It's not easy understanding who's who in Pakistani politics, who stands for what, and who's less corrupt than whom: few, if any, of the players on the national scene today are clean of the taint of corruption, election-rigging or outright thuggery. The country's political viability is shaky, its ability to contain terrorism surging and Taliban-led Islamists to the northwest shakier still. Yet Pakistani stability is vital to the security of central Asia and Western efforts to control Islamism and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan. Can Pakistan's political leadership cope?
1. Asif Ali Zardari
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Currently Pakistan's president. In his youth Zardari was known as a polo-playing playboy. After wedding Benazir Bhutto in an arranged marriage, his illustriously corrupt career began: He was charged with the attempted murder of a British developer, on whose leg he and an accomplice were accused to have strapped a remote-controlled bomb before sending the guy into a bank to force him to withdraw $800,000. To become president he profited from the country's emotional response Bhutto's assassination. His brief tenure as president has been disastrous economically and politically. His dictatorial impulses resemble those of Pervez Musharraf, whom he replaced. His political instincts appear nil.
2. Nawaz Sharif
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Twice the prime minister of Pakistan (1990-1993 and 1997-1999), Nawaz Sharif was booted out of office by Pervez Musharraf in 1999 and barred from entering politics through elaborate machinations. More recently, Asif Ali Zardari replicated Musharraf's tactics, using the Supreme Court to disqualify Sharif (or his brother, who was chief minister in the powerful province of Punjab) from holding office. Sharif's government was corrupt, autocratic, incompetent, and dangerously accommodating of Islamist influence. Nevertheless, by embracing, in 2009, the cause of Pakistanis demanding an independent judiciary, Sharif astutely allied himself with the political movement with the greatest momentum in the country.
3. Pervez Musharraf
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The original dictator (at least in the last 10 years) Musharraf, a military strongman with a lethal ego, took power to some acclaim from Pakistan's professional class in 1999, when he booted out Nawaz Sharif, promised economic reforms and distance from Islamists. What he offered up instead was mostly the Cult of Musharraf. His second coup in 2007 led to widespread disaffection with his heavy-handed regime. Popular demonstrations led by lawyers and Benazir Bhutto before her assassination drove him from power in 2008. But, as all things military do in Pakistan, he looms in the background.
4. Benazir Bhutto
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Twice a prime minister of Pakistan and verging on winning a third term, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on Dec. 27, 2007, either by Islamist militants or by followers of Pervez Musharraf. Benazir Bhutto carried the hopes of secular, socialist Pakistan under the banner of the Pakistan Peoples Party that her father founded. Yet her political tenures, too, were riven with corruption and misjudgments, not least her shepherding the Taliban to power in the 1990s. Her aura still exerts a powerful pull on Pakistanis' imagination.
5. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry
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The 20th chief justice of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf appointed him to the position in 2005 only to arbitrarily and illegally suspend him in 2007. The Pakistani Supreme Court reinstated him, however. As Chaudhry was preparing a court decision ruling on the legitimacy of Musharraf's 2007 re-election, Musharraf suspended the constitution and arrested Chaudhry and other members of the court. Chaudhry wouldn't be released from house arrest until March 2008. He vows to be reinstated chief justice. meanwhile, he is the symbolic leader of Pakistan's movement for an independent judiciary, which is fueling momentum behind the effort to push Asif Ali Zardari out of power--just as Pervez Musharraf was pushed out of power in 2008.
6. Pakistan Peoples Party
The Pakistan Peoples Party is Pakistan's largest, left-leaning, secular political parties. Today it's led by Asif Ali Zardari, widow of the late Benazir Bhutto. Socialism defines many of the PPP's principles, though not its accomplishments, which have been scant since Zulikfar Ali Bhutto founded it in November 1967. The PPP has more often been bedeviled by corruption and nepotism than principled leadership.
7. Pakistan Muslim League
The Pakistan Muslim League, or PML, is a collective of generally right-wing, conservative, Islamic Pakistani political parties erratically linked to the country's military and clerical establishment. The largest of the PML parties, and essentially the only one among them to wield power on the Pakistani political scene, is that headed by Nawaz Sharif, hence its acronym: PML-N.