LONDON: The launch of the book “Pakistan: Beyond the ‘Crisis State” edited by former Pakistan’s envoy to Washington and London Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, will take place here on May 5. Pakistan’s current High Commissioner to the UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan will address as chief guest. Dr. Maleeha Lodhi will speak about the book and award winning BBC journalist Lyse Doucet will discuss the theme and individual chapters of the book at an event to be held at the Chancery building.The book examines Pakistan’s challenges but also proposes solutions to its myriad problems. Its contributors are among the country’s leading intellectuals and practitioners and together they discuss ways of taking Pakistan beyond the crisis state.As leading columnist Mosharraf Zaidi highlights in his review of the book – each essay helps define some of the country’s most dire problems, and each one attempts to propose a range of solutions that are likely to help forge a Pakistani future more prosperous and more stable than today. The book is a solid effort to illuminate where hope will come from.”
Dr Lodhi blends her experience in journalism, academia and diplomacy in her own seminal chapter that provides the book with its title Beyond the Crisis State. The essays contributed by experts in their relevant fields include Ahmed Rashid, Rifaat Hussain, Akbar Ahmed, Saeed Shafqat, Ishrat Hussain ,Ayesha Jalal, Munir Akram, Zahid Hussain and Mohsin Hamid.The book assesses in detail Pakistan’s political, economic, social, foreign policy and governance challenges as well as the complex interplay between domestic developments and external factors including great power interests. The book provides a picture of how Pakistanis see themselves and their country’s fault-lines and spell out ways to overcome these.The book asserts that Pakistan’s people have the capacity to transform their country into a stable, modern Muslim state, but bold reforms will be needed to bring about this outcome.The book has received excellent reviews in Pakistan and abroad. Anatol Lieven Professor at King’s College London and former correspondent of the Times based in Pakistan in 1980s ranks it as ‘an excellent book, one that brings out some very important points about the surprising stability of the country beneath the alarmism of the daily headlines, and forms a useful antidote to the general perception about Pakistan in the West.”
The book has received plaudits from former Foreign Secretary Dr. Tanveer Ahmed Khan for re positioning the current discourse about Pakistan . Dr. Khan says ‘at a time when academic and journalistic discourse about Pakistan is often bent to serve the strategic needs of major powers, Dr Maleeha Lodhi has drawn upon the insights of a distinguished group of experts to re-locate this discourse in facts as well as in the true ethos of a nation so misrepresented in recent times.”Dr. Maleeha Lodhi has twice served as Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States as well as to the United Kingdom. She has been editor of two of Pakistan’s leading daily newspapers, The News and The Muslim. Dr. Lodhi has for six years also served on the UN Secretary General’s advisory board on disarmament. She has taught at the London School of Economics and has been a fellow at Harvard University and at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center. In 1994, Time magazine named her as one of 100 people who will help define the twenty-first century. – APP
