Word: zinni
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...anything that would undermine counterterrorism efforts," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said to reporters during a trip to China. Washington's Pakistan nightmare is that a weakened Musharraf may be ousted by extremist groups, leaving the country's nuclear arsenal in the hands of America-hating wackos. Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine general who headed the U.S. Central Command when Musharraf became army chief in 1998, points out that the U.S. ban on military exchanges with Pakistan during the 1990s--because of Islamabad's push for nuclear weapons--helped radicalize many in the officer corps. Musharraf flagged this...
...relations hard to come by inside the country. But such exchanges ended between the U.S. and Pakistan for about a decade after Congress cut off all military cooperation in 1990. "Musharraf was worried that a lot of the junior officers had been isolated from this and might turn inward," Zinni says. "You were beginning to see beards in the officer corps, which may signify more religious conservatism. That's created a bubble of officers who are going to start coming into senior positions that were isolated during the era of sanctions...
...relations remain frayed between the two nations because of Pakistan's memory of Washington's hot-and-cold attentions. "There's a complete lack of trust going back to after the first Afghan war [against the Soviet Union] - when we left them high and dry with 500,000 refugees," Zinni says. "And then we came rushing toward them after 9/11...
...brittle it could break." Pentagon officials added that the U.S. is reviewing some $300 million in foreign military sales financing for 2008, $32 million for law enforcement and anti-narcotics efforts, and $2 million for military training - the same kinds of program whose scrapping in the 1990s so upset Zinni...
...Indeed, Zinni disagrees with moves that would continue to punish Pakistan's military. He argues that the 1990s' sanctions were counterproductive, creating "a lot of bitterness in the ranks" of the Pakistani military. "It's too easy to punish the military for political decisions," Zinni says. "If the U.S. had problems with a country on human rights or other issues, I was always ordered as a combatant commander to punish the country's military. We shoot ourselves in the foot in a security sense when we do that...