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Benazir admits Zardari is a political liability

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has said she and her jailed husband Asif Ali Zardari are rethinking their life together and may live apart for a few years so that she can concentrate on politics.

"Maybe it is important that while I do politics he steps out for a while. Then he can decide what he wants to do when I am not doing politics," she said in an interview with the weekly Sunday.

"My husband and I have discussed this a number of times and we think that he just needs some time out so that the world can see him for what he is," she said.

The former prime minister, who has been sentenced in absentia to five years in jail on charges of corruption, accepted that Zardari was a political liability. He is called "Mr Ten Per Cent", allegedly for shaving a percentage off every deal he is involved in.

But Bhutto added that she loves her husband very much.

Referring to the Kargil conflict, she said it was the biggest blunder the Nawaz Sharief government had ever made.

"Kargil endangered the process of peace in the subcontinent, compromised Pakistan's position and compromised the Kashmiris.

"It is astonishing that he wants to continue in power after humiliating Pakistan," she said, adding that the Kargil conflict isolated Pakistan and nearly took South Asia to the brink of a nuclear war.

On the question of resolution of the Kashmir issue, Bhutto favoured bilateral discussion between India and Pakistan. As a start, the two countries should sit down and have negotiations for open borders between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, she said.

Bhutto said that if India and Pakistan "cannot do it themselves, it is good to get some outside help" so that South Asia is not punished because of the political leadership of the two countries.

"My father and Indira did it in 1972. Rajiv Gandhi and I were able to do it in 1988 and if we can do it again, fine. That is the reason we welcomed the bus diplomacy."

Referring to Sharief's claim that he had been able to internationalise the Kashmir issue, Bhutto said, "What he has done is internationalise Pakistan as a rogue nation. He has internationalised Pakistan as a bad partner to work with and a deceitful nation." She said Sharief would be out of office in three months.

"I think he should go by 1999. If he does not go now, he will bankrupt the country and bring about its disintegration. He is not a strategic thinker," she said.

UNI

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