Review: Pakistan A Hard Country
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201106600406 |
| Date | 01 December 2011 |
| Published date | 01 December 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Coming AttractionsReview |
| International Journal | Autumn 2011 | 1069 |
| Reviews |
very recent past, including lack of access to most of the documentary record.
No doubt subsequent scholarship will qualify their initial judgments, but it
is probable that the Bush administration’s aggressive brand of unilateralism
will continue to look more like a product of unique contingencies than the
inevitable result of post-Cold War unipolarity.
Jack Cunningham/University of Toronto
PAKISTAN
A Hard Country
Anatol Lieven
New York: Public Affairs, 2011. 558pp, US $35.00 cloth
ISBN 978-1-61039-021-7
Some books announce their viewpoint and range more accurately on the
dedication page than in the table of contents, or for that matter the text.
Anatol Lieven’s Pakistan: A Hard Country, issuing from the no doubt well-
drilled faculty of War Studies at King’s College, London, is a remarkable case
in point. The author, who is nothing if not conscious of his martial lineage
and is enamoured of the well-tended Pakistani military cantonments where
his bread has been buttered during frequent research trips, dedicates his
study of contemporary subcontinental politics and society to the memory
of his forbears in the Indian Civil Service and the 5th Royal Gurka Rifles
(Frontier Force) “and in honour of their successors in the civil and military
services of Pakistan.”
Empire! The point has not to my knowledge been made by any other
reviewer, even in the major review outlets, where the book has been praised
extravagantly for its criticisms of American policy in south and southwest
Asia. But on every page of this interesting but oddly limited book the
student of history can hear the distant yet unmistakable beat of the “the
tow, row, row” and “the rat-tat-tat” of the British Grenadier. It is the military
mind of Anglo-India—generating a latter-day sympathetic understanding of
the problems facing the Pakistani army and the country it has dominated
directly or indirectly since Partition in 1947—that is the intellectual key to
this book. Therein lie its strengths and its weaknesses.
To continue reading
Request your trial