Pakistan

Pakistan
Author: Anatol Lieven
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2012-03-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610391624

In the past decade Pakistan has become a country of immense importance to its region, the United States, and the world. With almost 200 million people, a 500,000-man army, nuclear weapons, and a large diaspora in Britain and North America, Pakistan is central to the hopes of jihadis and the fears of their enemies. Yet the greatest short-term threat to Pakistan is not Islamist insurgency as such, but the actions of the United States, and the greatest long-term threat is ecological change. Anatol Lieven's book is a magisterial investigation of this highly complex and often poorly understood country: its regions, ethnicities, competing religious traditions, varied social landscapes, deep political tensions, and historical patterns of violence; but also its surprising underlying stability, rooted in kinship, patronage, and the power of entrenched local elites. Engagingly written, combining history and profound analysis with reportage from Lieven's extensive travels as a journalist and academic, Pakistan: A Hard Country is both utterly compelling and deeply revealing.

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State
Author: Declan Walsh
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0393249921

Winner of the 2021 Overseas Press Club of America Cornelius Ryan Award The former New York Times Pakistan bureau chief paints an arresting, up-close portrait of a fractured country. Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times’s most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis—a chieftain readying for war at his desert fort, a retired spy skulking through the borderlands, and a crusading lawyer risking death for her beliefs, among others. Through these “nine lives” he describes a country on the brink—a place of creeping extremism and political chaos, but also personal bravery and dogged idealism that defy easy stereotypes. Unbeknownst to Walsh, however, an intelligence agent was tracking him. Written in the aftermath of Walsh’s abrupt deportation, The Nine Lives of Pakistan concludes with an astonishing encounter with that agent, and his revelations about Pakistan’s powerful security state. Intimate and complex, attuned to the centrifugal forces of history, identity, and faith, The Nine Lives of Pakistan offers an unflinching account of life in a precarious, vital country.

Pakistan

Pakistan
Author: Husain Haqqani
Publisher: Carnegie Endowment
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2010-03-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0870032852

Among U.S. allies in the war against terrorism, Pakistan cannot be easily characterized as either friend or foe. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is an important center of radical Islamic ideas and groups. Since 9/11, the selective cooperation of president General Pervez Musharraf in sharing intelligence with the United States and apprehending al Qaeda members has led to the assumption that Pakistan might be ready to give up its longstanding ties with radical Islam. But Pakistan's status as an Islamic ideological state is closely linked with the Pakistani elite's worldview and the praetorian ambitions of its military. This book analyzes the origins of the relationships between Islamist groups and Pakistan's military, and explores the nation's quest for identity and security. Tracing how the military has sought U.S. support by making itself useful for concerns of the moment—while continuing to strengthen the mosque-military alliance within Pakistan—Haqqani offers an alternative view of political developments since the country's independence in 1947.

Pakistan at the Crossroads

Pakistan at the Crossroads
Author: Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231540256

In Pakistan at the Crossroads, top international scholars assess Pakistan's politics and economics and the challenges faced by its civil and military leaders domestically and diplomatically. Contributors examine the state's handling of internal threats, tensions between civilians and the military, strategies of political parties, police and law enforcement reform, trends in judicial activism, the rise of border conflicts, economic challenges, financial entanglements with foreign powers, and diplomatic relations with India, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the United States. In addition to ethnic strife in Baluchistan and Karachi, terrorist violence in Pakistan in response to the American-led military intervention in Afghanistan and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas by means of drones, as well as to Pakistani army operations in the Pashtun area, has reached an unprecedented level. There is a growing consensus among state leaders that the nation's main security threats may come not from India but from its spiraling internal conflicts, though this realization may not sufficiently dissuade the Pakistani army from targeting the country's largest neighbor. This volume is therefore critical to grasping the sophisticated interplay of internal and external forces complicating the country's recent trajectory.

Big Capital in an Unequal World

Big Capital in an Unequal World
Author: Rosita Armytage
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2020-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789206170

Inside the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of Pakistan’s elite. Benefitting from rare access and keen analytical insight, Rosita Armytage’s rich study reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.

