The Role of the Army in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan is one of the poorest, most underdeveloped and politically fragmented countries in the world today. Its 125 million people, 17 per cent literate, increase at a rate of almost 3 per cent a year, subsist on a per capita income of under US$75 a year, and in East Pakistan have the great population density of nearly one thousand people per square mile. Its schools, hospitals, roads, sanitation facilities, and industrial plants are primitive by Western standards, in number and quality. In addition to being a divided country whose East and West wings are separated by nearly one thousand miles of hostile Indian territory, its people are disunited. They are divided not only into the Bengali-speaking peoples of the East wing and the Urdu-speaking peoples of the West wing, but culturally, ethnically, and even racially, as well.