Tbh I do see why you would have "a love affair" with the Pakistani military. Pak military is just about the only thing in Pakistan that isn't a complete failure and considering that your mindset is essentially tribalistic, Pak army is actually something you could feel proud about.
Problem is that Pakistani military is one of the main reasons why Pakistan is where it is.
Although the Pakistani army is mostly a success in persecuting and killing innocents, sucking up the resources of the nation, destroying democracy, its operational effectiveness being mainly in sodomising the nation it represents, including mainlining jehadism into society's bloodstream, and losing the eastern half of Pakistan when it was bisected following its jolly genocide jaunt in Bengal.
In fact, so parasitical is the Pakistani army, that the Pakistani economy basically exists to service the army, one of the reasons why the nation has not been able to sustain long term economic growth, and why it is always dependent on aid and loans to prop itself up.
Economic Growth, Clad in Military Garb
By STEPHEN KOTKIN
Published: November 4, 2007
PAKISTAN’S recently re-elected leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has indicated that he might finally heed the calls for him to step down as head of the army. But even if the general becomes a civilian president, that will not take the uniform off Pakistan’s economy.
A strategic country with nuclear weapons and suicide bombers, Pakistan also merits attention for economic lessons. From 1950 to 2000, its per capita income tripled, making it something of a middle-income country. But social indicators like infant mortality and literacy remain at the world’s lower end. A few hundred intertwined families, many rooted in the military, maintain an anti-development chokehold on the country’s wealth and political system.
“Why some militaries become key players in a country’s power politics is an issue that has puzzled many,” writes the Pakistani analyst Ayesha Siddiqa in “Military Inc.” (Pluto, $35). Her answer is that the brass is protecting its gold.A military industrial complex can form a part of a regular economy, as in the United States or Britain, she says, but in some places, like Indonesia or Pakistan, military business operates in the shadows, broadly distorting values. Ms. Siddiqa uses the term “Milbus” to refer to “military capital that is used for the personal benefit of the military fraternity, especially the officer cadre, but is neither recorded nor part of the defense budget.”
Her book, while dense and full of jargon, offers a detailed and powerful case study of a global phenomenon: hollow economic growth. Ms. Siddiqa’s empirical riches on Milbus were not easy to come by. Some were extracted by Pakistan’s parliamentary opposition after 2002; some she culled from official reports. (President Musharraf, she writes, has disclosed more than $10 million in real estate assets.) She also conducted interviews and has relied on Pakistani journalists’ muckraking.
Even if her “rough figure” for the overall scale of Milbus (about £10 billion, or $20.7 billion) and her accounts of specific examples prove in need of revision,
Ms. Siddiqa has dared to illuminate Pakistan’s military as an oppressive holding company possessing not just security-related businesses, but also hotels, shopping malls, insurance companies, banks, farms and an airline. How did Pakistan’s armed forces end up dominating the economy? Awarding land grants to soldiers dates back to the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny against British colonial rule. After 1947, when Britain departed and Pakistan separated bloodily from India, the perceived external threat from India, and the dispute over the province of Kashmir (left unresolved by the British), kept the military front and center in Pakistan.
Distrustful military men sought to ensure their institution’s financial autonomy, Ms. Siddiqa argues; then they sought direct control over policy making. In the bargain, they enriched themselves. Post-independence expansion of Milbus occurred most prominently via welfare foundations, under the guise of providing for the needs of the troops and their families, whether with bakeries or beauty parlors. In addition, land grants, pensions five times the civilian level and post-retirement jobs — “the most significant group involved in Milbus are retired personnel” — were designed to make service attractive. But Ms. Siddiqa writes that “out of the 46 housing schemes directly built by the armed forces, none is for ordinary soldiers.” Milbus acts like an upward funnel.
Milbus justifies its commercial empire by disparaging civilians as incompetent and corrupt and insisting that the military alone promote national development. Just such a developmental apology for Pakistan’s military rule was echoed in American academic and policy circles throughout the cold war.
To refute these claims, which endure among Pakistan’s officer corps, Ms. Siddiqa tallies the bailouts for military-run businesses. When Milbus earns profits, Ms. Siddiqa writes, they often derive from insider access to resources and contracts. A number of top military companies, she shows, were granted outright monopolies, which wiped out competitive civilian companies. Milbus displays all the inefficiencies of crony capitalism, worsened by the military hierarchy. She writes about what she views as appeasement of Milbus in actions of two rival civilian prime ministers. Later, they were exiled. One, Nawaz Sharif, was recently deported when he tried to return to Pakistan, and the other, Benazir Bhutto, was just allowed back in a tenuous deal.
By way of possible remedy, Ms. Siddiqa calls for the unity of Pakistan’s opposition parties, long a chimerical pursuit, and for a mass mobilization to democratize the political system. In fact, she writes that the military might be viewed as Pakistan’s largest political party, an all-volunteer force recruited primarily from the lower middle class. And she also notes that in China from the late 1990s, it was not democratic mobilization, but the autocratic Communist Party leadership that compelled the Chinese military to divest much of its vast economic holdings.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League in British India, helped establish Pakistan as a separate state for Muslims (not an Islamic state). He insisted that “the future of our state will and must depend greatly on the type of education we give to our children.” He was right. But education in Pakistan turned out to be elitist to an extreme, and steeped in national security demonologies, which helped deliver the nation into military hands. The upshot has been not just political instability, but also economic growth without development.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/business/04shelf.html There are none so blind as those that cannot see.......or those who cum at the sight of a jet fighter.
Topic: Islamic Scholar Attacks Pakistan's Blasphemy Laws