Tahir Hussain

“Much of what has gone wrong in Pakistan has been because of our inability to balance our relationships. Extreme tilts have caused much bloodshed and mistrust.”
― Reham Khan, Reham Khan

“Powell’s superiors at State had instructed her before she departed for Islamabad not to get into cabling wars with the U.S. embassies in Kabul and India over I.S.I.’ s conduct or other sources of controversy about Pakistan. But Khalilzad raised the temperature. In one cable, Powell felt that he had attempted to question her “loyalty and patriotism” simply because she had tried to describe Pakistan’s position of relative weakness in relation to the Taliban and the fact that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan “has never ever been controlled.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
― Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

“One view at the highest levels of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by summer’s end was that Karzai “was a very clever madman—just because he was insane doesn’t mean he was stupid.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016