Word: pakistani
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...Pakistani leaders, for their part, insist they never get the respect that is their due. The military has lost hundreds of soldiers battling extremists along the Afghanistan border. But terrorist groups continue to thrive in the lawless tribal areas; Musharraf says they are being protected by sympathetic locals in terrain that is impossible to police. Many Pakistanis - and some U.S. officials - believe Musharraf has been indulging in the most dangerous form of triangulation, balancing U.S. interests with Islamist sympathies to keep himself in power. "Musharraf uses the threat of the extremists to prove his utility and indispensability to the Western...
...self-appointed standard bearers of Pakistani democracy, Asif Ali Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari don't inspire much confidence. One is a feudal aristocrat widely reviled as corrupt and blamed for his wife's undoing when she was the country's Prime Minister in the 1990s. The other, their son, is a bookish Oxford undergraduate who talks of democracy but whose political clout derives entirely from his middle name. Yet there they were, three days after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, their beloved wife and mother, proclaiming themselves inheritors of her political fief, the Pakistan People's Party...
...Lost Pakistan? Modern Pakistan has been strained to its breaking point by three opposing forces: feudal dynastic politicians who have only a casual acquaintance with democracy; a corrupt, ineffective army; and religious extremists, who at least know what they want, even if the vast majority of Pakistanis find their vision of Islam unpalatable. All three have played their parts in undermining Pakistan's foundational promise as a modern, democratic Muslim nation. But they have had plenty of outside help. A succession of administrations in Washington have backed a series of wrong horses in Islamabad: military dictators like Musharraf or feudal...
...cause of Pakistani democracy been helped by the U.S. habit of giving more money to Pakistan's military leaders than to its civilian ones. Husain Haqqani, a former diplomat and political confidant of Benazir Bhutto's, told Congress last October that since 1954 the U.S. has given Pakistan about $21 billion in aid, of which $17.7 billion was given under military rule, and only $3.4 billion to elected governments...
...says something - none of it good - about Pakistan that such antecedents should be considered a political endorsement. Bilawal has spent nearly half his young life outside Pakistan, splitting his time between London and Dubai. A 2004 profile in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn said the teenager liked target-shooting, swimming, horseback-riding and squash and regretted being away from Pakistan in part because it meant he could not play more cricket. His grandfather Zulfikar, Bilawal said, "was a very courageous man, and I consider myself very lucky because I have three powerful role models that will obviously influence my career choices...