January 7, 2007: Academic: Terrorism and Continual Crisis Helps Pakistani President Musharraf to Stay in Power

In a review of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s autobiography In the Line of Fire, Fouad Ajami, director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, writes in the New York Times, “It is essential for Musharraf that Pakistan be a ‘dangerous place’: he and his country… feed off the menace.” Pakistani journalist and regional expert Ahmed Rashid agrees. He will later write: “As long as Pakistan remained the center for Talibanization, terrorism, or nuclear proliferation, the world could not ignore the military regime or dispense with Musharraf.… The West continued to view Musharraf as the only person capable of holding Pakistan together, even though some diplomats acknowledged that ‘Pakistan now negotiates with its allies and friends by pointing a gun to its own head.’” [Rashid, 2008, pp. 291, 444]