Selig Harrison, Director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy, writes in today’s New York Times OP-Ed page that Pakistan may be on the verge of splitting apart along ethnic lines into three sovereign parts (link to article).
For a dissenting (and decidedly more optimistic) outlook, see William Dalrymple, “A New Deal in Pakistan,” New York Review of Books, vol. 55, no. 5, April 3, 2008, pp. 14ff. Dalrymple, who lives in New Delhi and writes frequently about Islam in south Asia, published his piece after the mid-February parliamentary elections in Pakistan. He notes, “…it is clear that Pakistanis have overwhelmingly rejected the military and Islamist options and chosen instead to back secular democracy,” and, “The country I saw in February on a long road trip from Lahore in the Punjab down through rural Sindh to Karachi was not a failed state, or anything even approaching ‘the most dangerous country in the world’ [a jab at a recent cover story in The Economist].”
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[...] Question:Is Berman’s pessimism completely or even partially warranted? See William Dalrymple’s comments on the recent elections in Pakistan, for example, where a middle class majority overrode much of the religious vote. Posted by [...]
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