By Omar Waraich
The New Yorker - December 3, 2013
When General Raheel Sharif
was appointed as Pakistan’s Army chief last week, a flurry of profiles
described the new occupant of the country’s most powerful office as a
“moderate” and “professional” soldier, with “no interest in politics.”
In a country that has spent half its history under military rule, this
is a polite way of saying that General Sharif is unlikely to overthrow
the government. For Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who selected the new
Army chief, this disinclination to political involvement may have been
among General Sharif’s prime qualifications—Nawaz’s previous term in
office came to an abrupt end, in 1999, when he was ousted by General Pervez Musharraf, whom he had handpicked to head the Army.
Nawaz Sharif’s election earlier this year
marked a milestone for Pakistan: for the first time, an elected
civilian government completed a full five years in office and made an
orderly transfer of power to its successor. For much of those five
years, speculation swirled that the government, headed by Asif Ali
Zardari, the husband of the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, would
not survive. Now it appears that Sharif—whose party enjoys a large
majority in Parliament—should be able to complete another full term of
his own. If that happens, the door to further military coups, which has
been slowly creaking closed, might even be firmly shut.
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