Why "the mall" in Pakistan is too important to ignore

T.S. Eliot may have had the best take on trying to understand the world when he said that, “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Perhaps that is even more true today, as some places in the world are ever changing and that with each visit we need to see and understand them anew.

Haroon Ullah is a Pakistani American scholar and diplomat. In The Bargain from the Bazaar: A Family's Day of Reckoning in Lahore, he gives us a picture of a slice of Pakistan today. A county both a key part of and deeply removed from the world.

In fact in that contradiction lies the very reason we need to understand Pakistan. It has the power to upend the world even while it and its people try desperately to find a place in it.

My conversation with Haroon Ullah:

Pakistan: A Hard Country

While we continue to be at war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, it is arguably Pakistan that will shape the future of US success or failure in the region. If Islamic terror is to be unleashed, it will probably come from the mountains of Pakistan. On the other hand, if we are to have success in forestalling terrorism against the West, again Pakistan will be the reason. A nation both regressive and stable, deeply divided and yet somewhat functional because of those divisions, Pakistan is a country of immense size and even larger contradictions. Few understand Pakistan as well as Anatol Lieven. His new work Pakistan: A Hard Country, is a must read for anyone who truly wants to understand this most important part of the world.

My conversation with Anatol Lieven:

Podcast Powered By Podbean

To live and die in Pakistan

If Pakistan is the central front in the war on terror, why don't we know more about it?  For years we have read and listened to reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan, but arguably not enough about Pakistan;  a country with nuclear weapons, an unstable government and a military with questionable allegiances.   Nicholas Schmidle, an accomplished journalist, spent two years studying and reporting from Pakistan and understands the reality on the ground as few others do.  In his new book To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan, Nick Schmidle takes us inside his two years in a nation always on the bring of chaos.

My conversation with Nick Schmidle:

Powered by Podbean.com