Word: pakistanis
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...White House on Wednesday as capable of leading a successful fight against the Taliban. Zardari's approval ratings are lower than those of the reviled former dictator President Pervez Musharraf; his army is reluctant to go to war against a section of the country's citizenry; and Pakistani public opinion remains more hostile to the U.S. than to the Taliban. Karzai, meanwhile, has long been written off by Washington an incapable of providing the kind of governance essential to winning a counterinsurgency war. Still, in response to the growing legion of skeptics on Capitol Hill, the Administration might well...
...Ahead of Wednesday's trilateral summit between the Pakistani leader, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and President Barack Obama, U.S. officials were doing their best to soothe congressional skepticism over sending Pakistan's military and political authorities desperately needed infusions of cash. Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday that Zardari has the Administration's total backing. "He should be treated as the leader of a country who vitally needs our support and whose success is vitally related to American interests," Holbrooke said. Asked whether the Obama Administration...
...Congress is weighing several bills to increase aid to the Pakistani government and step up assistance to the Pakistani military in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But many on the Hill worry that the money will be misspent and want to attach strict conditions and benchmarks to the aid, some of which any Pakistani government might find difficult to meet...
...also be more sanguine about the Taliban than Washington has been because the generals tend to view the country's political establishment, most directly challenged by the militants' gains, as corrupt and self-serving. The army, rather than the relatively weak political institutions, is the spine of the Pakistani state, and democracy has never been seen as a precondition to its survival. If the turmoil in civil society reaches a boiling point, the military, however reluctant its current leadership may be to seize power, can be reliably expected to take the political reins...
This week, Obama will follow a path well worn by his predecessor, seeking to convince his Pakistani counterpart to do more against the Taliban. But the smart money says that, like Musharraf before him, Zardari - and the power behind the throne, armed forces chief General Ashfaq Kiyani - will be more inclined to simply do the minimum necessary to ease U.S. pressure, believing that their domestic insurgency will peter out when the U.S. ends its campaign in Afghanistan. That may explain Zardari's hopeful statement on bin Laden's current status...