Muslim Zion

Muslim Zion
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 1849042764

Originally published: London: C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2013.

Reimagining Pakistan

Reimagining Pakistan
Author: Husain Haqqani
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2018-04-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9352777700

Salman Rushdie once described Pakistan as a 'poorly imagined country'. Indeed, Pakistan has meant different things to different people since its birth seventy years ago. Armed with nuclear weapons and dominated by the military and militants, it is variously described around the world as 'dangerous', 'unstable', 'a terrorist incubator' and 'the land of the intolerant'. Much of Pakistan's dysfunction is attributable to an ideology tied to religion and to hostility with the country out of which it was carved out -- India. But 95 per cent of Pakistan's 210 million people were born after Partition, as Pakistanis, and cannot easily give up on their home. In his new book, Husain Haqqani, one of the most important commentators on Pakistan in the world today, calls for a bold re-conceptualization of the country. Reimagining Pakistan offers a candid discussion of Pakistan's origins and its current failings, with suggestions for reconsidering its ideology, and identifies a national purpose greater than the rivalry with India.

Making Sense of Pakistan

Making Sense of Pakistan
Author: Farzana Shaikh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190929111

Pakistan's transformation from supposed model of Muslim enlightenment to a state now threatened by an Islamist takeover has been remarkable. Many account for the change by pointing to Pakistan's controversial partnership with the United States since 9/11; others see it as a consequence of Pakistan's long history of authoritarian rule, which has marginalized liberal opinion and allowed the rise of a religious right. Farzana Shaikh argues the country's decline is rooted primarily in uncertainty about the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of 'being Pakistani'. This has pre-empted a consensus on the role of Islam in the public sphere and encouraged the spread of political Islam. It has also widened the gap between personal piety and public morality, corrupting the country's economic foundations and tearing apart its social fabric. More ominously still, it has given rise to a new and dangerous symbiosis between the country's powerful armed forces and Muslim extremists. Shaikh demonstrates how the ideology that constrained Indo-Muslim politics in the years leading to Partition in 1947 has left its mark, skillfully deploying insights from history to better understand Pakistan's troubled present.

Deadly Embrace

Deadly Embrace
Author: Bruce Riedel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2012-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0815722834

Pakistan and America have been gripped together in a deadly embrace for decades. For half a century American presidents from both parties pursued narrow short-term interests in Pakistan. This myopia actually backfired in the long term, helping to destabilize the political landscape and radicalizing the population, setting the stage for the global jihad we face today. Bruce Riedel, one of America's foremost authorities on U.S. security and South Asia, sketches the history of U.S.-Pakistani relations from partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947 up through the present day. It is muddled story, meandering through periods of friendship and enmity. Riedel deftly interprets the tortuous path of relations between two very different nations that remain, in many ways, stuck with each other. The Preface to the paperback provides an inside account of the discovery of Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad hideout that led to the al Qaeda leader's demise. Accusations of Pakistani complicity in harboring bin Laden once again dramatized the ambivalence and distrust existing between two nations that purport to be allies. Riedel discusses what it all means for the war on terror and the future of U.S.- Pakistani relations. Praise for the hardcover edition of Deadly Embrace "Mr. Riedel, who has advised no fewer than four American presidents, knows power from the inside—something he is keen to share with the reader.... His book provides a useful account of the dysfunctional relationship between Pakistan and America." — The Economist "Bruce Riedel has produced an excellent volume that is both analytically sharp and cogently written. It will engage both specialists and the interested public. Essential reading."—Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know "Riedel lucidly provides an overview of the last thirty years of Pakistan's internal politics, its relationship with the United States, as well as the various i

Pakistan

Pakistan
Author: Imran Khan
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2012
Genre: Pakistan
ISBN: 0857500643

'Pakistan' tells the fascinating history of the country as seen through the eyes of one of its most famous sons, Imran Khan.