Download or read book No Exit from Pakistan written by Daniel S. Markey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of the tragic and often tormented relationship between the United States and Pakistan. Pakistan's internal troubles have already threatened U.S. security and international peace, and Pakistan's rapidly growing population, nuclear arsenal, and relationships with China and India will continue to force it upon America's geostrategic map in new and important ways over the coming decades. This book explores the main trends in Pakistani society that will help determine its future; traces the wellsprings of Pakistani anti-American sentiment through the history of U.S.-Pakistan relations from 1947 to 2001; assesses how Washington made and implemented policies regarding Pakistan since the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001; and analyzes how regional dynamics, especially the rise of China, will likely shape U.S.-Pakistan relations. It concludes with three options for future U.S. strategy, described as defensive insulation, military-first cooperation, and comprehensive cooperation. The book explains how Washington can prepare for the worst, aim for the best, and avoid past mistakes.

Download or read book The Nine Lives of Pakistan Dispatches from a Precarious State written by Declan Walsh and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Exit West written by Mohsin Hamid and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE & WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE “It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful.” —Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review “Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” —Entertainment Weekly, “A” rating The New York Times bestselling novel: an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands, from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the forthcoming The Last White Man. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . . Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

Download or read book The Battle for Pakistan written by Shuja Nawaz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle for Pakistan showcases a marriage of convenience between unequal partners. The relationship between Pakistan and the United States since the early 1950s has been nothing less than a whiplash-inducing rollercoaster ride. Today, surrounded by hostile neighbors, with Afghanistan increasingly under Indian influence, Pakistan does not wish to break ties with the United States. Nor does it want to become a vassal of China and get caught in the vice of a US-China rivalry, or in the Arab-Iran conflict. Internally, massive economic and demographic challenges as well as the existential threat of armed militancy pose huge obstacles to Pakistan's development and growth. Could its short-run political miscalculations in the Obama years prove too costly? Can the erratic Trump administration help salvage this relationship? Based on detailed interviews with key US and South Asian leaders, access to secret documents and operations, and the author’s personal relationships and deep knowledge of the region, this book untangles the complex web of the US-Pakistani relationship and identifies a clear path forward, showing how the United States can build better partnerships in troubled corners of the world.

Download or read book Reorienting U S Pakistan Strategy written by Daniel S. Markey and published by Council on Foreign Relations. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel S. Markey examines Pakistan's complex role in U.S. foreign policy and advocates for a two-pronged approach that works to confront and quarantine immediate threats to regional security while simultaneously attempting to integrate Pakistan into the broader U.S. agenda in Asia.

Download or read book U S Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan written by Richard Lee Armitage and published by Council on Foreign Relations. This book was released on 2010 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Council on Foreign Relations sponsors Independent Task Forces to assess issues of current and critical importance to U.S. foreign policy and provide policymakers with concrete judgments and recommendations. Diverse in backgrounds and perspectives, Task Force members aim to reach a meaningful consensus on policy through private and non-partisan deliberations. Once launched, Task Forces are independent of CFR and solely responsible for the content of their reports. Task Force members are asked to join a consensus signifying that they endorse "the general policy thrust and judgments reached by the group, though not necessarily every finding and recommendation." Each Task Force member also has the option of putting forward an additional or a dissenting view. Members' affiliations are listed for identification purposes only and do not imply institutional endorsement. Task Force observers participate in discussions, but are not asked to join the consensus. --Book Jacket.

Download or read book Moth Smoke written by Mohsin Hamid and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut novel from the internationally bestselling author of Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid’s deftly conceived first novel, immediately marked him as an uncommonly gifted and ambitious young literary talent to watch when it was published in 2000. It tells the story of Daru Shezad, who, fired from his banking job in Lahore, begins a decline that plummets the length of Hamid’s sharply drawn, subversive tale. Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke was ahead of its time in portraying a contemporary Pakistan far more vivid and complex than the exoticized images of South Asia then familiar to the West. It established Mohsin Hamid as an internationally important writer of substance and imagination and the premier Pakistani author of our time, a promise he has amply fulfilled with each successive book. This debut novel, meanwhile, remains as compelling and deeply relevant to the moment as when it appeared more than a decade ago.

Download or read book Pakistan on the Brink written by Ahmed Rashid and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent, on-the-ground report from Pakistan—from the bestselling author of Descent Into Chaos and Taliban Ahmed Rashid, one of the world's leading experts on the social and political situations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, offers a highly anticipated update on the possibilities—and hazards—facing the United States after the death of Osama bin Laden and as Operation Enduring Freedom winds down. With the characteristic professionalism that has made him the preeminent independent journalist in Pakistan for three decades, Rashid asks the important questions and delivers informed insights about the future of U.S. relations with the troubled region. His most urgent book to date, Pakistan on the Brink is the third volume in a comprehensive series that is a call to action to our nation's leaders and an exposition of this conflict's impact on the security of the world.

