The US cultivated General Zia while ignoring his executed predecessor

Evidence

For David, the quest to discover what happened to his former lover, Zameen, causes a revision of his previous temporizing outlook. As a young man in 1979, he found himself caught up in a mob attack on the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad inspired by the recent revolution in Iran, an event that provided him with his first lesson in the inextricable link between the political and the personal. Having waited many hours for relief in the besieged embassy, David was later stunned to learn that President Carter thanked the new Pakistani dictator, General Zia, for his swift response. … Of course, Zia had just deposed and executed the elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and was about to commence his Islamization program in Pakistan with the full connivance of the United States, which was grateful for this reliable ally in the fight against a Soviet Union that by the end of the year would demonstrate its own imperialist intentions by invading neighboring Afghanistan. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to US cold-war backing of authoritarian Muslim allies — relevant to framing how Hamid and Naqvi treat US-Pakistan state relationships.