Stephen Philip Cohen > Quotes

“One important difference between the two states is that Pakistan's domestic and external policies are more entwined than those of India, partly because of Pakistan's more perilous geostrategic position and partly because the dominant Pakistan army looks both inward and outward.”
― Stephen Philip Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan

“-Failure of vision. Pakistan's founders expected the idea of Pakistan to shape the state of Pakistan; instead, a military bureaucracy governs the state and imposes its own vision of a Pakistani nation.”
― Stephen Philip Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan

“by allies, meant no good to its neighbor. Between them, Pakistan, China, and the United States, each for its own reasons, wanted to contain India, the new, independent, and rising power. This was the dominant Indian strategic outlook in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, up to the end of the cold war. India was able to pursue a policy of inaction for several reasons.15 First, it was the preferred policy most of the time—the default policy, and the guiding philosophy of one of India's least-heralded prime ministers, P. V. Narasimha Rao. He used to tell associates that in time most problems would take care of themselves. Rao demonstrated this by forwarding no significant initiatives toward Islamabad during his tenures as foreign minister and prime minister. At the same time, India has often been unable to act because”
― Stephen P. Cohen, Shooting for a Century: The India-Pakistan Conundrum