Resumo de Pakistan

Pakistan in the Twentieth Century is, as the
subtitle suggests, focused on politics. Ziring describes constitutions and
elections and changes in government, but his focus is above all on the leaders.
Other facets of the tumultuous history of Pakistan ? wars and military
operations, provincial and local politics, economics, religious and ethnic
identities and conflicts, cultural changes, foreign policy and the Cold War ?
are only covered where necessary to understand the events at the center.

Despite this narrow focus, I enjoyed Pakistan in the Twentieth Century.
Ziring''s narrative is accessible without a background in Pakistani history and
he presents lively portraits of those who led Pakistan ? Jinnah, Suhrawardy, Ayub
Khan, Bhutto, Zia ul Haq, Benazir Bhutto, and others ? along with evaluation of
their successes and failures. His approach does make it hard to distinguish
interpretation from description, however, and his own biases are not always
clear.

In Pakistan - A Dream Gone Sour Roedad Khan presents a different
perspective on the same subject. A high-ranking civil servant whose career
spanned more than fifty years, he highlights those events and people with which
he was personally involved, but he also offers commentary on broad issues such
as corruption and accountability, political sovereignty and succession, the politicizations
of the civil service, and the independence of the judiciary. Roedad jumps
around a bit and his style is idiosyncratic ? he has a fondness for comparisons
with historical events and figures, especially United States presidents ? but he
is never boring or self-indulgent.

A History of the Peoples of Pakistan is a completely different kind
of book. A history of the area in and around what is now Pakistan, from the
earliest times up to independence, it has the feel of an old-fashioned school
text: the subject material is artificially broken up into small sections of
paragraph or page length and treated superficially, with sweeping generalizations
and no interpretation or analysis. A History of the Peoples of Pakistan
also lacks either references or index. This was not really my cup of tea, so I
ended up reading only a few chapters. (What I would like to read is a world-systems
perspective on the Pakistan
region: given its position on the cross-roads between south, west, and central Asia, it should make a natural unit for long-term
economic analysis.)

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