The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World, by T.V. Paul

Abstract

T.V. Paul The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 253 pp., $27.95 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-19-932223-7Although the title The Warrior State might seem shocking to some, this book is a brilliant and penetrating analysis of an important region of South Asia, a region that has failed to generate a democratic political structure during the past six decades and whose external strategy of continually pursuing war with India has diminished rather than enhanced its state capacity. Since its independence in 1947, Pakistan's political history has been marred by intra-state and inter-state conflicts and the decay of its political institutions. The military has played a dominant role in determining the country's internal as well as external affairs. While many had hopes of a new beginning for the country in 2013 when, for the first time in its political history, Pakistan witnessed the transfer of power from one elected democratic government to another, this wishful thinking has been shattered by anti-government protests by two opposition groups, one led by the Sufi cleric Tahir-ul-Quadri and the other by charismatic cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan, who credited Nawaz Sharif s victory to electoral fraud. Some suggest that the military is behind Quadri and Khan's campaign. Internal security remains in jeopardy. Armed Taliban and their foreign allies roam freely in Waziristan and other neighbouring territories. Pakistan's military is still using militant groups as proxies to control Afghanistan and destabilize India. In 2013 Pakistan violated the line of control with India approximately 200 times and did so again about 60 times in the first half of 2014.T.V. Paul approaches these issues head on and provides a cogent and lucid analysis of Pakistan as a failing state. While the book is a must read for anyone interested in South Asia and Pakistan's development (or lack of it), it also makes an important contribution to the political science literature on state-making and nation-building. This study of Pakistan suggests that the European example of state-building and war-making is both historically and contextually constrained and cannot be easily transplanted to developing countries' experiences. T.V. Paul expands his analysis by asking whether Pakistan's case is atypical in the developing world and comparing Pakistan to other Muslim states, such as Turkey, Egypt, and Indonesia, where the military has dominated, as well as non-Muslim states such as Korea and Taiwan.T.V. Paul's analysis of the role of war and war-making in the development of the Pakistani nation-state in the twentieth century is built on the following four causal factors. First, Pakistan's dominant elite share the ideological world view of creating a strong national-security state based on military might and where Islam plays a crucial role in defining Pakistani identity. Second, the warrior state strategy is the result of a combination of ideas, circumstances, motives, and opportunities that have provided a guiding framework to the Pakistani elite. The Pakistani elite's warrior state ideal and military-first approach-strike first and military force to recover territory-is a product of the elite's Hobbesian worldview with a religious coloration (24). Third, the geostrategic location of the country has facilitated the pursuance of this hyper-national security agenda by the elites, as Pakistan continually seeks power symmetry with India, with the resulting consequences of an enduring rivalry between the two countries, a shifting of resources to war-making, and an unholy alliance with Islamic militant groups. …