Pakistan: Deep Inside the World’s Most Frightening State
No nation is a lot more essential to U.S. foreign policy than nuclear-armed Pakistan. Wedged among India and Afghanistan, it is the second largest nation in the Islamic world. But with militant Islamists now expanding their control over some of the country’s most strategically sensitive locations, there is a growing fear that Washington’s most stolid ally in South Asia—at least ostensibly—is unraveling, and perhaps is even on the verge of collapse. With a dozen or so private Islamist armies, a hundred or so nuclear weapons, and a dysfunctional government, Pakistan is regarded as 1 of the most harmful locations on earth. Its disintegration would pose an unthinkable threat to the United States and the West, which includes the prospect of its nuclear arsenal becoming captured by religious extremists. In Pakistan, Mary Anne Weaver presents her personal journey via a country in turmoil, reconstructing, largely in the voices of the crucial participants themselves—General Pervez Musharraf, General Muhammed Zia, and the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto—the legacies now haunting Pakistan in the aftermath of the U.S.-sponsored jihad in the 1980s in Afghanistan. Combining deep geopolitical intelligence with a vivid portrait of a land—of its people, its mystery, and its clans—Pakistan supplies an essential background for any person who desires to understand the single most urgent dilemma facing the international community.
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