On 19/03/2008, ss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Monday 17 Mar 2008 6:10:04 pm Udhay Shankar N wrote: > > Tarun Dua wrote: [ on 04:18 PM 3/17/2008 ] > > > > > >http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21194 > > > This article does not gel with this one > > http://www.brecorder.com/index.php?id=708905&currPageNo=1&query=&search=&term=&supDate > > There is some financial fiction in one or the other. Apart from a > suggestion > to me that the Pakistan Army may have paid Dalrymple to speak of "corrupt > Pakistani politicians" with not a chirp about the Pakistani army itself > which > has a huge role to play in Pakistan's current cheerful situation. That is > typical Pakistani army apologist language and it looks like Dalrymple may > have joined a long list of Western journalists who have been "magically > convinced" to speak "Pearls" on behalf of the Pakistan army. > > shiv > > The Tehelka version of Dalrymple's story is a bit more explicit on the army:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main38.asp?filename=Ne080308on_the.asp THE SECOND force that has shown a remarkable ability to ignore or even reverse the democratic decisions of the Pakistani people is of course the army. Even though Musharraf's political ally, the PML-Q, has been heavily defeated at the polls, leaving him vulnerable to impeachment by the new parliament, the Pakistani army is still formidably powerful. Normally countries have an army; in Pakistan, as in Burma, the army has a country. In her recent book, *Military, Inc*., the political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa attempted to put figures on the degree to which the army controls Pakistan irrespective of who is in power. Siddiqa estimated, for example, that the Army now controls business assets of around 20 billion dollars and a third of all the manufacturing in the country; it also owns 12 million acres of public land and up to 7 percent of Pakistan's private assets. Five giant conglomerates, known as "welfare foundations", run thousands of businesses, ranging from streetcorner petrol pumps to sprawling industrial plants, from cement and dredging to the manufacture of corn flakes. The army has administrative assets too. According to Siddiqa, military personnel have "taken over all and every department in the bureaucracy — even the civil service academy is now headed by a Major General, while the National School of Public Policy is run by a Lieutenant General. The military has completely taken over not just the bureaucracy but every arm of the Executive." Yet for all this potential power, the army has now comprehensively lost the support of its people — a dramatic change from the situation even three years ago when a surprisingly wide cross-section of the country seemed prepared to tolerate military rule. The new army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, who took over when Musharraf stepped down from his military role last year, seems to recognise this. He has issued statements about his wish to pull the army back from civilian life, ordering his soldiers to stay out of politics and give up jobs in the bureaucracy. He has also ordered that no army officer may meet with President Musharraf without his personal sanction.
