A glimpse in to what is in store for the nation…Mr. Zardari is in a mindset where he believes he is an expert on everything…the same illusion the former illegal president had when he totally disregarded the essence of collective leadership…and people are fearing he will bypass the parliament, prime minister, ministers, experts etc.
This is the same scenario where we saw a dictator in last 9 years single handedly destroyed every institution and did whatever came to his mind and whatever suited his personal interests…I hope Mr. Zardari will prove us wrong and will not create a civilian dictatorship after becoming President…
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/world/asia/05zardari.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
**Bhutto Widower With Clouded Past Is Set to Lead **
By JANE PERLEZ
Published: September 4, 2008
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, is set to become president on Saturday, an accidental ascent for a man known more as a wheeler-dealer than a leader. He will start his tenure burdened by a history of corruption allegations that cloud his reputation even as they remain unproved.
Though he has won the reluctant support of the Bush administration, which views him as a willing partner in the campaign against terrorism, Mr. Zardari will assume the presidency with what many consider untested governing skills as a tough Taliban insurgency threatens the very fabric of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state of 165 million people.
It remains to be seen how forcefully he will act against militants in the face of Pakistani public opposition to American pressure. Nor is it clear how much influence he exerts over the still powerful military and the nation’s premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
The editor in chief of the Daily Times, Najam Sethi, once an opponent and now a supporter of Mr. Zardari, said the elevation of Mr. Zardari would suit the Americans. Mr. Zardari, he said, “will learn on the job.” And indeed, Mr. Zardari, 53, has shown canny political skills as he has moved in the last two weeks to outmaneuver his former coalition partner, Nawaz Sharif, who served twice as prime minister.
But with the economy in a downward spiral and foreign exchange reserves perilously low, Mr. Zardari’s reputation for using political perches to benefit himself and his friends has left many here and in Washington worried about how he will restore economic confidence.
There are concerns about the oversight of a $15 billion package of nonmilitary aid proposed by the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, and backed by the Bush administration.
Mr. Zardari declined to be interviewed for this article. Pakistan’s information minister, Sherry Rehman, said it was too “sensitive” for him to talk before the election.
Pakistan has only $6 billion in foreign exchange reserves, disappearing at the rate of close to $2 billion a month to pay for oil and food. Several prominent economists and businessmen said much investor nervousness stemmed from mistrust of Mr. Zardari, who was investment minister in Ms. Bhutto’s government when it was accused of demanding illicit payments in return for deals that exceeded the accepted levels of corruption in Pakistan.
Fiscal Ability Questioned
Two recent decisions by Mr. Zardari showed a disregard for Pakistan’s alarming deficits, they said, speaking anonymously because they did not want to publicly criticize the next president.
**In April, Mr. Zardari told Ishaq Dar, the finance minister at the time and a member of Mr. Sharif’s party, which has since broken with Mr. Zardari, that he wanted the price the government paid farmers for wheat to be raised substantially as a way of rewarding an important constituency in Punjab Province, the nation’s most populous, according to two participants in the discussion with Mr. Zardari. The government would then have to heavily subsidize the cost of wheat to the consumer.
When Mr. Dar asked Mr. Zardari how he thought the government would pay for the subsidy, Mr. Zardari replied, “Print the notes,” according to the two participants, a government official and an associate of Mr. Zardari’s. In an effort to solve the impasse over the subsidy, it was suggested that Mr. Zardari form a committee of experts.
“ ‘I am the expert,’ ” Mr. Zardari said, according to his associate. **
Farahnaz Ispahani, a spokeswoman for Mr. Zardari’s party, denied the account.
The two officials described another episode in May as the budget was being prepared. Mr. Zardari decided to scrap a proposed capital gains tax after a visit from a group of influential stockbrokers from the Karachi stock exchange, they said. The revenue from the capital gains tax, and from an income tax proposal on the rich, would have paid for an income support program for the poorest Pakistanis, they said. More than half of Pakistanis live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.
In Mr. Zardari’s defense, the finance minister, Naveed Qamar, said that political stability would be restored to Pakistan once Mr. Zardari was president, and that the unsettled economy would benefit from the new political order.
Others were not so sure.
“Zardari will wield unprecedented power for a civilian president,” said Maleeha Lodhi, who was appointed as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States by Ms. Bhutto and then by Gen. Pervez Musharraf when he was Pakistan’s leader. “But he may lack authority in view of his checkered and controversial past.”
Indeed, Mr. Zardari, who is expected to be chosen in Saturday’s election by the Parliament and four provisional assemblies, is the unintended beneficiary of sweeping powers accumulated by President Musharraf, including the right to dismiss the army chief of staff and dissolve Parliament.
