto's government was again dismissed in November, 1996, on corruption allegations, and
1998
Zardari was, once again, put in prison. In 1998, Bhutto went into exile in Dubai, facing the threat of her own incarceration.
Zardari, meanwhile, languished in Karachi Central Prison, where he was tortured--beaten with a rifle butt and slashed with shards of glass.
2009
Today, he has a sickle-shaped scar on his tongue and a scar across his neck. "This is my jugular vein," Zardari said to me, pulling down the collar of his shirt. "They cut it open and said, 'We are going to kill you.'"
I asked him what kind of information his torturers hoped to extract. "Basically, they were trying to break me. They had tried everything [to defame Bhutto] but it hadn't worked," he said.
His jailers offered to let him go if he could guarantee that Bhutto wouldn't return to Pakistan, a proposition he refused. Said Zardari, "They simply didn't want us to be the leaders of the PPP."
2004
In late 2004, Zardari was finally released from jail. He flew to the United States to seek medical care for diabetes and back and heart trouble, conditions exacerbated by the torture.
2007
In 2007, 18 years after their first trip, Zardari and Bhutto were back in Washington, courting the next generation of Bushes. Though George W. Bush's administration strongly backed Musharraf, political instability and the growing pro-Taliban insurgency in Pakistan won Bhutto receptive audiences.
Armed with lobbyists, she tirelessly ran the think-tank circuit and cultivated officials, arguing that a power-sharing arrangement between her and Musharraf would offer the best hope for quelling the country's problems.
Zardari and Bhutto eventually returned to Pakistan in October, 2007, after the government waived their outstanding corruption cases.
The night Bhutto arrived, after eight years in exile, suicide bombers attacked her procession, killing more than 140 people. Bhutto narrowly escaped.
Just two months later and only a week after her 20th wedding anniversary, terrorists targeted Bhutto again, this time successfully. Pakistan burned for days.
The worst rioting occurred in Bhutto and Zardari's home province of Sindh. When Bhutto's family and supporters buried her, Sindhis chanted, "We don't need Pakistan!We don't need Pakistan!"
Soon after, the PPP produced Bhutto's handwritten will at a press conference. In it, she had written: "I would like my husband Asif Ali Zardari to lead you in the interim period until you and he decide what is best. I say this because he is a man of courage and honour. He spent 11-and-a-half years in prison without bending despite torture. He has the political stature to keep our party united."
Zardari had always believed that he could flourish in a larger role, even while he kept up the appearance of being content at Bhutto's side.
Like Bhutto, who watched and learned from her father before she assumed power, Zardari spent years watching and learning from his wife. His style, however, couldn't be more different than Bhutto's.
Whereas she relied on intellect and charisma, Zardari relies on street smarts and cunning.
But sometimes Zardari's charm hasn't been enough, and his penchant for backroom dealings has shown a darker side, too. He doesn't handle dissent well.
1996
His political opponents and even some within the Bhutto family accuse him of murdering Benazir's brother in September, 1996, to remove potential rivals within the PPP. And, shortly after the PPP's recent return to power, he sought to stifle criticism in the press by offering prominent journalists lucrative jobs in government.
Beyond co-opting the media, Zardari has surrounded himself with jailhouse pals, business partners and former exiles. Several of Zardari's fellow inmates now occupy cabinet-level posts in his government.
Weeks after Zardari took power, and just hours after he addressed parliament for the first time, terrorists bombed the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing more than 50 people; and, in November, gunmen based in Pakistan went on a rampage in Mumbai, bringing India and Pakistan to the brink of war.
The war against Islamic militants has gone so badly, in fact, that Zardari's government recently relented to Taliban demands and agreed to the imposition of shariah law in the Swat Valley.
When I visited Zardari in his office, I tried to elicit his master strategy for managing the multiple crises unfurling around him. "What comes next?" I asked.
"I was sitting in prison, looking at the poverty, looking at the problems of the nation, and thinking, 'How are we going to bring the country out of this mess?'" he replied. He told me that he considered the problems he inherited even worse than conventionally portrayed. "I know that the figures are all wrong," he said.
Then, speaking with the conviction of a man who felt that ruling Pakistan had always been his destiny, he said, "You see, I know where the state is going."
The rest of us, apparently, must wait to find out. - Nicholas Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation. His first book, To Live Or Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years In Pakistan, will be published in May.
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