This drama will move you, inspire you, and probably even change your life.

    Undermined by a ruling elite hungry for money and power, Pakistan now stands alone as the only Islamic country with a nuclear bomb, yet it is unable to protect its people from the carnage of regular bombings from terrorists and its own ally, America. Now with the revelation that Pakistan has been the hiding place of Osama bin Laden for several years, that relationship can only grow more strained. How did it reach this flashpoint of instability and injustice with such potentially catastrophic results for Pakistan?Recounting his country's history through the prism of his own memories, Imran Khan starts from its foundation, ripped out of the dying British Raj. He guides us through and comments on subsequent historical developments which shook the Muslim world - the wars with India in 1965 and 1971, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and America's retribution 10 years later with the assassination of bin Laden - to the current controversial and intractable war in Afghanistan.We see these events viewed not only through the eyes of Westerners, but through those of ordinary Pakistanis.Drawing on the experiences of his own family and his wide travels within his homeland, Pakistan: A Personal History provides a unique insider's view of a country unfamiliar to a western audience. Woven into this history we see how Imran Khan's personal life - his happy childhood in Lahore, his Oxford education, his extraordinary cricketing career, his marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, his mother's influence and that of his Islamic faith - inform both the historical narrative and his current philanthropic and political activities. It is at once absorbing and insightful, casting fresh light upon a country whose culture he believes is largely misunderstood by the West.

    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.

    A paperback original from a superb writer whose first novel was enthusiastically praised by Khaled Hosseini, bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Haji, an American of Indo-Pakistani descent, writes with grace, heart, and wisdom about the collisions of culture and religion, tradition and modernity played out through individual lives.

    A brilliant account of the workings of state terrorism by the world’s foremost critic of US imperialism.

    The Swedish Research Council awarded a very generous three-year research grant to enable me to carry out the investigation. It is the only comprehensive and complete study of the partition process in the Punjab, beginning with the election campaign of 1945 and culminating in December 1947. It proceeds at two levels, secret British deliberations and decisions and the ground reality in the Punjab. Most time and effort has been devoted to tracing survivors and eyewitnesses from 1947. In some cases I have collected evidence of the same incident from the two opposing sides after 55-63 years. Such a work will never be possible later because the generation on whose testimony it is base will be gone. The partition of the Punjab resulted in the biggest forced migration in history-some 14 million people altogether of which 10 million were from the Punjab. It also resulted in the first major case of ethnic cleansing after the Second World War-on both sides of the divided Punjab unwanted minorities were driven away or killed. Some 500,000 to 800,000 people were killed. It is an unprecedented work and will most certainly become the standard reference on the partition of the Punjab.

    A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father, who would rather poison his daughter than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor driven from the town of his birth, limps toward the new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. As the displaced face a variety of horrors, this unlikely quartet comes together, defying every rule of self-preservation to forge a future of hope.A dramatic, luminous story of families and nations broken and formed, "Partitions" introduces an extraordinary novelist who writes with the force and lyricism of poetry.

    For India, the war represents a triumphant settling of scores with Pakistan. If the war is acknowledged in Pakistan, it is cast as an act of betrayal by the Bengalis. None of these nationalist histories convey the human cost of the war. Pakistani and Indian soldiers and Bengali militiamen raped and tortured women on a mass scale. In Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, survivors tell their stories, revealing the power of speaking that deemed unspeakable. They talk of victimization—of rape, loss of status and citizenship, and the “war babies” born after 1971. The women also speak as agents of change, as social workers, caregivers, and wartime fighters. In the conclusion, men who terrorized women during the war recollect their wartime brutality and their postwar efforts to achieve a sense of humanity. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh sheds new light on the relationship among nation, history, and gender in postcolonial South Asia.

    In Pakistan, the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto famously declared, there is “always the story behind the story.” In The Pakistan Cauldron, James P. Farwell explains what makes Pakistani politics tick. Farwell has advised the Department of Defense on terrorism, sovereignty, and the political issues in the Middle East, Africa, and Pakistan. Here he reveals how key Pakistani political players have inconsistently employed the principles of strategic communication to advance their agendas and undercut their enemies. Pakistan is an enigma to many. Only by understanding the complex forces that shape Pakistani leaders can we uncover their shifting political agendas and how they affect America and the West. Farwell explains how and why former president Pervez Musharraf clamped down on nuclear scientist A. Q. Kahn and isolated him. He assesses Benazir Bhutto’s unique legacy and analyzes how Musharraf handled the aftermath of her assassination. He explains Pakistan’s current instability and demonstrates how the country’s emotional reaction to bin Laden’s death is best understood as the outcome of long-standing political dynamics. The Pakistan Cauldron is for anyone who needs to know why Pakistan continues to pose increasingly difficult challenges for the United States and the West.

