Word: pakistani
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...argument Haq and other video-shop owners like him can't win in this Pakistani frontier town. It often ends with unknown assailants bombing their stores in the night. Haq's shop is the latest to be bombed by what locals call the Taliban, religious vigilantes who don't necessarily come from Afghanistan but who take their cue from its erstwhile rulers. No one was hurt by the 4 a.m. bombing of his store, but the message was clear. So Haq is getting out of the video business, as owners of some 40 similar shops in the neighborhood have also...
...real Benazir Bhutto embodied two of Pakistan’s biggest ills: the perpetual protection of feudal interests, and a democratic process plagued by nepotism and corruption. It is this democracy deficit that both the Pakistani army and the Islamists are currently exploiting. But like the audience offering blind adulation at the Kennedy School in 1997, the world press and Harvard have chosen to ignore her past, focusing instead on what Bhutto symbolized to the West, not what she was to her own people...
That she was personally secular—as well as immensely courageous—is unquestionable. However, these views did not translate into policies as prime minister. Her record as an anti-terrorist crusader is murky, at best. While Bhutto was prime minister, the Pakistani intelligence services helped install the Taliban in Afghanistan. There was also a huge spike in Pakistan’s monetary and strategic support for jehadis in Kashmir during her tenure. While Bhutto’s direct responsibility for both these actions is debatable, they were nonetheless incongruous with the simplistic anti-terrorism crusader image that...
...recent anti-terrorist image was a calculated one. After 9/11, the topography of Pakistani politics dramatically changed, and Islamist political parties grew powerful by feeding on local anger against the pro-American stance of the Musharraf regime. These Islamists parties began to eat into the electoral base of Bhutto’s party. Benazir Bhutto’s recent opposition to Islamists was thus more to do with immediate electoral interests rather than long held political beliefs...
Bhutto’s international connections helped her rise to power. The U.S. was far more comfortable doing business with Benazir Bhutto than other, more local Pakistani politicians such as Nawaz Sharif. She used her many years in exile to address think-tanks, policy makers and academics in the West, her Harvard credentials underlining her perceived reliability. Newspapers the world over spent more time on her privileged education than the specifics of her rule. Harvard would thus do well to realize the way its brand is used in the rest of the world. Bhutto used it to perpetuate...