'Zardari is a luckless president of a luckless country' - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has been unfairly criticised by media and people of Pakistan despite the fact that his wrongdoings have not come close to any of the earlier politicians of the country, according to Pakistani columnist Ayaz Amir. "Has Zardari done anything which comes close to the unbeatable folly of the 1965 war? If anything undid us it was that foolish call to arms. We had set out to conquer Kashmir. At Tashkent we ended up lowering the casket of the Kashmir cause into the ground," The News quoted Amir, as saying. "Do Zardari's alleged crimes measure up to the folly of General Yahya Khan who presided over the break-up of Pakistan? We couldn't stand the notion of meeting East Pakistani aspirations half-way, just as we are having a hard time now understanding Baluchi aspirations," he questions. Amir points out that the frenzied crowds, which protested against the corruption of the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Government in 1977, eventually got the former prime minister hanged, but along came the tyranny of General Ziaul Haq. "Zia first proclaimed his aim as Islamisation. Then it was accountability. These were pretexts for suppressing democracy and perpetuating his rule. Zia was perhaps the greatest disaster to befall Pakistan. We are still living with the consequences," he said. "Zardari may deserve all the pejorative adjectives in the dictionary but has he committed any crime, which comes close to the enormity of the disaster that was Kargil? That adventure was meant to seize advantage in Kashmir once again. It ended up exposing Pakistan to fierce international criticism and giving birth to the term cross-border terrorism, the stick with which Pakistan has been regularly beaten ever since," he added. He is just the "luckless president of a luckless country," Amir concluded.