Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself
Advance praise forPlaying with Fire “Pamela Constable, one of the world’s leading reporters on South Asia, has distilled her many years of reporting on Pakistan and turned them into an accessible and well-written account that illuminates one of the world’s most opaque countries. Constable does that by meeting and understanding all sorts of Pakistanis from rural laborers who live like serfs to their feudal politician bosses. Her book is a key to understanding this much misunderstood country.”—Peter L. Bergen,New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Longest WarandHoly War, Inc.“Pamela Constable has woven the fabric of Pakistan into an engrossing and vivid portrait of a country dangerously on the edge. With empathy yet unblinking candor, Constable exposes the powerful rifts tearing Pakistan apart and delivers a sobering warning about the future of both state and society.”—David E. Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize–winning author ofThe Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy “Pakistan has become one of the great problem-countries for the world, especially for the United States which did much to help it but also much to create the present malformed state. Pamela Constable has written the best introduction yet to this troubled and troublesome country, where the very idea of Pakistan is in tatters and the state is failing. Her emphasis on the powerlessness of ordinary Pakistanis, the cupidity of its political and military institutions, and the head-in-the-sand attitude of Pakistan’s elites is alarming but accurate. Not bogged down in detail, this is the best overview of Pakistan yet published.”—Stephen P. Cohen, senior fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution