Word: zardari
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Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari completed his first state trip to Beijing on Oct. 17, signing a raft of new agreements with a nation he had hailed in Islamabad four days earlier as "the future of the world." China and Pakistan tied up at least 11 deals on trade and economic cooperation, infrastructure projects, agriculture, mining rights and telecommunications; they now aim to double bilateral trade, which currently stands at around $7 billion...
...countries have a long-standing, all-weather relationship, forged over decades of mutual animosity toward neighboring India, with whom they separately have fought wars. But Zardari's visit comes at a pivotal moment. His fledgling democracy is not only threatened by terrorism, but is also teetering toward bankruptcy. Spiraling inflation, now at 25%, has eaten into Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves at a rate of $1 billion a month and the country risks defaulting on debt repayment loans. These fiscal headaches have been compounded by a flare-up in tensions with its most vital ally, the U.S., which recently launched...
...What They're Watching in Pakistan: Footage of the Sept. 24 meeting between President Asif Ali Zardari and U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin (in which Zardari called Palin "gorgeous" and said he'd like to hug her) has been must-see TV on local networks and has drawn tens of thousands of viewers on YouTube. While some laughed off Zardari's behavior--one station ran the clip with a romantic Urdu ballad sound track--many called it unbecoming of a head of state. One mosque leader issued a fatwa against him, calling his gushing un-Islamic...
...pressure. The changes came just weeks after Richard Boucher, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, publicly demanded that reform of the ISI be carried out. They also followed last weekend's secret meeting between Pakistan's recently elected President, Asif Ali Zardari, and CIA head Michael Hayden about what the U.S. intelligence agency called the "double game played by Pakistan's spy agency." While in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, Zardari told Roger Cohen of the New York Times, "The ISI will be handled; that is our problem...
...There's nothing inherently incorrect about that answer: Zardari, whose wife Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by al-Qaeda, isn't in league with Osama bin Laden, and the vast majority of Pakistanis oppose terrorism. The trouble is that the same could be said of nearly every country in the world. But anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the past few months knows that Pakistan is now home to al-Qaeda's top leaders and serves as the staging ground for the dramatic increase in suicide bombings in Afghanistan - and that elements of its security services are indisputably aiding...