Pakistani army's '$20bn' business
submitted 1 month 26 days 1 hour ago by: shakeel333 : 3 commentsThe Pakistani military's "welfare foundations" run thousands of businesses worth tens of billions of dollars, ranging from street-corner petrol pumps to sprawling industrial plants, says Ayesha Siddiqa, the author of Military Inc: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy.
Siddiqa says the military's private wealth could be as high $20bn, a "rough figure", she says, split between $10bn in land and $10 in private military assets.
Siddiqa fears that her book may step on some powerful toes. "Over the past three years a lot of my friends have advised me not to publish this book. They think I have suicidal tendencies."
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E5C408D6-2425-4BA3-BF34-215F94459...
The country's first civilian government in 1953. Since then, the governor-generals, presidents and army chiefs have dismissed as many as ten civilian governments that together ruled the country for 27 years. The remaining 33 years have seen direct military rule. /the Americans have tended to use their crucial financial and military support selectively against democratic governments.
Aid to dictators
Last, but not least, the Americans have tended to use their crucial financial and military support selectively against democratic governments.
The pattern is unmistakably clear.
The first large-scale American food and military aid started to pour into Pakistan in late 1953, months after the dismissal of its first civilian government.
It continued for a decade as Pakistan under a military regime joined various US-sponsored defence pacts against the Soviet Union.
The US started having problems with Pakistan when an elected government came to power in 1972, but poured billions of dollars into the country when another military regime took over in 1977 and agreed to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Similarly, while the elected governments that followed during 1988-99 had to live with a decade of US sanctions, the military regime of Gen Musharraf, that ousted the last civilian government in 1999, remains a 'well supplied' ally in the US' 'war on terror'.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/6940148.stm
Comments
Shakeel, unfortunately, judging from the comments on buzzvines which are a close approximation of the general attitude of the larger Pakistani population, you will be ridiculed for 'army bashing', you will be told that the army and Musharraf have done wonders for the country (without a single wonder ever being mentioned, of course) and the whole thing will be downplayed as nothing more than American propaganda instigated, of course, at the behest of American Jews and the other Zionists.
For me and other realists, this information is nothing more than confirmation of what we already know and have debated well.
the question is that is it good or bad.
in one way its good that one organization is providing so much employment, continoualy re-investing, adding to GDP and exports etc.
so how can this be bad? unless ofcourse the military higups steal some of the profits.
can anyone explain how can this be bad
There is no oversight which means that corruption can and does abound more importantly it makes the people firmly subservient to the army rather than the other way round