Mr. Zardari will now become the civilian official Washington relies on as it tries to persuade Pakistan to take a stronger stance against militants who are using the northern tribal areas as a sanctuary to attack American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Despite their reservations, American officials prefer him to Mr. Sharif because they believe that Mr. Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party, more secular than Mr. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N, will be more likely to confront militants.
Mr. Zardari has displayed a sudden willingness to take on the Taliban, saying last week that he would ban them and freeze their assets, a starting point strongly favored by the State Department, though it would have limited practical impact.
“Zardari is a businessman,” said a Western diplomat. “He says to himself: ‘I know I need American support. What do they want? They want this,’ ” meaning a stance against the Taliban.
Little Sway With Military
But as Mr. Zardari moved to the fore, some efforts to please Washington have exposed his uneasy relationship with the military, and Inter-Services Intelligence, the powerful spy agency he accused of assassinating his wife last December.
An effort to control the agency and impress the Bush administration failed in July. Washington has said that the agency is involved in sabotaging American interests by supporting the Taliban in the tribal region. Mr. Zardari and an Interior Ministry official directed that the agency report to the Interior Ministry; the military swiftly ordered that the notice be retracted.
“His first attempt to get control of the army and ISI was a total failure that showed a naïveté about how the army and the ISI work,” said Bruce Riedel, a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration who now advises the Obama campaign on Pakistan.
In five months as head of the governing coalition that collapsed after pushing Mr. Musharraf from power, Mr. Zardari filled important government posts with people he knew from jail and exile. He refused to reinstate the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, whom President Musharraf removed. His opponents charge that Mr. Zardari feared that Mr. Chaudhry might have reversed an amnesty that allowed Mr. Zardari’s corruption cases to be dropped.
Mr. Zardari was in jail from 1990 to 1993 after Ms. Bhutto’s first term and from 1996 to 2004 after her second term. He maintains that the corruption charges, and a murder charge, were politically motivated by forces trying to minimize his influence, and that he refused offers for early release from prison.
In Britain Mr. Zardari faced a civil case brought by the Pakistani government charging that he had paid for a country manor with ill-gotten gains. In order to win a delay in the British courts, Mr. Zardari filed affidavits in early 2006 from two doctors in New York saying he was mentally unable to assist his lawyers.
Mr. Zardari, then living at the Helmsley Carlton apartment block on 61st Street and Madison Avenue, who friends said appeared to be in good spirits, suffered from dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to affidavits first reported by The Financial Times.
Acquittal and Amnesty
Pakistan’s high commissioner in London, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, who was recently appointed by Mr. Zardari and is a longtime friend, said Mr. Zardari was now healthy. Mr. Zardari was one of more than a dozen people accused of a conspiracy in 1996 to kill Ms. Bhutto’s brother, a political opponent of Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto. The high court in Sindh Province, Mr. Zardari’s political base, acquitted him in the murder case in April.
Last week, a Swiss prosecutor dismissed a case in which Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto were found guilty in 2003 on money laundering charges involving illegal commissions they had received from two Swiss companies, Cotecna and Société Générale de Surveillance. The court ordered them to return $12 million to the Pakistani government.
The Pakistani government dropped the charges this year, after Mr. Zardari and Ms. Bhutto had been offered an amnesty on their corruption charges. The Swiss authorities said that they could no longer pursue the case and that they would release $60 million of Mr. Zardari’s funds.
After the announcement in Geneva, Mr. Zardari told a Pakistani journalist, according to an account in the daily newspaper The News, that the original conviction in 2003 was the result of a bribe paid to the magistrate by the Pakistani government.
A report on private banking and money laundering in the United States, done for the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1999, cited allegations that some of Mr. Zardari’s Citibank accounts were used to “disguise $10 million in kickbacks for a gold importing contract in Pakistan.” The report said that Mr. Zardari had accumulated $40 million in Citibank accounts. He denied the charges, and the head of the gold company identified in the report denied he had paid bribes.
**Mr. Zardari’s position as head of state will be a giant leap from the days when he accompanied Ms. Bhutto on her official trips. In his autobiography, a former leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, wrote that he found Mr. Zardari “a likable rogue” who tried to impress with chatter about his real estate and export deals. **
Increasingly worried about his personal security, Mr. Zardari is now living at the prime minister’s house in Islamabad, the residence that he and Ms. Bhutto had designed during her tenure. Out back is the polo field built to indulge his passion for horses.
After the vote on Saturday, he will live in the presidential palace, a white marble edifice in the center of the capital, designed by Edward Durell Stone, the American architect of the Kennedy Center in Washington.
There, behind the tall colonnades and long corridors, according to a close associate, he will have achieved three things he most covets.
As president he will have, according to the Constitution, immunity from prosecution. He will enjoy top-notch security. And he will be provided with the rites of protocol that will allow him to appear on the world stage as a leader in his own right, and not just as the spouse of one.
