I Shot Musharraf

This situation in Pakistan is obviously scary. I see that we have given Pakistan over $10 billion in aid, mostly military, in the last six years. This reminds me of the situation in Bangladesh, which I've written about before. In that case, we used UN peacekeeping jobs, which are highly lucrative, to bribe the military into taking over the government. Unsurprisingly, the military has not given up power yet.

Now I wonder if some similar dynamic is at work in Pakistan. $10 billion is a lot of money - are we essentially bribing the military to do what we want? You can see why the average Pakistani might not be happy if that's the case. Anyway, I don't have much more to add, just noting a source of leverage that we have.