    In this regard, it seeks to understand as to what Pakistan may have meant to the Muslim masses in the UP in order to explain their extraordinary support for its establishment. The dissertation argues that the UP Muslims overwhelmingly supported the demand for Pakistan for two reasons. First, Pakistan was seen s an Islamic utopia akin to the one that the Prophet had created in Medina nearly thirteen hundred years earlier. Second, Pakistan was also viewed by the UP Muslims as a Muslim dominated sovereign state bordering a Hindu dominated India which would act as the best guarantee for the protection of their political, economic and cultural rights an interests in the UP in post-colonial India.;While the existing partition historiography has insisted upon the vagueness of Pakistan in the public mind, and the consequent lack of active participation of the Muslim masses in the partition drama, my dissertation argues that the UP Muslims were clearly aware that the UP would remain in Hindu India and not be a part of Pakistan. This becomes evident from an examination of the intense and widespread public debates on the question of Pakistan in the public sphere through forums such as the popular press, public meetings and propaganda materials circulated by both the Congress and the Muslim League in the aftermath of the Lahore Resolution. The critical support of the UP Muslims for the formation of Pakistan therefore attests to the agency of the masses in the making of their own history. Given the intense and widespread public debates on the nature of Pakistan as a modern Islamic state, this dissertation also challenges the conventional wisdom in South Asian studies that the idea of the modern state with its origins in Europe has remained a diffuse concept in the public mind in South

    The author offers intriguing insights into the culture of the tribal territories that straddle the two countries. This is home to the Taliban, an untamed land which continues to absorb so much of the world’s attention and military endeavour. Grant Lock is shrewd and laconic but above all compassionate. His experience of the world’s two major religions deserves careful consideration.

    Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined ‘political’ realm, Saadia Toor highlights the significance of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. This extra dimension allows Toor to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.Timely and unique, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the roots of modern Pakistan and the likely outcome of current power struggles in the country.

    The author is now a well-known Pakistani defence analyst.

    

    The trail of two key figures, an accused Pakistani mastermind and his American operative, traces the rise of a complex, international threat.

    Ornately adorned and considered as “moving art”, these trucks—veritable roving exhibitions—depict all aspects of life and support a highly developed artisanal industry. Exploring the significance of this practice, Jamal J. Elias provides a unique window on Pakistan's comnplex society that addresses complex questions of culture and religion in a way that is both accessible and entertaining. Jamal J. Elias is Professor of Islamic Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania. The world's foremost expert on Pakistani truck art, Elias is also a photographer who has held a number of solo and group exhibitions in the US.

    Its diversity and resilience have rarely figured in the single-issue focus of recent literature on the country, be it journalistic or schol?arly. This book seeks to present an alternate paradigm and to contribute a deeper understanding of the country's dynamics that may help explain why Pakistan has confounded all the doomsday scenarios. It brings together an extraordinary array of leading experts, including Ahmed Rashid, Ayesha Jalal and Zahid Hussain, and practitioners, such as the book's editor, Maleeha Lodhi, Akbar Ahmed and Munir Akram. Together they debate their country's strengths and weaknesses and offer ways out of its current predicament. This book provides a picture of how Pakistanis see themselves and their country's faultlines and spells out ways to overcome these. Pakistan's political, economic, social, foreign policy and governance challenges are assessed in detail. So too is the complex interplay between domestic de?velopments and external factors including great power interests that are so central to the Pakistan story and explain the vicissitudes in its fortunes. Lodhi and her contributors contend that Pakistan and its people have the capacity to transform their country into a stable, modern Muslim state, but bold reforms will be needed to bring about this outcome. About The Author: DR MALEEHA LODHI has twice served as Pakistan's Ambas?sador to the United States as well as to the United Kingdom. She has been editor of two of Pakistan's leading daily newspapers, The News and The Mus?lim. She served on the UN Secretary General's advisory board on disarma?ment, taught at the London School of Economics and has been a fellow at Harvard University and at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center. In 1994, Time magazine named her as one of 100 people who would help define the twenty-first century.

    The war in Afghanistan has become America's longest war. Despite these facts, most Americans do not understand the background of, or reasons for, the United States' involvement in these two wars.Utilizing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, author Dan Caldwell describes and makes sense of the relevant historical, political, cultural, and ideological, elements related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps most importantly, he demonstrates how they are interrelated in a number of important ways.Beginning with a description of the history of the two conflicts within the context of U.S. policies toward Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan—because American policy toward terrorism and Afghanistan cannot be understood without some consideration of Pakistan—he outlines and analyzes the major issues of the two wars. These include intelligence quality, war plans, postwar reconstruction, inter-agency policymaking, U.S. relations with allies, and the shift from a conventional to counterinsurgency strategy. He concludes by capturing the lessons learned from these two conflicts and points to their application in future conflict.Vortex of Conflict is the first, accessible, one-volume resource for anyone who wishes to understand why and how the U.S. became involved in these two wars—and in the affairs of Pakistan—concurrently. It will stand as the comprehensive reference work for general readers seeking a road map to the conflicts, for students looking for analysis and elucidation of the relevant data, and for veterans and their families seeking to better understand their own experience.

    The author, a former foreign secretary of Pakistan, considers a broad range of events and interweaves his own experiences and perspectives into the larger narrative of the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship.Beginning with the 1989 departure of Soviet troops—and especially since the 2001 NATO invasion—Riaz Mohammad Khan examines the development of Afghanistan and surveys the interests of external powers both there and in Pakistan. He discusses the rise of extremism and religious militancy in Pakistan and its links with ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan. Ultimately, Khan argues, Pakistan reveals a deep confusion in its public discourse on issues of modernity and the challenges the country faces, an intellectual crisis that Pakistan must address to secure the country’s survival, progress, and constructive role in the region.