Nicholas Schmidle profiles Asif Ali Zardari in The New Republic. Zardari became the President of Pakistan last year, when Pervez Musharraf stepped down under pressure (which was, in large part, imposed by Zardari and his Pakistan People's Party).Schmidle's article starts by telling the story of Zardari's over-the-top flirting with Sarah Palin last fall - the response in Pakistan was negative, as Zardari's behavior was seen as both juvenile and inconsistent with Islam.
Zardari has spent eight of the past eleven years in jail, on charges of corruption, money-laundering, and murdering his brother-in-law. Schmidle portrays him as something of an erratic, unpredictable playboy (one of the details I like is that he constantly mixes cliches - this reminds me of several people in my past, and I actually always have found it to be a very endearing trait).
Schmidle says that the match of Zardari with Benazir Bhutto was somewhat surprising - the Zardari family was seen as nouveau-riche (his father ran the "Bambino" movie theater in Karachi) whereas the Bhuttos were the old-school artistocratic politicians.
The article does not have an overarching conclusion as to the direction in which Pakistan is headed (and it's not 100% anti-Zardari), but I did get the sense that Schmidle does not think Zardari is up to the task:
It would be easy to conclude that Pakistan, never the most stable place even in the best of circumstances, has come unglued. That seemed to be the clear sense of the Obama administration, which has launched Predator strikes within Pakistani territory. The war against Islamic militants has gone so badly, in fact, that Zardari's government recently relented to Taliban demands and agreed to the imposition of sharia law in the Swat Valley.
