Talk:Pervez Musharraf

"He has been criticised for not intervening..."
One thing I always hate to read are sentences that start this way. Passive voice is weak - Who criticised him for this? Ideally, this sentence should read "A 2007 report from HRW/Amnesty/The International Association of Mimes crticised Musharraf for..."PFoster 13:10, 1 January 2008 (EST)

My in-laws in Rawalpindi did and they include his successor, General Kayani (though he has not said anything). Musharraf is in a difficult position, trying to hold the line between people who want to make money, have families and get on with their lives and people who want to run about Lahore attempting to impose Taliban rule by murdering people and blowing themselves up. Much of the terror that has disfigured the latter part of 2007 has been since the storming of the Lal Masjid and the imposition of emergency rule has to be seen in this context as well as Musharraf's constitutional wrangling with the Supreme Court. Although he has strong-armed the court with the Army, his elected - and "elected" has to be seen in the same context as elections in 18th century England, with votes being traded by feudal landlords for tax exemption - predecessor Nawaz Sharif did the same with his PML party thugs (who also took the opportunity to run over my wife several times when she exposed electoral fraud).

I am not criticising Musharraf except with hindsight, which gives us all 20/20 vision, but despite the criticism inherent in this article, Musharraf is -in military dictator terms- very moderate in comparison with the last one, General Zia or the Burmese. The Pakistani Army has taken much higher losses than any other in the fight against vicious fundamentalists. This has resulted in an increasingly dirty war in Waziristan in which the assassination of warring tribal leaders by the Intelligence Servics has inflamed rather than dampened the situation.

Furthermore Musharraf only came to power after Sharif attempted to kill him as well as the other 400 passengers on a PIA jet. Human Rights "activists" and journalists have not visited tribal areas to find out what is really going on because it is too dangerous and prefer to sit in Rawalpindi, venturing out of the Pearl Continental to give thoughtful pieces to camera or reports to the UN, but they would be out of there the moment the Taliban took over, as they were in Kabul when 50,000 people were massacred by the so-called "Mujahadeen" they had been sympathising with. The plight of such people is then studiously ignored as it is with the casualties of suicide bombers who are not political leaders. One of my nephew's friends was a bodyguard whose car was hit by a bomb intended for Musharraf, but nobody wrote a report about his human rights.

The Pakistan Army is an organisation losing its respect not for its brutality but its lack of success against the Enemies of Rationality. The Army is over 150 years old but the country is only 50 and for all its faults, which are many, is the only institution that holds the country together. The leaders of the "democratic" parties are more interested in their own positions and point-scoring and their supporters in burning lorries and post offices than in the country.

Their demands for an early election would be more credible if their supporters had not gone about burning voter registration lists in this process.

Streona 00:00, 2 January 2008 (EST)

MEGO. Paragraph breaks would help. From the first sentence of this post, does that mean that the sentence in question should read "Streona's in-laws have criticised Musharaff for..."?

Look, I'm as interested in Pakistan as the next guy, and I see the links between fundamentalist Islam, Pakistan's current malaises, and this wiki's mission statement. I'm just not sure if this is the place for prolonged discussions on the intricacies of 150 years of Pakistan's political history... PFoster 00:05, 2 January 2008 (EST)
 * Streona, you have to use two "enter"s to get the MW software to make paragraphs, one just gets ignored. I had to fix that on a number of things you wrote.  Also did it above.
 * Also, I find it odd that you didn't really address the question, unless it really is your in-laws who are the "citation", in which case, maybe that belongs on your user page. Also try to understand what PFoster means by "passive voice" if you are going to write long articles.  The subject of a sentence should be the thing doing the "acting", not the thing "being acted on".  What happens if you use it too much is that the point of a sentence will get vague, and if it continues with commentary, extra clauses and stuff, the meaning becomes almost impossible to decipher.  Anyway, I hope you have a great new year, and continue to join in here at RW! human  03:38, 2 January 2008 (EST)