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61 " Pakistan has gone on to try and define by law who is or is not a Muslim, adopted (and abandoned) interest-free banking, considered segregation of the sexes in public, and endeavoured to implement sharia. The quality of education in Pakistan has declined as a result of attempts to comply with clerical demands. "
― Husain Haqqani , Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State
62 " Pakistani officers consider the most regressive clerics patriotic because, after all, they would never make common cause with Pakistan’s external enemies—the Indians and whoever else Pakistani intelligence might know or imagine as conspiring against the country at any given moment. Liberal and secular thinkers, on the other hand, are permanently suspect. If they speak up for any ethnic group, they must want Pakistan’s disintegration; if they ask for a secular state, they could be asking for eliminating Pakistan’s identity and a virtual reincorporation into India; and if they question the army’s political role or its budget, they must be in league with ‘the enemy’. "
63 " National pride should not deter Pakistanis from confronting the fact that education has not been their national priority the same way as, say, acquiring nuclear weapons. "
64 " The number of clerics has also increased exponentially. At Independence in 1947, there were only 137 madrasas (Islamic seminaries) in Pakistan. Nine years later, a 1956 survey reported that the number of madrasas had increased to 244 in West Pakistan. By 1995, the ministry of education estimated the figure at 3,906, which increased to 7,000 in 2000 and 35,000 by 2016. "
65 " Seventy years after its birth, Pakistan is a volatile semi-authoritarian, national security state, which has failed to run itself consistently under constitutional order or rule of law. Examining the causes of Pakistan’s persistent dysfunction, including an inquiry into its foundational idea, is more important than building a ‘positive image’ through half-truths. "
66 " As of 2014, Pakistan is home to the third largest illiterate population globally and there are only fifteen countries in the world with a lower literacy rate than Pakistan. 34 "
67 " The average Pakistani student is brought up on a mix of dogma and mythology that does not encourage respect for facts or empiricism. "
68 " There are forty-three countries in the world that are poorer than Pakistan on a per capita GDP basis45 but twenty-four of them send more children to primary school than Pakistan does. "
69 " The pervasiveness of distortions of history and the tendency to discuss even the sciences in the context of Islam’s glory or Pakistan’s security, crafts a mind that sees things not as they are but as it would like them to be. The consequence of using education as a tool of ideological indoctrination has been to undermine the quality of Pakistani education. Although Pakistan has produced many individuals who have done path breaking work in the sciences and even social sciences, these are the exceptions, not the norm. "
70 " According to Trump, ‘The Pakistani people have suffered greatly from terrorism and extremism. We recognize those contributions and those sacrifices. But Pakistan has also sheltered the same organizations that try every single day to kill our people. We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting. But that will have to change, and that will change immediately. No partnership can survive a country’s harboring of militants and terrorists who target US service members and officials. It is time for Pakistan to demonstrate its commitment to civilization, order and to peace. "
71 " Pakistan could continue to survive as it has done so far and defy further negative predictions. But if it does not grow economically sufficiently, integrate globally and remains mired in ideological debates and crises, how would its next seven decades be any different from the past seventy years? "
72 " In Pakistan, a perception has been officially cultivated that anyone who offers facts, statistics or opinions that do not coincide with the national narrative does so at the behest of Pakistan’s many external enemies. "
73 " A few weeks after the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that ‘Pakistan has everything that gives you an international migraine. It has nuclear weapons, it has terrorism, extremists, corruption, it’s very poor and it’s in a location that’s really, really important. "
74 " The constant refrain of Islamizing a Muslim-majority country, coupled with the belief that this nation must always be in conflict with its largest neighbour because of religious differences, is in many ways at the heart of most of Pakistan’s current problems. "