In the Line of Fire

"Ayesha Siddiqa is a Pakistani woman who has meticulously researched how the military has expanded from just being an army to being a state within a state, with control over, for example, the country’s largest highway construction company. The Pakistani army is today the largest single landowner in both urban and rural areas. It is quite a brave book for a Pakistani woman to write because she made a lot of enemies in the process of the research and publishing it. Here I would link back to Benazir’s book and say it is also a signal that while Pakistan has many problems it also has a very vibrant civil society and a very vibrant and outspoken middle class, which is demanding that Pakistan look forward and not turn itself into a Islamic emirate of some kind. That is the hope in Pakistan. People like Ms Bhutto and Dr Siddiqa have the courage to take on the dark forces in Pakistan."