Pakistan On The Brink: The Future Of Pakistan, Afghanistan And The West

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Format:: Hardback
Pages:: 256
Publisher:: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date:: 15 March 2012
Category:: Books
ISBN:: 9781846145858

Description

With Bin Laden dead, Pakistan threatened by internal power struggles, relationships between the United States and Pakistan at an all-time low, and as the US and Britain begin their withdrawal from Afghanistan, what are the possibilities - and hazards - facing the world's most unstable region? Where is the Taliban now, and how do they figure in the future of Pakistan as well as Afghanistan? What does the immediate future hold, and what are the choices that Pakistan, Afghanistan and the West can make? These are some of the crucial questions that Ahmed Rashid takes on in this follow-up to his acclaimed "Descent into Chaos". Rashid correctly predicted that the Iraq war would need to be refocused into Afghanistan, and that Pakistan would emerge as the leading player through which American interests and actions would have to be directed. Now, as Washington and the rest of the West wrestle with negotiating with unreliable and unstable "allies" in Pakistan, there is no better guide to the dark future than Ahmed Rashid. He focuses on the long-term problems: the changing casts of characters, the future of international terrorism, and the actual policies and strategies both within Pakistan and Afghanistan and among the Western allies. As he has done so well in the past, "Pakistan on the Brink" offers sensible solutions and provides a way forward for all countries involved, while the world tries to bring some stability to a fractured region saddled with a legacy of violence and corruption.

Reader Reviews

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In this useful book, the author says about Pakistan, "For too long the military and political parties have neglected their one single task, which is to make life better for their people".The author is a journalist based in Lahore (Pakistan) with a deep knowledge of the complex relationships between local power sources such as the ISI (Inter Services Agency - Pakistan military), Taliban (both Afghan and Pakistani), the Americans (political and military), the Afghan government and tribes and India. The picture that emerges, is of tremendously abused populations in Pakistan and Afghanistan that would be delighted to see an end to their corrupt and self serving governments together with the Islamic fundamentalist terror groups that inhabit the region.Rashid shows that in common with other residents of the middle east they look with longing at Turkey, as he says, "Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan age fifty-seven, is a new hero for the Arab and Muslim world, taking on Muslim dictatorships like Syria, defending the Palestinians, tilting against Israel, yet firmly wedded to the West and the United States through NATO and other alliances; it is even up for membership in the twenty seven nation European Union."After reading this book one can see that the only chance of getting from "here to there" would be a an unlikely Pakistan/Afghan "Arab Spring" , so for the forseeable future one would sadly expect Pakistanis to continue to emigrate from their disfunctional society.

4.00 out of 5

Miro

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