This book examines the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan, and analyzes its connections to Pakistan Army's policies and the fluctuating U.S.-Pakistan relations. It includes profiles of leading Pakistani Jihadi groups with details of their origins, development, and capabilities based on interviews with Pakistani intelligence officials, and operators of the militant groups. The book contains new historical materials on Operation Gibraltar (1965 War with India), conspiracy behind General Zia-ul-Haq’s plane crash in 1988, a botched military coup by fundamentalists in army in 1993-4 and lastly about how General Musharraf handled the volatile situation after the 9/11 attacks. Besides General Musharraf’s detailed profile, the book evaluates the India-Pakistan relations vis-à-vis the Kashmir conflict, and Dr. A Q Khan’s nuclear proliferation crisis. The book offers predictions for Pakistan's domestic and regional prospects.
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Dr. Hassan Abbas is currently a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society's New York headquarters working on U.S. relations with South and Central Asia. Hassan is also a Senior Advisor at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, after having been a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center from 2005 to August 2009. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), Michigan, and an Associate of the Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU), University of Bradford, in the United Kingdom. He received his Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and an LL.M. in International Law from Nottingham University, United Kingdom, where he was a Britannia Chevening Scholar (1999). Hassan also remained a fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School (2002-2003) and as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation (2003-2004).
His research interests are nuclear proliferation, religious extremism in South and Central Asia, and relations between Muslims and the West. In association with the Belfer Center, he is currently working on a project focusing on police reforms and counterinsurgency in Pakistan.
Hassan is a former Pakistani government official who served in the administrations of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1995-1996) and President Pervez Musharraf (1999-2000). His latest book, Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror (M.E. Sharpe) has been on bestseller lists in India and Pakistan and was widely reviewed internationally, including by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Far Eastern Economic Review, The Hindu, and Dawn. He has also appeared as an analyst on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, Al-Jazeera, and PBS, and as a political commentator on VOA and BBC. His forthcoming book is Letters to Young Muslims on Science, Sovereignty and Sufis. He runs WATANDOST, which is a blog on Pakistan and its neighbors' related affairs.
