ASIF Ali Zardari, the widower of the murdered opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, sits at the pinnacle of Pakistani politics. It is a startling comeback for a man who, though never convicted in Pakistan, spent 11 years in jail on corruption and murder charges as one of the country's most ostracised figures.
The election victory last month of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, which he now leads, has left Zardari, 51, Pakistan's kingmaker. He came closer than ever to official rehabilitation last week when a court dropped the last of many corruption cases
against him.
Zardari's most pressing concern is who to name prime minister, a decision he is expected to make any day.
With parliament due to convene tomorrow, the widower is poised to form a coalition government with the party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. The PPP won the most seats in the election, routing Musharraf's supporters and triggering calls for the president to step down. Sharif's party came in second.
Zardari's sudden revival is a reminder of how Pakistan has veered between military rule and civilian governments that have been dogged by allegations of corruption, and how those cases can be waged – or wiped away – depending on the political winds.
The dismissal of the corruption cases was a key demand by Bhutto as she negotiated her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile under a US-backed power-sharing deal intended to preserve President Pervez Musharraf.
But it is Zardari who has become the accidental beneficiary of that plan, which is in shreds. He and Sharif have said they would seek to curb what remains of the president's already diminished powers. The pair pledged to bring an end to the Musharraf era.
Zardari said the cases against him were politically driven. The accord agreed to by Musharraf, known as the National Reconciliation Order, and on which the court acted, exonerated him, he said.
"Before she laid down her life she made sure that the world acknowledged, everybody acknowledged, that they were politically motivated cases," Zardari said of Bhutto in an interview just before the elections. "So I think I am exonerated."
The National Reconciliation Order absolved politicians, bankers and bureaucrats – but not ordinary citizens – charged with corruption offences from 1988 to October 1999, when Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup.
The cases against Zardari that were dismissed ranged from charges of $10m kickbacks from a gold-importing company to allegations that he improperly used government funds to build a polo ground at the prime minister's residence in Islamabad.
The charges stem from his actions during Bhutto's two terms as prime minister, a time when he was known as "Mr Ten Percent" because of allegations that he demanded a cut of contracts after his wife assumed office in 1988.
She was dismissed in 1990 after two years in office, and Zardari served three years in prison from 1990 to 1993 on corruption charges that were never proved.
In her second term, from 1993 to 1996, he wielded more power as minister of environment and investment. When she was dismissed in 1996 by President Farooq Leghari, Zardari was again arrested on corruption charges.
He remained in prison until November 2004, shuffling between jails in Lahore, Rawalpindi and his home city of Karachi. Zardari was classified as an A-class prisoner and received certain privileges: a separate room from the main prison wing with an attached bathroom, air conditioning and two servants.
A lawyer, Talib Rizvi, who often visited him in jail, said Zardari always managed to have the best food and always seemed in high spirits.
"I had one of my finest lunches in that jail. Asif used to get food from Clifton House," said Rizvi, referring to the grand Bhutto family residence in Karachi. "He would get food for 50 people." Expensive gifts to friends were customary.
And as generous as Zardari was toward his friends, Rizvi said, he was as tough against his enemies. Rizvi said Zardari offered to organise revenge against assailants who had shot at Rizvi in the remote area of Baluchistan when he went to defend men charged with the murder of a tribal leader.
In the early 1970s, Zardari went to London. There, Zardari said in the interview, he attended the London School of Business Studies and received a degree. His official biography says he attended a commercial college called Pedinton School. But a search of tertiary educational institutions in London showed no such school, and associates said he did not finish his studies.
The question of whether Zardari has a degree is a sensitive matter because Musharraf introduced a law in 2002 that made it compulsory for parliamentary candidates to hold a degree in order to qualify for electoral office.
There are now expectations among his political colleagues, and in the Pakistani media, that Zardari plans to run for parliament so he can then assume the post of prime minister. But he has said the prime minister's office did not interest him because it would be "very restrictive".
He said he wanted, instead, to re-energise the PPP.
