Allah, Army, and America in Pakistan

-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 the four titles, Nawaz s book on the political history of Pakistan s army is the best documented. The author belongs to an extended family of Pakistani military officers; a connection he has used well to gain access to the archives of the army headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi. This archival material is supplemented with some of the hitherto unused documents and correspondence found in the American government departments that throw light on the evolution of U.S.-Pakistan relations. One will have to agree with Owen Bennett-Jones s one-line blurb printed on the dust jacket of the book: To understand Pakistan you have to understand the army and to understand the army you need to read this book .