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They will never listen to him, trust him, or respect him! That was the point my Pakistani acquaintance was trying to make in his heavily accented and broken English, replete with wild gesticulations as if his hands were lobbing exclamation point grenades into the air around us.

He was talking about Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. I asked him if he thought Zardari -- who at that time had just ascended to office to replace Pervez Musharraf -- could last in office, or if the head of the military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, would take the reins in a bloodless coup.

His answer boiled down to this: the Kayani coup-coup clock was ticking.

If only.

Zardari is a nogoodnik, to say the least. He is the widower of the slain former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, who was as corrupt and incompetent as her husband, though never the unabashed clown he is.

Bhutto nearly drove her country to bankruptcy and helped create the Taliban as we know it. She is remembered fondly, however, because of her murder by Islamist terrorists in 2007 and because during her cushy "exile" in Dubai the Western courtiers of the press swooned over her, their words of obsessive and uninformed acclaim vacillating between schoolboy prose and the condescension with which we in the West treat pretty women who tell us what we want to hear.

While Bhutto was head of state, her husband Zardari earned the nickname "Mr. 10 Percent," because if you wanted to do business with those whose hands grace the levers of power in Pakistan, well, it'll cost you.

That's President 10 Percent now, and Pakistan is once again a mess. But this time it's our mess. Since we can't send soldiers into Pakistani territory, it's where most of the Afghan insurgent leaders are holed up, with Quetta serving as a base for fighters who cross the border at will to kill our troops.

We use Predator drone strikes to assassinate terrorist leaders, but because we can't put troops on the ground, we rely on Pakistani military intelligence for our targets. Turns out their political rivals just happen to be the targets, time and again.

That makes us sound like a tool of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's intelligence agency. But a recent Investor's Business Daily (IBD) editorial makes the case that we're not the tool; we're the target.

IBD quotes the testimony of Treasury undersecretary Stuart Levey: "Saudi Arabia today remains the location where more money is going to terrorism -- to Sunni terror groups and the Taliban -- than any other place in the world."

IBD editorialists went on: "Pakistani intelligence views Taliban chief Mullah Omar an asset ready to be redeployed in Afghanistan once the U.S. inevitably leaves the country. They had groomed and installed him as Afghan strongman prior to 9/11 to check Indian influence in the region. There are now reports that Omar has been moved from Quetta to Karachi to keep him safe from U.S. drone attacks."

Funded by the Saudis, the Pakistanis are shielding our enemies. On Monday, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government demanded Pakistan crack down on Siraj Haqqani, the Afghan Taliban's fiercest fighter. Pakistan's response? It had something to do with a long walk and a short pier.

In a sharp and disturbing report, the Times quotes Pakistan making the same excuses with regard to Haqqani as with Mullah Omar.

"The Obama administration wants Pakistan to turn on Mr. Haqqani, a longtime asset of Pakistan's spy agency who uses the tribal area of North Waziristan as his sanctuary," Jane Perlez reports. "But, the officials said, Pakistan views the entreaties as contrary to its interests in Afghanistan beyond the timetable of President Obama's surge, which envisions drawing down American forces beginning in mid-2011."

Pakistan envisions sending the region back to the mid-1990s, when it utilized the Taliban to help control its own borders and its interests in lawless Afghanistan.

Obama has made two moves in the region that deserve more recognition than they've received thus far, and a third move that has properly earned the support of the American public. The third move was the decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

The first two were his immediate decision to couple his Afghanistan policy with that of Pakistan -- what became known as AfPak, and to replace top American commander in Afghanistan Gen. David McKiernan with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former top Joint Special Operations commander who was better suited to run the military's counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan.

Pakistan is one of the main reasons we cannot leave Afghanistan. But the ineptitude, corruption, and parade of pusillanimous capitulations of the Zardari "government" to our adversaries aren't the ingredients for a tenable future with this putative ally.

Zardari must go. Simply replacing him with Kayani would send a message, and it would bring a measure of competence, control, and stability to Pakistan's helm.

It still wouldn't be perfect, but it would be better than continuing to rely on President 10 Percent to protect our interests in Pakistan.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.