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Commentary - Stephen Cohen: Assessing Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf
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WASHINGTON (Map, News) - As a general, [Pakistani President Pervez ] Musharraf got mixed reviews from his peers. As a politician, he has shown little talent. His one strength, until Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry defied him, was that his opponents were even less inspiring.
Musharraf’s rule has not been without merit. Going against the views of army hard-liners, he lobbed one Kashmir proposal after another at the Indian government, putting it on the defensive. Under Musharraf, Pakistan’s position has changed from insistence upon a plebiscite (something India will never allow) to one of several alternative arrangements, all designed to save face for Islamabad.
Musharraf did preside over economic reform, but the World Bank has pointed out that income disparities and rural poverty have both grown while the urban elite make money hand over fist. His treatment of the press has been retrograde. It is Orwellian for American officials to claim that Pakistan is on the road to democracy.
You can read the rest of this study on the Brookings Web site at: www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/cohens/20070703.htm.
Comments from Examiner Readers
10:53 AM MST on Fri., Jul. 20, 2007 re: "Pietro S. Nivola: Uncle Sam suffering from attention deficit disorder"
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4:57 AM MST on Wed., May. 9, 2007
re: "Sunlight study sees 10 ways to open the House"
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Mr. Mirth Alert said:
Mr. Nivola should thank the Lord that he's allowed to put his ignorance on public display, for he knows little about division of labor & nothing about attention deficit disorder. Division of labor was a mfr.'ing scheme, to produce more for less, i.e., increase profit. Despite Mr. Mellon's early 20th-century claim that good govt. is good business, govt. neither mfrs. nor turns a profit. & This notion of doing a little of everything need not be explained by some questionable medical diagnosis but rather by the very dictum that got the guy who appointed all the policy makers elected: "I can please all of the people all of the time." Overstretched govt. is the product of deliberate planning, not some behavioral miscue.
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Examiner Reader said:
Sorry, but this Open House Project commentary reads like an Onion parody column: who @the Sunlight Fdn. sincerely believes that Congress has any interest in empowering the public? The gulf betw. haves & have-nots widens a little more each day, & as "haves" Congress sure as shootin' has nothing to gain by reducing that gulf. Never mind all this techno nonsense, Sunlight Fdn.: arrest members of Congress & detain them for 48 hr; if for no reason other than to shake it outta its "have" stupor.
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