Power and Privilege : Life is tough in Pakistan, for everybody but the generals. The election of a new Parliament will do little to rein in the military, whose spending is strangling the country.(politics)(Statistical Data Included)(Illustration)

A score of Pakistani peasants, dressed in shalwar kameez and turbans, stood nervously before a table piled high with land contracts. They had come to the sprawling Military Farms--a 17,000-acre dairy, meat and grain-producing agribusiness in the heart of the fertile Punjab--at the urging of its owner, the Pakistani Army. According to Army Col. Saleem Khan, the commander of a paramilitary unit assigned to the area, the tenant farmers were voluntarily signing new land-tenure contracts. After two years of resistance, he claimed, a majority of the 15,000 tenant families who'd been working the land had agreed to the military's new terms. As proof, he pointed to several ...