A new partner -- warts and all

ASIF ALI ZARDARI, who was sworn in Tuesday as president of Pakistan, comes to the post with a shady past. The widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, he spent 11 years in jail on corruption charges involving enormous sums of money. He was even convicted once - a mistrial was later declared - on charges of murdering his wife's brother. But the wheeler-dealer previously known as Mr. 10 Percent has displayed great deftness in outmaneuvering opponents. He will need all his Machiavellian wiles to keep Pakistan from coming apart at the seams.

It was a promising sign that the one foreign head of state invited to Zardari's inauguration was President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. In part, this was Zardari's way of signaling that he means to keep the bargain Bhutto made with the Bush administration: to help the United States and the Karzai government prosecute an increasingly daunting war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

To fulfill his end of the bargain, Zardari will have to obtain the cooperation of Pakistan's army and the nearly autonomous Inter-Services Intelligence agency. He will also need funds to spend on schools, social services, infrastructure, and economic development in impoverished rural areas where extremist recruiters have flourished. For this purpose, he will need a continued flow of aid from the United States, which has given Pakistan more than $10 billion since former president Pervez Musharraf signed onto what President Bush calls the war on terror.

That war cannot be wound down, much less won, without what Karzai in Islamabad called a "joint struggle for peace and prosperity in the region." Karzai's remark implies that the Pakistani military and intelligence services will not stop backing the Taliban in Afghanistan until the danger of conflict with India is overcome or at least reduced substantially. The Pakistani brass sees the Pashtun areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan as a source of strategic depth in their contest with India. So it was a good sign that Zardari said shortly after his swearing-in that he intends to undertake "fast-track" efforts to resolve the crucial conflict with India over Kashmir.

It is probably not a coincidence that both the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke last week of the need for a comprehensive strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, one that includes a greatly enhanced civilian component. If Zardari becomes an effective partner in implementing such a strategy, he will not be the first scoundrel to suddenly bloom into a statesman.