RSS Feed for This PostCurrent Article

Mr. 20% got his loot

By pm317 on May 16, 2009 at 11:35 AM in Current Affairs, Pakistan, Taliban

If you find the title puzzling, I am referring to this from Steve Clemons post republished at NQ here:

One other interesting tidbit here in Qatar is that many Arabs who have moved in and around Pakistan believe that President Zardari is no longer “Mr 10%.”

They call him “Mr. 20%.”

It is difficult to tell who is playing what game when it comes to Pakistan but they get their billions anyway making fools out of Americans yet again. Now to hear of a double game being played by Zardari as told by his late wife’s niece, Fatima Butto, The Taliban bogeyman, How Pakistan’s president is scamming the West.:

President Asif Ali Zardari, less than a year into his reign, has managed to engage Pakistan’s armed forces, the seventh largest army in the world, in a guerrilla war with the newly formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, our very own Taliban, in the North West Frontier Province. Rumors of Talibanization air daily on Pakistani television, radio and print media: The barbarians are at the gate, we are told, and warned that if there was a time to rally around the nation’s oleaginous president, a man known locally as “President Ghadari” or traitor in Urdu, this is it. However, the time for scaremongering has past — it is precisely President Zardari’s politically expedient use of national hysteria that has seen American drones welcomed over Pakistan’s airspace and has birthed a war that this government cannot win.

[snip]

In 2008, months after taking power in a hastily organized parliamentary election, Zardari drew upon Pakistan’s overwhelmingly anti-American sentiment and empowered the nascent domestic Taliban, which entered prominence roughly at the same time that the president did, by capitulating to their demands for sharia law in the Swat Valley (the very same region that the government is now, one month later, bombarding with American assistance).

With one hand, Zardari gave the militants what they wanted — no vote or referendum was held — and Taliban law was imposed on the Swat Valley by force. With the other, Zardari pointed a crooked finger at the rise of fundamentalism and capitalized on a golden opportunity to bring the nation’s elite back into the government’s obsequiously pro-American fold.

[snip]

Zardari’s double game may have brought him billions more in American aid and assistance — U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke being the president’s loudest champion in Washington, warning Congress that if billions of dollars are not delivered immediately to Pakistan the war on terror will be in mortal danger — but it has lost him Pakistan.

Read the article here.