He has served more than 11 years in jail, been charged with corruption and even murder, claimed dementia on one occasion, and is now immune from prosecution in charge of a nuclear state in the frontline of the so-called “war on terror”.

Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, better known as Mr Ten Per Cent - except to those who say it was Thirty Per Cent - is the controversial former playboy and widower of the late Benazir Bhutto on whose support America is now relying against the Taliban.

Despite his legendary love for lucre, a fortune somewhere in the vast playing field between $30m and $1 billion, allegedly acquired illicitly, Zardari has never been convicted of any of the charges against him and insists - against the odds - that he is the man to unify and stabilise Pakistan.

“We are not trying to become a problem for the world. We want to be part of the solution,” he said before elections in February in which his Pakistan People’s party won the largest number of seats in parliament.

Back then, not standing for a seat himself because of his lack of educational qualifications, it seemed unlikely Zardari would hammer together the pact of disparate allies that yesterday put him in the presidency in succession to the ousted former general, Pervez Musharraf. It seemed even less likely back in 1987 when this polo-playing playboy who ran with a gang of well-to-do but not well-connected, fast-car-driving, streetwise wide boys in Karachi was married off to the urbane, Oxford-educated Benazir, scion of a political dynasty.

It was an arranged marriage, thought by some to be demeaning for the Bhutto girl to be “given” to the son of a cinema owner, but it was understood that it was all about her; he was just an adjunct, labelled mostly harmless.

Zardari, however, was not what it said on the label, and there are some who still allege that Bhutto wasn’t either. She swept to power in 1988 and was swept out again two years later on allegations of incompetence and corruption. Most of the charges were directed against Zardari, but Bhutto’s handwriting was also allegedly on Postit notes said to have been attached to official contracts with details of backhanders for deals that included defence, power plants and state industry privatisation.

Zardari was jailed on charges of corruption and embezzlement, but whisked from prison into the office of minister for investment when his wife was reelected in 1993. When her government fell again in 1996, he was rearrested, this time in connection with the murder of his wife’s militant far-left brother Murtaza, who had urged her to purge him from the party. The case was unproven, but a raft of other charges, including money laundering via Swiss banks, kept him locked up until 2004.

The cases rumbled on, with revelations of more than a dozen bank accounts in London and Switzerland, a mansion in Surrey and a string of other properties from the US to France and Dubai. This was at a time his wife was declaring: “How can anyone even think of buying a mansion in England when people in Pakistan have no roof over their head?”

With the trail leading offshore from Liechtenstein to the British Virgin Islands, all the charges have so far run aground for lack of evidence. Judge Lawrence Collins did say that, although there was “no direct evidence”, the government of Pakistan had a “reasonable prospect” of proving corruption in a civil case. To say the least, that is now unlikely to be pursued.

When Zardari, who moved to New York after his release from jail, was called to London in 2006 to give evidence, he provided affidavits from two doctors saying he suffered from dementia, major depressive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder, even though those who knew him at the time said he appeared in good spirits.

His longtime friend, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, high commissioner to Britain, insists he is now healthy again. Reassuring for a man who has his finger on a nuclear button. Others also less critical of Zardari insist he is simply a man keen to help friends and supporters, accidentally painting a picture of him as not so much the father of his country but its godfather.

His rise to power rests on the “political will” of his late wife, a document he keeps framed above his dining table, urging the party to accept their 19-year-old son Bilawal as her successor, with his father alongside him as mentor and regent. After her death Zardari immediately sidelined the boy, sending him back to resume his studies at Oxford.

Since his party’s electoral success in February, he has in effect been directing the actions of the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. Earlier this year he allegedly tried to raise the price of wheat for farmers who had supported him in the Punjab. When his finance minister asked where the money would come from, Zardari is supposed to have said: “Print the notes.”

He is also reported to have rejected a new capital gains tax intended to fund income support for Pakistan’s poorest, who live on barely $2 a day, after meeting Karachi stockbrokers.

An attack on Gilani’s car last week will have made Zardari only more aware that if marrying into the Bhutto family elevated him to the heights of power it also put him in the firing line: she and one of her brothers were assassinated, the other died in mysterious circumstances and their father was executed. Zardari claims he has a good idea who killed his wife and believes they will come after him too, though as president his security will be markedly increased. There is no doubting his personal courage. A frequently told anecdote goes back to his days as a young polo player when he leapt from his horse on a riding expedition to rescue the daughter of a German diplomat whose mount was lodged in quicksand.

The worst allegation against him was that in 1990 he strapped a remote-controlled bomb to the leg of a businessman to force him to go into a bank to make a withdrawal. Zardari himself dismisses most of the stories against him as wild accusations by his enemies. A long-term acquaintance adds: “His reputation is such that people can get away with saying all sorts of things about him. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t true.”

Given his past, he is remarkably sensitive to his public image. He reduced his female public relations officer to tears recently after they met tribal leaders in the troublesome northwest provinces, because newspaper photographs showed her and not him.

It is his relations with those tribal leaders - and the Taliban camped out in their midst - that Washington will be more concerned about than all the allegations of corruption. Musharraf tried and failed to walk a knife edge, careful not to antagonise the powerful tribal clans while at the same time accepting billions in aid from Washington for hunting down Islamist extremists in their areas. The current chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, has said he wants to remove the army from politics, but given that Pakistan has oscillated between military and civilian governments for its entire existence that may not come easily.

Without the army’s backing - and the cooperation of the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency - the war against the Taliban is hopeless. There are enough Pakistanis, particularly in the tribal borderlands, who feel Musharraf was wrong to get involved in what they see as an American war against Islam.

It is often forgotten that Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan is merely the line drawn by Sir Mortimer Durand, foreign secretary of British India in 1893, and perceived by most local tribes nowadays as an irrelevance. The name Pakistan itself is essentially an Anglophone acronym, the first three letters of which include Afghans between the Punjabis and Kashmiris. It is by no means an exaggeration to say that escalation of the current fighting along the border could threaten the country’s existence. The question is whether Zardari can display the same acumen in that rats’ nest as he has done in his financial dealings.

Larry Goodson, from the US Army War College, has likened Pakistani politics to the film Groundhog Day, where the same unfortunate events are forever repeated in the same sequence. The difference is that in Groundhog Day, the main character learns to repent of his sins and everyone eventually lives happily ever after. For Pakistan a Hollywood ending is not yet on the cards.

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