Quotes About Pakistan

Your problem," he once announced to a Pakistani journalist with whom he had become annoyed, "is that you're an elitist, whereas I began my life as a son of a schoolteacher. I sat on a mat on the floor and learned to read and write. . . . We are homespun. We are nationalists. We are not like your Sandhurst friends. Not like Musharraf.

Panetta dined with Pasha and Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widow, who shared authority uneasily with the army. Zardari made jokes about I.S.I.'s pervasive surveillance of him—jokes that sounded paranoid but were grounded in fact. "Ahmed knows everything I think and everything I say," Zardari remarked of the I.S.I. chief sitting near him. "I walk into my office every morning and say, 'Hello, Ahmed!

Still, the Pakistanis beat the CIA's systems. In Quetta in 1983, ISI officers were caught colluding with Afghan rebels to profit by selling off CIA-supplied weapons. In another instance, the Pakistan army quietly sold the CIA its own surplus .303 rifles and about 30 million bullets. A ship registered in Singapore picked up about 100,000 guns in Karachi, steamed out to sea, turned around, came back to port, and off-loaded the guns, pretending they had come from abroad.

Black Label–sipping Pakistani generals with London flats and daughters on Ivy League campuses had been managing jihadi guerrilla campaigns against India and in Afghanistan for two decades.

The clandestine alliance between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was grounded in history. Each was a young, insecure nation that saw Islam as central to its identity. Pakistani troops had been hired by the Saudis in the past for security deployments in the kingdom. The Saudi air force had secretly provided air cover over Karachi during Pakistan's 1971 war with India.4

The military-industrial complex was one of Pakistan's binding forces, alongside Islam, national pride, suspicion of India and America, and cricket.

Why dictator Musharraf, raising the slogan of 'Pakistan First,' did not think about construction of Dasu and Basha dams?

I come from the small town of Sialkot in Pakistan. During pre-Partition, this town had the highest literacy rate among women.

I was in Pakistan in Islamabad when Bhutto was assassinated, and the next day, you know, there's just plumes of smoke everywhere. I mean, Islamabad is on fire.

These so-called extremists in Pakistan should be brought into the mainstream; if you marginalize them, you radicalize them.

Pakistan, she observed, had a policy of "profiting from the disputes of others," and she cited Pakistan's desire to benefit from tension between the great powers and Pakistan's early focus on the Palestine dispute as examples of this tendency. "Pakistan was occupied with her own grave internal problem, but she still found time to talk fervently of sending 'a liberation army to Palestine to help the Arabs free the Holy Land from the Jews

Pakistan's view of itself as a 'citadel of Islam' has created an environment in which violence is normal provided it is committed in the name of Islam.

At least part of Pakistan's quality of education problem stems from its ideological orientation. The goal of education in Pakistan is not to enable critical thinking but to produce skilled professionals capable of applying transferred information instead of being able to think for themselves. To produce soldiers, engineers and doctors indoctrinated with a specifically defined Islamic ideology, the country has ignored liberal arts and social sciences.

Bengali leader, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (who served as Pakistan's prime minister in 1956) had noted as early as March 1948 that Pakistan's elite was predisposed to 'raising the cry of "Pakistan in danger" for the purpose of arousing Muslim sentiments and binding them together' to maintain its power.

Radical and violent manifestations of Islamist ideology, which sometimes appear to threaten Pakistan's stability, are in some ways a state project gone wrong.

In popular sentiment, just as conspiracies have made Pakistan weak and vulnerable, its destined economic greatness has been thwarted by corruption, not poor policy choices.

Suhrawardy, who was barred from politics by Ayub Khan, challenged the concept of Pakistan as an ideological state. Emphasis on ideology, he argued, "would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence.

The exigencies of maintaining the West Pakistani political, bureaucratic and military elite in power were the major reason why, after Jinnah's death, the secular Muslim nationalist path was hurriedly abandoned.

Many of Pakistan's problems—from falling behind in secular education to the rise of Islamist extremism—can be traced to the country's founding on the basis of religious nationalism.

Of all the United States' partners in the global war on terrorism, Pakistan is the most vexing and arguably the most important.

Pakistan has been unfortunate that its leaders and rulers have repeatedly chosen ideological wooden-headedness over pursuit of reasonable and viable options.

The alliance between the mosque and the military in Pakistan was forged over time, and its character has changed with the twists and turns of Pakistani history.

But insecurity remains the hallmark of Pakistan's political and intellectual conversation. Even a comment about, say, Pakistan's relatively low ranking among nations for book readership, is portrayed as an attack on the idea of Pakistan.

One-third of the Indian subcontinent's Muslims remained behind as a minority in Hindu dominated India even after partition in 1947. The other two-thirds now lives in two separate countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh, confirming the doubts expressed before independence about the practicality of the two nation theory.