Word: zardari
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...taken personal responsibility for "distributing money to the alliance against Benazir Bhutto" during the 1993 election. "After seeing the period that she had ruled, I thought it would be better if the lady did not come to power," he said. On Saturday, Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, welcomed the move to put the ISI under civilian control as an important "step towards civilian rule...
...visiting the U.S. this week. He came to the role via tragedy, elevated from the vacuum created by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister to whom he had long been loyal. Despite Gilani's title, however, it is Bhutto's widower, the controversial Asif Ali Zardari, who is the true power behind Bhutto's People's Party and who has made the bulk of the decisions from his heavily guarded home in a leafy Islamabad neighborhood. Zardari is not shy about his influence, using words like "my government" and referring to himself as a "father...
...seen as too weak to act. Indeed, he seems to have only nominal control of the powerful ISI, Pakistan's security and intelligence apparatus, which has a reputation for acting on its own; and he is seen as ceding many prerogatives of the Prime Minister's office to Zardari and to Rehman Malik, Bhutto's security chief who is now, in effect, Pakistan's Minister of the Interior. Says political analyst Talat Masood: "The present government is not in a position to tackle the serious concerns facing this country. It has hardly started to clarify its own position on extremism...
...costs. The parliamentary coalition that eclipsed the former military leader, Pervez Musharraf, promised to bring peace and progress. Instead, the new leaders are preoccupied with wrangling over who is in charge. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, a stalwart of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), bows to Asif Zardari, Bhutto's widower, who is co-chair of the party but does not hold government office. The government is an unwieldy coalition between bitter enemies: the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-N, led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif; the two parties traded power three times in eight years...
...Justice. But the issue may be more than simply technical: given Musharraf's opposition to the return of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as head of the judiciary - which would raise the prospect of Musharraf's ouster on legal grounds - a restoration of the judges could provoke a backlash. Zardari's party is more willing than Sharif is to work with Musharraf, who still enjoys considerable support within the military and from the U.S. (which sees him as a reliable ally in the war on terror). Zardari, moreover, may have his own problems with Chaudhry: the judge last October ruled...