Journalist Ahmed Rashid interviewed Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari for a June 11, 2009, article in the New York Review of Books. ” ‘We are not a failed state yet, but we may become one in ten years if we don’t receive international support to combat the Taliban threat,’ Zardari told me indignantly, pointing out that the United States had given [former President Pervez] Musharraf $11 billion between 2002 and 2008, but he had received only a pittance. ‘We have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive the economy. What are we supposed to do?’ Zardari believes that the United States owes it to Pakistan to bail it out with billions of dollars.”
– Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink, Page 138