Download or read book China s Western Horizon written by Daniel Markey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the ambitious leadership of President Xi Jinping, China is zealously transforming its wealth and economic power into potent tools of global political influence. But China's foreign policy initiatives, even the vaunted "Belt and Road," will be shaped and redefined as they confront theground realities of local and regional politics outside China. In China's Western Horizon, Daniel S. Markey, a scholar of international relations and former member of the U.S. State Department's policy planning staff, previews how China's efforts are likely to play out in its own "backyard:" theswath of Eurasia that includes South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from his extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, Markey describes how perceptions of China vary widely within states like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran.The region's powerful and privileged groups often expect to profit from their connections to China, while others fear commercial and political losses. Similarly, statesmen across Eurasia are scrambling to harness China's energy purchases, arms sales, and infrastructure investments as a means tooutdo their strategic competitors, like India and Saudi Arabia, while negotiating relations with Russia and America. On balance, Markey anticipates that China's deepening involvement will play to the advantage of regional strongmen and exacerbate the political tensions within and among Eurasianstates. To make the most of America's limited influence in China's backyard (and elsewhere), he argues that U.S. policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy to serve America's aims in Eurasia and to better compete with China over the long run.

Download or read book Pakistan s Enduring Challenges written by C. Christine Fair and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-03-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001 to the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2014, Pakistan's military cooperation was critical to the United States. Yet Pakistani politics remain a source of anxiety for American policymakers. Despite some progress toward democratic consolidation over the last ten years, Pakistan's military still asserts power over the country's elected government. Pakistan's western regions remain largely ungoverned and home to the last remnants of al-Qaeda's original leadership as well as multiple militant groups that have declared war on the Pakistani state. The country's economy is in shambles, and continuing tensions with India endanger efforts to bring a durable peace to a region haunted by the distant threat of nuclear war. Pakistan's Enduring Challenges surveys the political and economic landscape of Pakistan in the wake of U.S. military withdrawal. Experts in the domestic and international affairs of the region consider the country's prospects from a variety of angles, including security issues and nuclear posture, relations with Afghanistan, India, and the United States, Pakistan's Islamist movements, and the CIA's use of drone warfare in Pakistan's tribal areas. This timely volume offers a concise, accessible, and expert guide to the currents that will shape the country's future. Contributors: Christopher Clary, C. Christine Fair, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Karl Kaltenthaler, Feisal Khan, William J. Miller, Aparna Pande, Paul Staniland, Stephen Tankel, Tara Vassefi, Sarah J. Watson, Joshua T. White, Huma Yusef.

Download or read book Directorate S written by Steve Coll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars, the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11 Prior to 9/11, the United States had been carrying out small-scale covert operations in Afghanistan, ostensibly in cooperation, although often in direct opposition, with I.S.I., the Pakistani intelligence agency. While the US was trying to quell extremists, a highly secretive and compartmentalized wing of I.S.I., known as "Directorate S," was covertly training, arming, and seeking to legitimize the Taliban, in order to enlarge Pakistan's sphere of influence. After 9/11, when fifty-nine countries, led by the U. S., deployed troops or provided aid to Afghanistan in an effort to flush out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the U.S. was set on an invisible slow-motion collision course with Pakistan. Today we know that the war in Afghanistan would falter badly because of military hubris at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the drain on resources and provocation in the Muslim world caused by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and corruption. But more than anything, as Coll makes painfully clear, the war in Afghanistan was doomed because of the failure of the United States to apprehend the motivations and intentions of I.S.I.'s "Directorate S". This was a swirling and shadowy struggle of historic proportions, which endured over a decade and across both the Bush and Obama administrations, involving multiple secret intelligence agencies, a litany of incongruous strategies and tactics, and dozens of players, including some of the most prominent military and political figures. A sprawling American tragedy, the war was an open clash of arms but also a covert melee of ideas, secrets, and subterranean violence. Coll excavates this grand battle, which took place away from the gaze of the American public. With unsurpassed expertise, original research, and attention to detail, he brings to life a narrative at once vast and intricate, local and global, propulsive and painstaking. This is the definitive explanation of how America came to be so badly ensnared in an elaborate, factional, and seemingly interminable conflict in South Asia. Nothing less than a forensic examination of the personal and political forces that shape world history, Directorate S is a complete masterpiece of both investigative and narrative journalism.

