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The withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2014, leaving behind about 10000 odd soldiers for training and limited operations, in a sense symbolizes the end of an era.

Pakistan has been boxed in a peculiar paradoxical situation–on one hand it is pronounced as a state perpetrating militancy and on the other a victim itself of terrorism fighting rather hard to counter militancy.

aj Hashmi evidently utilized his four year stint at the US Department of Defence, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, very well. He mentions conversations with student practitioners with service in theatres of the myriad and ongoing American wars.

This is a chilling account of the origins, ideological moorings, national ambitions and global outreach of one of the world’s most proscribed terrorist groups—the Lashkar–e-Taiba (LeT), designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the United States since December 2001 and also implicated by the United Nations since December, 2008 in its front denomination,Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JuD).

Ayesha Jalal’s latest work is a reflective account of Pakistan’s contemporary history and the nascent effort by its citizens to reimagine Pakistan, free from military dominance and as a ‘more resilient federal union’.

A year ago no one could have imagined that Pakistan would change its course from a rickety democracy to a hybrid-military rule within less then two years after general elections in May 2013.