Nightingale was found guilty of having a 9mm Glock pistol and 338 rounds of ammunition in the bedroom of his shared army house.
Yet it has become very clear that an overwhelming majority of Pakistani people do not share the army's India obsession or its yearning for "strategic depth" — that is, a continuing deadly muddle — in Afghanistan.
This sparked a wave of demonstrations by millions of secular Turks, who shared the army's aversion to Mr Gul's earlier flirtation with political Islam.
At a May 2011 prayer breakfast, reported by TRCB News: "[Keynote speaker and Naval Station Great Lakes Commander Robert Sullivan] shared an army saying which said that there are no atheists in foxholes.
E-mail address GO SIGN UP Share Tweet The army remains on the streets in some numbers.
But the people of Egypt — the grandmothers in veils who have dared to share Tahrir Square with army tanks, the jubilant young people who have risked their lives for their first taste of these new freedoms — are not so easily fooled.
Between 1900 and 1903 the cavalry's share of the army budget was cut from six to under 4.5 per cent, and recruiting for the cavalry was suspended for a year.
But the Turkish army shares the Algerian army's profound fear of Islamic fundamentalism and, as a result, is reluctant to let unfettered democracy run its course.None of the Algerian would-be presidents was an open Islamist, though one leading candidate had been endorsed by Islamist exiles.
Admiral Gary Roughead (a former chief of naval operations) and Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution, a think-tank, say that part of the problem is that the Pentagon traditionally asks for equal budget shares for the army, the navy, the air force and the marines.
That will mean the military must give up its monopoly on power, and that isn't easy for any leader of a regime, especially one deeply invested in its country's economy — a trait Egypt's army shares with the People's Liberation Army in China.
