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Zardari prepared for assassination, named his successor | Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, who feared he would be assassinated, had made extensive preparations for his family to live in the United Arab Emirate, according to US
Embassy cables. Zardari, whose wife Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide bombing
in December 2007, told US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson that if he was
assassinated "he had instructed son Bilawal to name his sister, Faryal Talpur,
as president". In 2010, Zardari requested the United Arab Emirates to allow his
family to live there in the event of his death. Benazir lived in self-imposed
exile in the UAE for years before her ill-fated return to Pakistan in 2007, The
Guardian reports. The WikiLeaks cables provide a changing portrait of Zardari.
A 2008 description of Zardari notes that he hails from a tribe with non-significant
social standing in Sindh. "There is a story that as children, Sindhis were told
'a Zardari stole it' if something went missing". But later dispatches portray
him as a more capable leader, The Guardian reports. Zardari is frank about the
strength of the Taliban: "I'm sorry to say this, but we are not winning" the war
against extremists," he told US Vice-President, Joe Biden, in 2009 - indicating
his own limitations. "I am not Benazir, and I know it," he told Patterson after
his wife's death. The cables, which were put in the public domain by the whistleblowing
web site WikiLeaks, also record embarrassing mistakes in the American embassy's
efforts to manage its relationship with the power elite in Pakistan.
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