In the past decade, a number of books have been published about the fraught US-Pakistan relationship. Two of the most prominent of those include Daniel Markey's No Exit from Pakistan and Hussain Haqqani's Magnificent Delusions.Footnote 1 The first, the work of a former US official, made a case for why the United States could not afford to terminate its security relationship with Pakistan despite the many problems plaguing the relationship. The second, written by a noted Pakistani journalist and former ambassador to the United States, traced the evolution of the fraught relationship from its very outset under the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. The latter was an especially informed account given Haqqani's considerable personal knowledge of the ebbs and flows of the alliance.
Markey's book was a straightforward policy-oriented work that emphasized the importance of the US-Pakistan security nexus to American foreign and security policy concerns. Haqqani's historical account sought to illuminate the reasons underlying the vicissitudes in the bilateral relationship. Shuja Nawaz's book, The Battle for Pakistan, on the other hand, is a rather curious contribution to this corpus of literature. It is odd because unlike the other two books, it has a distinctly “in medias res” quality to it. For no apparent reason, it begins at a particular (albeit important) historical juncture—in 2007—around the time of the assassination of the Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Yet Nawaz provides no clear rationale for starting his analysis of the recent tribulations of the US-Pakistan relationship at that particular moment.
Indeed, the book is composed of a series of vignettes about the troubled bonds between the two countries. However, at no point does Nawaz provide an overarching statement that would justify the selection of these particular episodes and turning points. As a consequence, the book has a rather jarring quality and lacks narrative flow.
This structural shortcoming aside, there is no question that Nawaz possesses the knowledge of an insider. The book is laden with information gleaned from interviews with former diplomats, bureaucrats, politicians, and military personnel, both American and Pakistani. Consequently, he is quite deft in deploying any number of telling anecdotes to illustrate specific incidents that he highlights in the book. For example, he recounts in considerable detail the efforts of Benazir Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who assumed Pakistan's presidency after her assassination, to rein in Pakistan's all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.
Other sections of the book also make for interesting reading as they provide intriguing insights about key political players at key turning points. In this regard, Nawaz seems equally knowledgeable about the intricacies of politics and policy making in both Pakistan and the United States. In the chapter that deals with the two Barack Obama administrations, he provides a deft account of the genesis of the administration's Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. Among other matters, he reveals that Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat who became the first Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was at odds with President Obama. However, his ties to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enabled him to keep his position. Nawaz also affirms what many analysts of South Asia have long suspected: for all of Holbrooke's diplomatic experience, his knowledge of the region was exceedingly limited. He did, however, assemble of team of scholars and analysts who were knowledgeable about the region. What Nawaz does not mention is that virtually every one of them had their own prejudices, and at least two of them were quite oblivious to the Pakistani military establishment's rank duplicity.
Nawaz, on occasion, does pull his punches. In his discussion of the US raid of Pakistan that culminated in the killing of Osama bin Laden, he entirely skirts the question of Pakistan's possible knowledge of Bin Laden's presence in the country. How was Bin Laden living in close proximity to Pakistan's premier military establishment for over a year without arousing any suspicions? Nawaz blithely quotes from a conversation with General Pervez Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, then chief of staff of the Pakistan Army, who categorically denied knowing that Bin Laden was living on the very doorstop of the Pakistan Military Academy.
The final chapter ends on a hortatory note, outlining how Pakistan might evolve into a state that promotes peace, prosperity, and stability in the region. Sadly, this chapter also ducks a critical question: namely, the bloated state of the Pakistani military establishment and how it has systematically distorted the country's developmental priorities. The lopsided state of civil-military relations in the country has long dogged Pakistan's society, economy, and polity. Unless this structural anomaly is forthrightly addressed, the many pathologies that trouble the country will simply continue to fester.
