This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 16 Nov 2007, by D S.
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16 Nov 07
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Neither Bhutto nor Sharif will crack down on the tribal regions, whatever promises they are privately making these days. Nor will Bhutto or Sharif challenge the military’s strategic calculus, which is to hedge against Indian encirclement via Afghanistan and U.S. abandonment of Pakistan, as occurred in the early 1990s. Like it or not, the military is the player that matters when it comes to such vital U.S. interests as fighting al Qaeda, stabilizing Afghanistan, and stemming nuclear proliferation—but military leaders are increasingly nervous that the United States will desert them again.
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Some in Washington believe that civilian leaders would do more to crack down on Islamist militants and better cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts on the Afghan-Pakistani border. That’s a false hope: Civil-military relations and national-security decision-making cannot change overnight. In the past, civilian governments have deferred to the Army to manage civil unrest, especially in the frontier provinces. And as it did with nuclear weapons development, the military often acts without the full knowledge of civilian leaders.
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Bhutto was run out of the country for skimming millions off the top of government contracts; Sharif orchestrated the storming of the Supreme Court by street thugs as he was being tried for contempt.
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Moreover, as foreign-policy analyst Anatol Lieven has noted, “All civilian governments have been guilty of corruption, election rigging and the imprisonment or murder of political opponents, in some cases to a worse degree than the military administrations that followed.”
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The Musharraf government has presided over Pakistan’s most successful economy, averaging 7 percent annual growth over the past five years. Compare this with the anemic 3 percent average in the 1990s under civilian rule.
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When India and Pakistan parted ways in 1947, most of the British Indian Army’s Muslim officers—who constituted the bulk of the officer corps—went to Pakistan, while the bulk of civilian expertise went to India. This set the course for the military to dominate not only decisions of national security, but also domestic policy.
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02 Oct 07
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By Sameer Lalwani
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By Sameer Lalwani
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15 Sep 07
chinesejapaneseWhy We’d Miss Musharraf
By Sameer Lalwani
Page 1 of 1
Posted September 2007
Pervez Musharraf is wobbling, and his political adversaries are moving in for the kill. But Pakistan’s former leaders are hardly the democratic saviors they present themselvmusharraf pervez pakistan international politics Nawaz Sharif Benazir Bhutto delicious import from ImportDelicious 2016 05 22
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