Reddit mentions of Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy

>If it wasn't for these organizations, your veterans would be on the street.

I didn't say they were throwing money in the garbage or burning it. I said that it should be properly counted as part of the defense budget, which it currently isn't. This makes the defense budget appear smaller than it really is.

>Profits from Askari and FF don't come from the tax revenue or federal budget. The taxes from these companies go into boosting the budget.

What taxes? So far as I know, none of them pay taxes. FF, Askari, Shaheen and Bahria were all created under the Endowment Act as charitable foundations, and are therefore tax exempt.

>How is the act of creating business "extracting a lot of money out of the country"?

They don't create money out of vacuum. The military currently owns about 12% of Pakistan's entire land area, including some of the most expensive and useful land in the country. These are public assets that the military is using to generate income, so it's not exactly de novo wealth created by the military.

It's also pretty opaque. You can't just demand balance sheets and full accounting information from them, like you could from an ordinary business. Ayesha Siddiqa's book goes into detail about just how secretive these welfare foundations are, what kind of hold they have on the government that allows them to get sweetheart deals that are off-limits to the public.