Friday, December 28, 2007

Us, worried?

"Our assessment is that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal is under control," said Pentagon spokesman Colonel Gary Keck. "At this time, we have no need for concern."
-- Pentagon readies plans for Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

P.S. David Remnick quotes Mary Anne Weaver's 1993 description of Benazir Bhutto:
She is part Radcliffe and Oxford, with an extremely well-stocked mind, full of feminist literature, peace marches, the Oxford Union, and with a very liberated social life. She is also part feudal Sindh, a haughty aristocrat, the daughter and granddaughter of immensely wealthy landlords, whose inheritance gave her the right to rule. . . . She is an Eastern fatalist by birth, a Western liberal by conviction, and a people-power revolutionary—who has carefully modelled herself on Evita PerĂ³n and Corazon Aquino—through sheer necessity. She is an expensively educated product of the West who has ruled a male-dominated Islamic society of the East. She is a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties.
P.S. 30 Dec: Sound analysis, as ever, from William Dalrymple, who writes that Bhutto, a product of elective feudalism, failed to pass a single piece of major legislation during her first 20-month premiership.

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