Pakistan, the deeply troubled US ally bordering both Iran and Afghanistan, may be the next crisis facing US foreign policymakers. The country’s mountainous northwest region is increasingly controlled by the Taliban (Muslim extremists) and is the suspected hiding place of Osama bin Laden. American journalist Nicholas Schmidle spent two years in this troubled country, watching Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf attempt to hold on to his military dictatorship amid challenges from both secular, pro-democracy reformers and pro-Taliban Islamic extremists.
As Schmidle visits heavily armed pro-Taliban leaders in Pakistan’s northwest region, finds himself in the middle of massive pro-democracy riots in Karachi, and is followed and threatened by Musharraf’s lethal secret police force, he gradually realizes that “Pakistan is the most dysfunctional -- and dangerous -- country in the world.’’ He observes seething ethnic tensions, as well as sectarian religious fissures, all over the country. In northwest Pakistan, Schmidle observes a lawless, Wild West mentality: “everyone else I saw on the road was carrying guns,’’ he writes, “[t]he government was non-existent.’’
