Clear insight into the military-religion cocktail pakistan is high on. A good read to understand the self defeating actions of pak. ( )

A very interesting analysis by this seasoned diplomat. One common theme has been that even the hardcore elite of the country have nothing positive to say about this country. Born with a split personality, even it's protagonists could not give any form or shape for the country's ideology either secular or religious.

It's unenviable rulers have had to choose from three retirement options, execution, assasination or permanent exile. Due to it's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tendencies the country has bred several power centers, the Army, the ISI, myriad short lived civilian administrations and a plethora of ever growing religious, fanatical and violent offspring like the Taliban, the LeT who have long since disowned and distanced themselves from their creators and masters. Each of them tigers by the tail, pulling in different directions.

In fact this place is a case study for how to not govern a country. All the mistakes that can be made in good governance have been made and new examples come to the fore with each passing day. The Army has become a client of the US which in turn is guinea pigging with exerting pressure through remote control using the minions in the Army as puppets.

A very interesting analysis by this seasoned diplomat. One common theme has been that even the hardcore elite of the country have nothing positive to say about this country. Born with a split personality, even it's protagonists could not give any form or shape for the country's ideology either secular or religious.

It's unenviable rulers have had to choose from three retirement options, execution, assasination or permanent exile. Due to it's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tendencies the country has bred several power centers, the Army, the ISI, myriad short lived civilian administrations and a plethora of ever growing religious, fanatical and violent offspring like the Taliban, the LeT who have long since disowned and distanced themselves from their creators and masters. Each of them tigers by the tail, pulling in different directions.

In fact this place is a case study for how to not govern a country. All the mistakes that can be made in good governance have been made and new examples come to the fore with each passing day. The Army has become a client of the US which in turn is guinea pigging with exerting pressure through remote control using the minions in the Army as puppets.

What is Pakistan? Is it an Islamic state, or is it a state for Muslims? The answer to that question is not unimportant.

Husain Haqqani's Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military provides an historical account of which choice Pakistan's civilian and military leaders have made for the country and why. He also discusses the importance of that choice to Pakistan, Pakistan's neighbors, and the United States.

Pakistan was initially supposed to be a state for Muslims. But as Haqqani shows, and in contravention to the conventional wisdom on Pakistan, very shortly after its birth, Pakistan's leaders altered course and decided to turn Pakistan into an Islamic state, at least on paper. Those leaders feared for the internal unity of Pakistan because of its rich ethnic and linguistic diversity, so they decided to use two things to unify the people into a nation: Islam and hatred of India.

Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the leaders of Pakistan's army made this decision. Since independence, Pakistan's civilian leaders have generally seen economic growth and social modernization as the route to building a nation in Pakistan. This viewpoint sees Pakistan as a state for Muslims, not as an Islamic state, which is an indirect threat to the institutional interests of the Pakistan Army because for any indigenous economic development plan to succeed, the Pakistan military would likely have to get by with a much smaller share of national GDP than it has ever done.

Although, Haqqani positions the repeated interference of the Army in politics not as an issue of the military protecting its institutional interests, but as a genuine disagreement between the civilian and military leaders over the proper way to secure Pakistan. But because of the genuine popularity of Pakistan's civilian leaders in the early part of the country's existence, the military had to foment unrest in the country and problems between the political parties if it was going to be able to justify taking power.

According to Haqqani, it is for this reason that Pakistan's army has joined an unwritten alliance with Pakistani Islamists. The army uses Islamists to create unrest in society to give the appearance that civilians cannot govern the country in exchange for giving them a role in governance that they could not get in a free and fair election.

This alliance of mosque and military has, according to Haqqani, caused serious damage to Pakistan's economic and political development. Moreover, while the military was the overwhelmingly dominant party to the alliance until the 1990s, as of late, the Islamists have started to act independently of the military to the point that Pervez Musharraf, the last military ruler of Pakistan, justified his continued rule in part on the threat that Islamists posed to the country.

Haqqani makes some sensible suggestions for both Pakistan and the U.S. in how to get Pakistan out from between the rock and hard place that it currently finds itself with regard to jihadi terrorists that have started to target Pakistan itself. The most important one for the U.S. is to stop turning a blind eye toward the Pakistan Army's and intelligence service's support for terrorist groups because of some use that the U.S. can make of Pakistan in some important U.S. foreign policy. Haqqani makes the all too sadly necessary point that a Pakistan under the grip of radical Islamists would be a far greater threat to U.S. security than some terrorist organization hiding out in the mountains of Afghanistan, and the Pakistan military and intelligence services are bringing that terrible outcome closer to reality with every day that they pursue their policies of supporting jihadi terrorist organizations. ( )

It was difficult to decide whether to call this history or current events. It is a history of Pakistan from the partitioning of India in 1947. It is primarily a political history written in the current context of the rise of Islamism. As such, it is a significant book for students of foreign affairs. It explores the complex relationship between the military and the United States on the one hand, but between the military and Islamism on the other. ( )