Pakistan: Armed Forces Inc.

It's early morning in Islamabad, and a middle-class child sits down for breakfast. He pours sugar refined from Fauji Sugar Mills into a bowl of Fauji oatmeal, which his mother cooked using gas bottled by Fauji LPG. In the next room his father logs onto his computer running on electricity produced by the Fauji Kabirwala power plant and clicks onto a program that uses Fauji software. The house they all live in was, of course, built with Fauji cement.

The Fauji group is as pervasive a commercial presence in Pakistan as General Electric is in the U.S. And the Fauji companies, all part of the Fauji Foundation, are closely linked to an even more ubiquitous institution--the Pakistani military, itself a formidable force in the economy.