Word: soldierly
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...never the brightest boy, not even in his family. His mother Zohra predicted grand futures for his bookworm elder brother Javed, a Rhodes scholar who works at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, and younger brother Naved, an anesthesiologist in Chicago. Hearty Pervez, she decreed, should be a soldier. "For all of us," Musharraf says today, "she selected the right profession." (Zohra still lives with Musharraf and breakfasts with him most days, reading headlines aloud and making sure he doesn't seem overly stressed. "She sees me off in the morning," the President says...
...Pakistani soldiers are well trained in the art of survival, and Musharraf remains a soldier to his core. Indeed, he still bids farewell to civilians and even foreign journalists with a salute. The trouble is, politics--local and international--requires a different set of skills: the art of compromise, the popular touch, Machiavellian guile, a rare gift for persuasion. And those skills are not taught at the military academy...
...soldier's attitude toward politics springs from his training at the academy. All cadets attend lectures on governance. Arts majors take a political-science course studying Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Indian strategist Chanakya, Arab historian Ibn Khaldun and Pakistani poet Muhammad Iqbal. But the average soldier learns more in the mess hall and the boxing ring than from this tutoring in political theory. "Phhh," sneers Major General Hamid Rab Nawaz, the academy's commandant. "I never studied political science myself...
...soldier is beginning to show the strain. Musharraf still exercises every evening, briskly striding around the tightly guarded Army House compound. But he is suffering from a bum shoulder and can barely lift his arm. "See?" he says, failing to get it fully over his head. "That's as far as it goes." His daily tennis game, played with security guards, was canceled a few months...
...because of its strategic significance but because of what it stood for - the ethnic cohabitation of Muslim, Croat and Serb. The Croat commander whose unit deliberately brought the bridge down alluded to that when he said the ancient landmark was "not worth even the finger of one Croat soldier." Today, Mostar's Muslims and Croats (the Serbs fled during the war) do not mix much, keeping to their respective banks of the river, especially after dark. They don't share the same feelings about the bridge, either. While Muslims are uniformly enthusiastic, Croats say its significance - and the importance...