See Pakistan Think Yemen

One of the things about thinking so much about one particular country is that everything tends to be processed through that one filter. This can be both good and bad. Good in that one is constantly thinking about the country in different ways, but bad in the sense that over time everything begins to resemble Yemen, which is not always, indeed often is not, true.

Still I couldn’t help but think of Yemen when I read this paragraph in Nicholas Schmidle’s book on Pakistan (pg. 134):

“Cynics parading as realists said Musharraf had everything under control. That his intelligence agencies allowed the various crises to fester and create the impression in Washington that Pakistan was beleaguered with threats – and that Musharraf was the only one who could manage them all.”