Word: control
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Whether he can deliver, though, is another matter. "None of the things [the U.S.] cares about are in his control," says Christine Fair, a South Asia expert at the Rand Corp. Pakistan's security forces and intelligence agencies are hardly answerable to the civilian government. Still, the Obama Administration could at least try to strengthen Zardari's hand. A bill proposed last year by then Senator Joe Biden and Senator Richard Lugar calls for trebling U.S. economic assistance to Pakistan, to $1.5 billion annually for five years, with a possible extension for another five years. The bill enjoys bipartisan support...
There's some argument for that. An old joke in Islamabad: All countries have armies, but in Pakistan, the army has a country. Indeed, military dictators have ruled Pakistan for much of its 61-year history, and the armed forces control vast swaths of the economy...
...same time ... He has to get the Pakistani army to step up the fight against extremists, even as he's telling the generals, 'Sorry, guys, we're making the civilians your bosses.'" In the past, the military has actively undermined every effort to put it under civilian control; expect more of the same. There are not many carrots the U.S. can dangle before Kayani to get him to change old habits. But the Biden-Lugar bill does provide some leverage: it requires $1 billion in military aid to be conditional on more effort by the Pakistani military to fight...
...rest of the world, that's no debate: inadequate and inconsistent financial regulation is uniformly blamed. What's more, a consensus seems to have emerged among the world's finance ministers and central-bank bosses that the chief underlying cause of the crisis was an unbalanced and out-of-control system of global capital flows in which some big-spender countries (namely the U.S.) ran up huge debts while big savers (China and India, for example) hoarded surpluses...
...dollar that was linked to gold. The fixed exchange rates and gold standard unraveled in the 1970s, and ever since we've had a system in which the IMF occasionally steps in to help countries in currency crises (usually imposing harsh terms in the process) but exercises no real control over the global financial system...