Download or read book Vortex of Conflict written by Dan Caldwell and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq; more than 5,000 Americans have been killed; and over 35,000 have been grievously wounded. The war in Afghanistan has become America's longest war. Most Americans do not understand the background of, or reasons for, the United States' involvement in these two wars. Using primary and secondary sources, author Dan Caldwell describes relevant historical, political, cultural, and ideological elements related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He demonstrates how they are interrelated. Beginning with 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 major issues of the two wars. These include intelligence quality, war plans, postwar reconstruction, interagency policymaking, U.S. relations with allies, and shift from conventional to counterinsurgency strategy. He concludes by capturing the lessons learned from these two conflicts and points to their application in future conflict. His book is a 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.

Download or read book The Struggle for Pakistan written by Ayesha Jalal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Established as a homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947, Pakistan has had a tumultuous history. Beset by assassinations, coups, ethnic strife, and the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has found itself too often contending with religious extremism and military authoritarianism. Now, in a probing biography of her native land amid the throes of global change, Ayesha Jalal provides an insider’s assessment of how this nuclear-armed Muslim nation evolved as it did and explains why its dilemmas weigh so heavily on prospects for peace in the region. “[An] important book...Ayesha Jalal has been one of the first and most reliable [Pakistani] political historians [on Pakistan]...The Struggle for Pakistan [is] her most accessible work to date...She is especially telling when she points to the lack of serious academic or political debate in Pakistan about the role of the military.” —Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books “[Jalal] shows that Pakistan never went off the rails; it was, moreover, never a democracy in any meaningful sense. For its entire history, a military caste and its supporters in the ruling class have formed an ‘establishment’ that defined their narrow interests as the nation’s.” —Isaac Chotiner, Wall Street Journal

Download or read book Discontent and Its Civilizations written by Mohsin Hamid and published by Riverhead Books. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in hardccover in 2015 by Riverhead Books.

Download or read book Magnificent Delusions written by Husain Haqqani and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between America and Pakistan is based on mutual incomprehension and always has been. Pakistan—to American eyes—has gone from being a quirky irrelevance, to a stabilizing friend, to an essential military ally, to a seedbed of terror. America—to Pakistani eyes—has been a guarantee of security, a coldly distant scold, an enthusiastic military enabler, and is now a threat to national security and a source of humiliation. The countries are not merely at odds. Each believes it can play the other—with sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic, results. The conventional narrative about the war in Afghanistan, for instance, has revolved around the Soviet invasion in 1979. But President Jimmy Carter signed the first authorization to help the Pakistani-backed mujahedeen covertly on July 3—almost six months before the Soviets invaded. Americans were told, and like to believe, that what followed was Charlie Wilson's war of Afghani liberation, with which they remain embroiled to this day. It was not. It was General Zia-ul-Haq's vicious regional power play. Husain Haqqani has a unique insight into Pakistan, his homeland, and America, where he was ambassador and is now a professor at Boston University. His life has mapped the relationship of the two countries and he has found himself often close to the heart of it, sometimes in very confrontational circumstances, and this has allowed him to write the story of a misbegotten diplomatic love affair, here memorably laid bare.

Download or read book No Win War written by Zahid Hussain and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the post-9/11 relations between the US and Pakistan. The growing divergence between Washington and Islamabad has taken an already uneasy alliance to a point of estrangement. Yet, a complete breakup is not an option. The underlying cause of the tension, within the partnership the two had entered on 13 September 2001, has never been fully understood. What is rarely discussed is how Pakistan's decision to ally itself with the US pushed the country into a war with itself; the cost of Pakistan's tight roping between alignment with the US and old links with the Afghan Taliban; and its long-term implications for the region and global security. This book elucidates implications for Afghanistan in the so-called war on terror while revealing US and Pakistan's foreign policy initiatives. The author explores all this through little known facts and through the players involved in this cloak and dagger game. The book tells the story behind the headlines: how equivocal is ISI's break with the Afghan Taliban fighting the coalition forces in Afghanistan; the shootout in Lahore involving a CIA agent; and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Download or read book Crossed Swords written by Shuja Nawaz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on 30 years of research and analysis, this definitive book is a profound, multi-layered, and historical analysis of the nature and role of the Pakistan army in the country's polity as well as its turbulent relationship with the United States. Shuja Nawaz examines the army and Pakistan in both peace and war. Using many hitherto unpublished materials from the archives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army, as well as interviews with key military and political figures in Pakistan and the United States, he sheds light not only on the Pakistan Army and its US connections but also on Pakistan as a key Muslim country in one of the world's toughest neighborhoods. In doing so, he lays bare key facts about Pakistan's numerous wars with India and its many rounds of political musical chairs, as well as the Kargil conflict of 1999. He then draws lessons from this history that may help Pakistan end its wars within and create a stabler political entity. Visit http://www.shujanawaz.com for more information about Shuja Nawaz.