Ahmed Rashid opens his new book, Pakistan on the Brink, with a quote from SirWilliam F. Butler’s 1889 biography of Charles George Gordon (also known as Gordon Pasha), which captures the essence of the Pakistani state in such totality and definitude, the citation demands verbatim reproduction: The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
Be wary of those who maintain otherwise because, if not deranged, such persons are very likely members of the ISI (albeit, they might be both). Be it ineptitude or malfeasance – the naked truth is that Pakistan’s leaders have reduced the country to a nuclear-armed, near-bankrupt, terrorist breeding ground - in short, as Andrew Bacevich recently put it: “Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world.”
Despite being ranked the 13th most failed state on earth by Foreign Policy magazine, Pakistan plans on increasing military expenditures by another 10% next year, even though a disproportionate amount of the federal budget is already dedicated to maintaining the seventh largest army on the planet and the most insecure nuclear arsenal this side of Pyongyang. http://www.aopnews.com/opinion/hughes_pakistan_failed_state.shtml
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