Review Article Allah, Army, And America In Pakistan

Abstract

Tariq Ali. The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. New York: Scribner, 2008. Zahid Hussain. Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Shuja Nawaz. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ahmed Rashid. Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. New York: Penguin, 2008.

The four books under review together reveal the saga of Pakistan’s journey from crisis to crisis as a postcolonial state, from the obscurity of its birth in 1947 to its present fame as the ‘epicenter of global terrorism’. Each author takes an insider’s look at the country’s internal contradictions and its entanglements in global conflicts in his own way, Ali as a New Left activist, Hussain as a journalist, Nawaz as a broadcaster and military historian, and Rashid as news reporter and analyst of international relations. Of