Something I didn’t realize until this weekend is that Pakistan was, quite recently, a richer country in per capita than its larger neighbor India. But over the past decades that has changed. Pakistan has put up decent growth numbers, but India’s have been better and it’s now the substantially richer country as well as a much larger one:
World Bank, World Development Indicators – Google Public Data ExplorerEdit descriptionwww.google.comI don’t like to spend too much time playing fake South India expert, but it seems to me that if you’re a responsible leader in the Pakistani security forces, this trend is going to be your overwhelming concern. Pakistan is weaker than its key regional rival, and the gap is growing. Policy toward everything else — Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, whatever — is going to take a back seat.