Defeat is an Orphan
How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War
-
- $23.99
-
- $23.99
Publisher Description
When India and Pakistan held nuclear tests in 1998, they restarted the clock on a competition that had begun half a century earlier. Nuclear weapons restored strategic parity, erasing the advantage of India's much larger size and conventional military superiority. Yet in the years that followed Pakistan went on to lose decisively to India. It lost any ability to stake a serious claim to Kashmir, a region it called its jugular vein. Its ability to influence events in Afghanistan diminished. While India's growing economy won it recognition as a rising world power, Pakistan became known as a failing state. Pakistan had lost to India before but the setbacks since 1998 made this defeat irreversible.
Defeat is an Orphan follows the rollercoaster ride through post-nuclear India-Pakistan, from bitter conflict in the mountains to military confrontation in the plains, from the hijacking of an Indian plane to the assault on Mumbai. Nuclear weapons proved to be Pakistan's undoing. They encouraged a reckless reliance on militant proxies even as the jihadis spun out of control outside and inside Pakistan. By shielding it from retaliation, the nuclear weapons also sealed it into its own dysfunction -- so much so that the Great South Asian War, fought on-and-off since 1947, was not so much won by India as lost by Pakistan.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacDonald (Heights of Madness), a former Reuters correspondent and specialist on South Asian politics and security, begins her account of Pakistan's decades-long slide into instability with a gripping retelling of the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 by Pakistani militants. The celebratory atmosphere on board, full of "first-time flyers anxious for their free whiskey-and-soda or beer," quickly turned into a nightmarish ordeal that brought passengers and crew into the heart of "the spider's web" the enemy territory of Pakistan. The hijacking serves to frame and focus MacDonald's narrative of the ratcheting up of tensions between Pakistan and India, a process that had unfolded in fits and starts since 1947 and accelerated after both nations conducted nuclear tests in 1998. India, MacDonald contends, did not precisely win the "Great South Asian War"; rather, Pakistan, beset by internal rivalries and political dysfunction, laid the seeds of its own defeat. Her image of Pakistan as "insufficiently imagined" a state hostage to the idealizations of political leaders and defined in opposition to India is arresting, but the recent flare-up in hostilities between the two South Asian giants undercuts the finality of her assertion that Pakistan was the ultimate loser in this regional conflict.
