Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War

MacDonald (Heights of Madness), a former Reuters correspondent and specialist on South Asian politics and security, begins her account of Pakistan’s decades-long slide into instability with a gripping retelling of the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 by Pakistani militants. The celebratory atmosphere on board, full of “first-time flyers anxious for their free whiskey-and-soda or beer,” quickly turned into a nightmarish ordeal that brought passengers and crew into the heart of “the spider’s web”—the enemy territory of Pakistan. The hijacking serves to frame and focus MacDonald’s narrative of the ratcheting up of tensions between Pakistan and India, a process that had unfolded in fits and starts since 1947 and accelerated after both nations conducted nuclear tests in 1998. India, MacDonald contends, did not precisely win the “Great South Asian War”; rather, Pakistan, beset by internal rivalries and political dysfunction, laid the seeds of its own defeat. Her image of Pakistan as “insufficiently imagined”—a state hostage to the idealizations of political leaders and defined in opposition to India—is arresting, but the recent flare-up in hostilities between the two South Asian giants undercuts the finality of her assertion that Pakistan was the ultimate loser in this regional conflict. (Jan.)

An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that the book was published by Oxford University Press, which is in fact the distributor of the book.