Pakistan: A Hard Country’s
This book would not have been possible had it not been for the immense kindness and hospitality of many Pakistanis, who invited me to their homes and talked to me frankly about their lives and their opinions– so many that the great majority will have to go unthanked. I am especially indebted to Ashraf and […]
This book has undergone many permutations, but has emerged all the better. I owe my thanks and gratitude to Professor Brendan O’Leary, who nurtured my interest in ethnic conflict regulation and encouraged me to be a thorough, logical, and dedicated student of South Asia. I also owe an enormous debt to Lord Professor Meghnad Desai […]
There have been a number of studies of colonial Lahore in recent years. These have explored such themes as the city’s modernity, its cosmopolitanism and the rise of communalism which culminated in the blood-letting of 1947. There has also been a study of how the city recovered from the socio-economic dislocation arising from the Partition […]
This book seeks to make sense of Pakistan’s history by examining the interplay between colonial inheritances and contemporary strategic and socio-economic environments. Equally important is the interplay between the regional and national levels of politics. The state’s response to pressures for increased political participation and devolution of power has been of crucial importance, as has […]
In February 2002, a mere two years after the President of the USA very publicly refused to endorse the new military government of Pakistan, Pakistan’s leader, General Pervez Musharraf, stood up on a platform in Washington with US Secretary of State for Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In between the friendly badinage, Rumsfeld looked Musharraf in the […]
This book took six years to compile. what began as a simple quest to com press a holistic account of the Pakistani nuclear program turned into a Rubik’s cube. As a first-time writer setting out to pull together a balanced and objective account on a subject considered taboo for decades, I ran into the proverbial […]
In 1998 I wrote a memo to President Bill Clinton titled “Pakistan: The Most Dangerous Country in the World.” Pakistan had just tested nuclear weapons, and nowhere else on the planet were so many ominous trends colliding in a uniquely combustible way. During subsequent crises with India, Pakistan issued threats of nuclear war (as did […]