Word: coups
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...make optimistic assumptions about economic growth and government revenue extraction potential," Biddle says. "The result could easily be a postwar Afghan security force too large to pay and also too large to demobilize safely." Historically, he warns, that leads to trouble. "Situations like this can easily produce a coup d'etat or civil warfare," Biddle says. "Unless we're very careful about this, too large an increase in Afghan national-security forces could be successful in the mid-term, but become a self-defeating prophecy in the longer term...
...Kayani - who has been keen to win support for his troops' faltering campaign against the militants - met on Friday with Zardari and his Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani. Although Pakistan's army has routinely staged political interventions, analysts believe that it is unwilling to seize power in another military coup. But as Zardari and Sharif joust for control over Punjab, the largest province and the home of the bulk of the army, it could yet assert its clout through backstage maneuvers...
...then there was South Korea's Park Chung Hee. A general who took control of the country in a 1961 coup, he ruled, often with an iron fist, for 18 years. Yet he was deeply moved by South Korea's destitution. In the early 1960s, the country's per capita income was just over $100, and the economy depended on American aid. Park, a virulent nationalist, vowed to do something about it. "I had to break, once and for all, the vicious cycle of poverty and economic stagnation," he later wrote...
...military intervention. In 1977, a movement led by right-wing and religious forces similar to the opposition parties aligned with Sharif brought down the first PPP government, then run by Zardari's father-in-law, and paved the way for Zia ul-Haq to seize power in a military coup...
...attacks on the judiciary. "It's a very ominous turn of events," said Farzana Shaikh, a Pakistan expert at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs. "These are not actions that one normally associates with an elected government that has flaunted its democratic credentials." While she rules out a coup, Shaikh believes that Zardari's latest maneuvering will "create great consternation in the senior ranks of the army." General Ashfaq Kayani made a surprise visit to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Wednesday to discuss the turmoil. "I suspect what might happen is an attempt by the military to orchestrate...