asif ali zardari

Shah Mahmood Qureshi says his government has forged an “unprecedented national consensus” to defend a “stable, democratic country where terrorism and extremist ideologies have little or no support.”

After months of negotiations over the summer between the House, the Senate and the Obama administration, the Senate has passed a bill to triple non-military aid to Pakistan. The bill, upping civilian foreign aid to the Pakistanis to $7.5 billion over five years, was hailed by its Senate authors, John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar [...]

As long as we’re talking about the future composition of the Afghan government, a reliable source informs me that the next round of the U.S./Pakistani/Afghan governmental talks is scheduled for October. More as it develops, as I’m not yet sure whether the meeting will be in Washington again.

At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke repeatedly referred to a recent opinion poll of Pakistanis conducted by the International Republican Institute. So what’s it say?
Conducted between March 7 and 30, it’s a grim one from an American perspective. More Pakistanis believe the United States was behind last year’s Mumbai terrorist [...]

This was a noteworthy point from President Obama in his joint appearance at the White House with Presidents Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday:
The United States has made a lasting commitment to defeat al-Qaeda, but also to support the democratically-elected sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. That commitment will not waver and [...]

One thing that you didn’t get from Ambassador Richard Holbrooke in yesterday’s hearing on Pakistan: a sense of precisely what accountability measures the Obama administration finds too “inflexible” in the House’s Pakistan funding bill. Nor did he say what the administration’s metrics — I’m told the word “benchmarks” are too reminiscent of the Iraq debate [...]

Whatever you do, don’t miss The New York Times’ epic interview with a Pakistani Taliban tactician about what has become “a seamless conflict” on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The tactician is based out of Wana, in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but spends much of his time focused on Afghanistan. His superiors, for [...]

As the Zardari government in Pakistan has an increasingly precarious hold on power, one option for the Obama administration is to turn to Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani to foment a coup, as an ex-intel official tells Laura Rozen:
“Look at [Secretary of State Hilary Clinton]’s comments over the  last week to the effect that the Zardari government [...]

Not necessarily from the Taliban, but from a military coup responding to the threat the Taliban poses to the viability of Pakistan. Fox News reports that Gen. David Petraeus is telling people privately that the next two weeks (!) are a test of the Zardari government’s survivability. Anonymous sources allegedly familiar with Petraeus’ talks with [...]

I don’t believe it either, but, via Bill Roggio, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari says Pakistani intelligence believe it to be so but don’t have any, like, evidence.
Quoth Bill: “If you can’t trust the ISI to give you accurate information on al Qaeda and the Taliban, who can you trust?”
I note it here for the [...]