Khaansaab, since I consider myself a jahil I don't know if you are appreciating or degrading me above. Ah! Ignorance is bliss :)
Respectfully, the only thing I will say in my defense is that you are putting words in my post. I NEVER, I repeat NEVER, said that Yahya, Zardari, Benazir, NS' periods were better! The problem is that you have pre-conceived notions about what I am trying to say and thats the reason that you tend to take the doctored graphs presented to show military dictator's rule as golden periods but see the graphs that I presented as reverse - Sigh! If you like i can provide sources for your convenience. You are entitled to your opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts - in fact no one is - including me!
Devil is in the details Khaansaab, devil is in the details!
Check this pie chart(
source). If the economy was doing so great then why were we (musharraf era) taking grants/loans during this time (2004-2009):
Mind you, these numbers are what we received annually. If you add them up for the period mentioned then it adds up to some significant amount.
As for IMF's aid to Pakistan, here is an excerpt from the report that you can find
here:
THE YEAR 2003-04:
Most projects with IMF were suspended because Pakistan could not complete their conditions. But first time in 2004, Pakistan got the entire amount which was sanctioned by IMF on PRGF which is $1.47 billion dollars.
Now that I have bored you with more data (facts) let me conclude my point by reiterating what I was trying to say in my initial post and which is that it happened to be that during the military dictators' eras the economy was largely propped up by the foreign aid coming in thanks to the geo-strategic situation in the region and the part we played on behalf of the western world and their lackeys in the region, the Gulf countries.
As I said earlier, you are entitled to your own opinions and you may love musharraf or Ayub or Zia or any other military dictator that may come but the fact remains that unless there is a war going on in our neighborhood that the western world or the brotherly gulf countries have a stake in, our economy will be teetering unless we get our house in order and make the fundamentals of our economy strong.
For the umpteenth time I will say it on this forum that if you pick up the data that lists the economic indicators from countries in the region and some comparable countries even in other parts of the world you will see similar growth numbers and economic stability across the board. There may be some exceptions but largely you would see pretty similar numbers. That will show you that during the mid 2000s the global economy was red hot. Here is a link to read up on it. I hope you know what put a screeching halt to the economies of the world in 2008 since most of this so called economic boom was in fact based on pure speculation.
