Word: zia
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...pursuit of U.S. interests not in Pakistan but in neighboring countries - to balance Soviet influence in India or to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the U.S. has rarely kept its eye on the ball. In the 1980s, Washington aided the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, using Pakistan as a fulcrum to help pry the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. The policy succeeded - but when victory was assured, the U.S. lost interest, while thousands of young Muslim extremists who had been armed to combat the communists turned their weapons against Pakistan and the U.S. With...
...However, in the final analysis, her career was an almost tawdry cycle of exile, house arrest, ascent into power and dismissal, much sound and fury and signifying little. Jailed and then exiled after her father's fall, Bhutto returned to campaign for office in 1986 after Zia's military government gave in to international pressure to slowly restore democracy. (Despite his dictatorship, Zia was a key ally of the West, supporting the Mujaheddin against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.) In a scene reminiscent of her second coming in October 2007, she was greeted in April 1986 by hundreds of thousands...
...child of privilege, and took the mantle of power from her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the fiery and magnetic founder of the Pakistan People's Party, who himself would become a martyr for democracy when he was executed in 1979 by the military dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq. She inherited her bearing and physical presence from her mother Nusrat Ispahan, from a distinguished Kurdish family from Iran. Educated at Radcliffe and Harvard, she would also study law at Oxford. Her family and close Western friends knew her as "Pinky...
...Zia's death in a plane crash in August 1988 helped to further loosen the military strictures around the country, and Bhutto became Prime Minister by December of that year. As a ruler, Bhutto got few favorable reviews in Pakistan. Her government passed no legislation except a budget during its first 14 months in power. Much of its energy was squandered feuding with the opposition. Among the first acts of Bhutto's party after coming to power was a campaign to bribe and threaten legislators in Punjab. The goal: to overthrow Bhutto's nemesis, Mian Nawaz Sharif, Punjab's chief...
...mistresses, a Houston doyenne named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and a scuzzy, belligerent, occasionally brilliant CIA agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Charlie also plays the Israelis and Egyptians against each other, to get them to work together. He tries working his seductive powers on Pakistan's President Zia (Om Puri). In Congress he trades votes and cashes in favors. Essentially, he treats the Afghan war as one big earmark. He makes American generosity seem the coolest game in town - the Peace Corps reimagined as summer camp...