The 2016 expanded edition of Aboard the Democracy Train is coming soon to Pakistan with a new sub-title, `Pakistan Tracks the Threat Within.’ The book brings readers up to speed with significant changes that have occurred in the region over the last few years.
Beginning with the May 2011 raid by US Navy Seals that avowedly snatched and killed Osama Bin Laden from Abbotabad… to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s murder of children in Army Public School, Peshawar… the 2016 edition traces the events that ultimately convinced the Pakistan army to change its military strategy.
The back drop is the last 1 1/2 decade of war in Afghanistan that threw Pakistan into a whirlpool, making it difficult even for the intelligentsia to understand the twists and turns in the political life of the nation.
The forthcoming edition spells the road that Pakistan took to achieve its success in bringing down terrorist attacks. That trajectory began once the army understood that the real threat “lay within.”
Army operations across Pakistan inherently uphold that there can be no economic development without peace. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is the face of the business minded government, which has among its major ventures linked Pakistan’s fortunes with China’s Economic Corridor to Gwadar Port.
Until then, Pakistan’s `Democracy Train’ goes on, where millions of common people still clamor for the basic necessities of life and the dignity to which all human beings are entitled.
Pakistan still struggles with governing an ill fed, barely literate population that has spun out of control and provinces that chafe for their fair share from the center. Ready to work for pennies, common people feed the wheel of corruption… becoming cannon fodder for unscrupulous mafias clasped around the society like a cobra moving its tongue.
‘Aboard the Democracy Train, Pakistan Tracks the Threat Within,’ lays out the current situation from outside in – hopefully piercing through non transparency and half truths told through the media.
It will be available in the first week of July at Paramount Books, Karachi.