Introduction

Pakistan’s experience stands out from other countries not only in the taxation field, but also
with respect to the importance of the external factors in shaping its development. We have
seen Hilary Synott’s earlier allusion to the ‘heavy price Pakistan has paid for other countries’
behavior towards it’. He was referring specifically to the Wests accommodation with the Zia
regime and its encouragement of the launching of an international jihad from Pakistan’s soil
in the service of its service of its Cold War strategic rivalry with the Soviet Union, The
‘blowback’ of militancy from the latter development has been a key destabilizing factor. One
could in fact deepen the historical analysis and see the understanding of democracy in
Pakistan’s formative years as being in part the result of a Western accommodation with the
emerging power of the army. As early as the mid-1950s, it was in receipt of an aid package of
$500 million. Another constant in the US-Pakistan relationship is Washington’s frustration at
Pakistani ‘ingratitude’. The prevalence of current anti-American sentiment is well
established. A pew Research Center survey after Osama bin Laden’s killing revealed that
only 12 per cent of respondents had a positive view of the Unites States. Five decades earlier,
a similar state of affairs prevailed. The Americans had funneled aid to Ayub Khan in the last
1950s to assist economic ‘take-off’, and in the context of Pakistan’s aligned status with US
security pacts, designed to isolate the Soviet Union. When the United States for the first time
supplies weapons on a large scale to India following its defeat in the October 1962 war with
China, there were not only protest in the Pakistan National Assembly but also an invasion of
the USIS library grounds in Karachi and the stoning of Flash man’s Hotel in Rawalpindi,
which was well known for its Western clientele.43