Asia and Pacific

Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan By Ali Usman Qasmi. Stanford University Press, 2023, 444 pp.

Subcontinent Adrift: Strategic Futures of South Asia

By Feroz Hassan Khan. Cambria Press, 2022, 280 pp.

Pakistan and American Diplomacy: Insights From 9/11 to the Afghanistan Endgame

By Ted Craig. Potomac Books, 2024, 296 pp.

Three books parse the travails of Pakistan in history and geopolitics. The country was founded as a state for Muslims, but its national identity remains a subject of contestation and debate. Leaders have wrestled with whether many more Muslims—from India, from breakaway Bangladesh after 1971, or even from Afghanistan—should be allowed to claim Pakistani citizenship; whether non-Muslims in Pakistan should have equal rights with Muslims; whether the state should interpret the vast reservoir of Islamic texts in light of modern democratic and egalitarian values or adhere to more originalist interpretations; and whether the common bond of Islam overcame the separatist claims of large ethnolinguistic minorities such as the Baluchis and the Pashtuns. In a detailed study pitched to specialists, Qasmi excavates previously overlooked legal and religious archives to illustrate how these fundamental issues surfaced in debates over Pakistan’s constitutions, the role of the government versus religious authorities in setting the dates of religious holidays, and the country’s symbols—the precise shade of green on the nation’s flag, the official dress code, the national anthem, and the choice of iconography on official stationery.These debates refracted the larger issues of national identity that continue to undermine the coherence of the Pakistani state.

Khan, a former Pakistani brigadier general, astutely analyzes Indian and Pakistani security strategies and shows how the Pakistani security establishment has made the country’s inherently vulnerable situation even worse. The country is squeezed into a band, only 500 miles wide in the middle, between Afghanistan and India. By joining with the United States in the 1980s to support Afghan resistance to

Soviet occupation, Islamabad created a “Frankenstein’s monster” of jihadist forces, which it has had to battle on its own territory for the last 20 or more years. On the Indian front, the two sides are locked in a vicious cycle of threat and counterthreat. Pakistan sends proxy forces into Kashmir and elsewhere to weaken India, and India responds by upgrading its larger and better-equipped army to be ready to attack Pakistan. Islamabad’s obsession with security stifles the possibility that the country could gain economically from its location on the crossroads between Asia and the Middle East and from its large workforce, and gives the military unaccountable power to undermine democracy.

Craig, a U.S. diplomat in Islamabad in the 2010s, shows why Pakistan is unhappy with its outside patrons and why they are unhappy with it.The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan generated a flood of terrorists and refugees who threatened Pakistan’s security, but the Americans bristled at Pakistan’s effort to protect itself by maintaining cooperative relations with the Afghan Taliban. The United States supported the Pakistani military’s brutal domestic antiterrorism operations but then lectured the country on human rights and democracy. Chinese loans and investments entrenched the country in debt without appreciably spurring its development. The expensive and slow-moving Chinese expansion of Pakistan’s Gwadar port lacks an economic rationale and has antagonized the local Baluchi population. These outside powers neither approve of Pakistan’s support for militant groups that conduct terrorist attacks in Indian-administered

Kashmir nor consistently take Pakistan’s side on diplomatic issues against the more influential country of India. Dissatisfied with both China and the United States, Pakistan cannot let either patron go, lest the other gain too much influence.

Japan’s Ocean Borderlands:

Nature and Sovereignty

By Paul Kreitman. Cambridge University Press, 2023, 300 pp.

The remains of Japan’s once extensive Asian-Pacific empire include over 14,000 mostly uninhabited islands that range as far as 1,100 miles from the country’s five main islands and collectively define a maritime exclusive economic zone nearly 12 times as large as the country’s land territory. Kreitman describes the history of six island groups that were once alive with sea birds but became barren after hunters killed them off for their plumage and guano miners dug up the landscape. Before and during World War II, Japan feuded with the United States and other powers over control of these islands. Today, they have achieved new importance, both as sites of nature conservation and as the source of exclusive economic rights under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Working in the eye-opening field of “political ecology,” Kreitman shows how exploiting nature and conserving it both serve to “perform” sovereignty.

Letters From Prison, vol. 1 By Arnon Nampa. Translated by The Article 112 Project. Justice in Translation, 2023, 74 pp.

Letters From Prison, vol. 2 By Arnon Nampa. Translated by The Article 112 Project. Justice in Translation, 2024, 77 pp.

The Thai lèse majesté law known as Article 112 has been applied with escalating severity in response to the growing resistance to the country’s ten-year-old military regime.The lawyer and human rights activist Arnon Nampa is serving two consecutive four-year terms for speech acts that ostensibly fall afoul of the law. With more cases against him still pending, he writes to his children, “Daddy’s . . . punishment might be imprisonment of more than 80 years.” Nonetheless, he tells them, “What Daddy is going through now is the process of being punished and accepting the punishment, but not accepting guilt.” On the contrary, “Going to prison this time is full of honor because it is part of the struggle for rights, freedom, and democracy.” He is terrified to think that his young son might not remember him. But at least, he hopes, his letters will help his two children learn about their father and understand why they cannot all be together. Meanwhile, his happiest moments are when he is asleep, dreaming of driving his daughter to school or bathing his son. The missives join a venerable tradition of prison letters that seek to influence events beyond the confining walls through their eloquence and humanity.

for the record

The article “The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution” (March/ April 2024) misstated the year the PLO accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242. It was 1988, not 1998.

The article “Kissinger and the Meaning of Détente” (March/April 2024) misstated a Soviet concept of power. It was the “correlation of forces,” not the “constellation of forces.” A caption in that article gave the wrong title for Leonid Brezhnev. He was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not the Soviet premier.