Writing in "The Hindu Book Review, Suhasini Haidar found MacDonald's narration on the whole as "even-handed", but noted several lapses, which according to her are common to such India-Pakistan treatises of western and Indian scholars alike. First, she writes, is the inclination to look at the hostile relations between the two countries through a "time prism," taking the nuclear tests conducted by them in 1998 as a starting reference point for Pakistan's initiation of a reckless proxy war against India, using Islamic militants. As Haider puts it, "The truth is Pakistan's ‘reckless reliance’ on proxies did not begin in 1998, but all the way back in 1948, during the first Kashmir war. Later, the use of Sikh militants who hijacked planes to Lahore in the 1980s, or the D-Company that has lived in Karachi after the Mumbai blasts in 1993 were all part of a similar strategy."