Asif Ali Zardari becomes president with Pakistan-US relations at their lowest point in seven years, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad On 6 September Pakistani lawmakers voted Asif Ali Zardari their president under a black, crackling sky. At one point a tremor shook Islamabad's whitewashed National Assembly. Politicians and journalists fled from under the portico, as though fearful of retribution. The storm had little effect on Zardari's victory. He won 482 out of 702 votes cast, outstripping his nearest challenger by 228 ballots. But the turmoil of the heavens seemed the right backdrop to the sense of foreboding accompanying Pakistan's latest "transition to democracy". Even the victory parades of Zardari's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) were muted. They too seemed to want out before the rain came. Zardari has come a long way since his wife -- PPP leader Benazir Bhutto -- was murdered last year. Once synonymous with venality (his sobriquet is "Mister Ten Percent" for kickbacks he allegedly received while a minister) he now occupies Pakistan's most powerful civilian position, able to dismiss governments and appoint army chiefs. It is some makeover. And it's been accomplished with skill, luck and ruthlessness. Zardari used his wife's death to vault himself into a position of unassailable power within the PPP. Following its victory in the February parliamentary elections, he marshalled a coalition government at home and cultivated ties with Washington abroad. Both came together to oust the former president Pervez Musharraf in August. Three weeks later Zardari sidled into the vacant throne. There is only one thorn in the crown: the Pakistan Muslim League of former premier Nawaz Sharif (PML-N), which left the coalition last month after Zardari failed to honour election promises to reinstate judges sacked by Musharraf. The presidential poll confirmed the PML-N as the strongest party in the Punjab, Pakistan's richest and most populous province. Zardari says he will deal with opponents with dignity. The fear is he will use his presidential powers to bring the Punjab to heel. The auguries are not good. No sooner had Sharif left the coalition that the government's politicised National Accountability Bureau was said to be reopening corruption cases against him. The government denied any vendetta, but many saw it as a throwback to the days when the PPP and PML-N fought each other through the courts rather than in the assemblies. Strife between the province and centre is the last thing Pakistan needs. Even as lawmakers were casting their ballots a suicide car bomber ripped through a police checkpoint outside Peshawar. Thirty-six people were killed, including several buried alive beneath the rubble of a market. Locals cursed the bomber and pelted the police with stones, outraged that the picket had been put in a built-up area. It was a reminder -- if reminder were needed -- of an Islamist insurgency that has killed 3,000 Pakistanis in the last year, including, of course, Bhutto. It also exposed the incoherence of government policy. Since coming to power in March, the PPP coalition has conducted dialogue with the Taliban, launched military operations that have so far left 300,000 people displaced and, for the month of Ramadan, declared a ceasefire. "We don't know what Zardari's policy is vis-à-vis the militants. Does he have one?" asked Nisar Memon, an opposition Senator outside the National Assembly on 6 September. The same could be said about relations with Washington. In the last week there have been at least three United States military strikes inside Pakistan from Afghanistan. The most brazen was a commando raid in south Waziristan on 3 September that left 15 people dead, including women and children. None, apparently, were Taliban or Al-Qaeda fugitives. But the most telling was a missile strike on a compound in north Waziristan on 9 September, near the Afghan border. Nine people were killed, say Pakistani intelligence officials. The compound belongs to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran commander from the US-backed war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan who, in the 1990s, joined up with the Taliban. Haqqani has long had close ties with the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's premier intelligence outfit, and earlier with the CIA. It was under the ISI's protection that he and his son Sirajuddin, another Taliban commander, moved back and forth to Afghanistan and ran camps out of Waziristan. Washington has had it with such liaison. In July it presented Pakistan premier Youssef Raza Gilani with evidence of the ISI and Haqqani's role in an attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on 7 July. Sixty were killed in the worst bombing in the Afghan capital. American and NATO commanders also say Pakistan's on-again, off-again military campaigns are the main reason for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda's increased infiltration into Afghanistan and the rise in NATO casualties. The motor for American blitz on Pakistan is clear, say generals. It heralds a get-tough policy where US forces will go after Taliban and Al-Qaeda's "safe havens" inside Pakistan without coordination with the Pakistan army and regardless of the political cost to the government. The expectation is there will be a spike in such strikes in the run up to the US presidential election in November, as the Bush administration makes one last lunge for the scalp of a bin Laden, Zawahri or Mullah Omar. It will be a tough baptism for Zardari. Not only has he used his contacts in the US government to climb his way to power. He has pledged to "stand with the United States, Britain, Spain and others who have been attacked" because "the war... is our war". His problem is that 70 per cent of his people don't think it's "their war". They say it's "America's war" and blame it for the violence in Pakistan. The PPP cannot ignore such sentiment, even if Zardari is ready to. The result is a government that pulls like a tug in a storm. On 6 September -- even as the lawmakers were gathering outside the National Assembly -- news came that Pakistan had suspended supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan. Defence Minister Ahmed Mokhtar said this was in "protest at attacks into Pakistan territory by international forces deployed in Afghanistan". Within hours Pakistan's de facto Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the suspension was due to "security concerns". Supplies were resumed that night. (see p.12)
