Where the Wild Frontiers are

Over the past decade, Pakistan assumed increasing importance in American thinking as a perplexing part of the quagmire in which Washington's "AfPak" policy has became stuck. But Pakistan had its own history throughout these years, too: a history that was complex, enthralling, infuriating, and inspiring-- sometimes, all at once. And the country's 175 million people had their own view of the attempts that distant Washington was making to wield influence over their country's government and society... How lucky, then, that since 2004, a deeply informed Pakistani historian called Manan Ahmed has been casting his keen and always wry eye on the U.S.-Pakistani interaction on his blog, "Chapati Mystery." Now, Ahmed has curated the most trenchant of these analyses into Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination, a work that will forever change the way its American readers think about Pakistan. In an Epilogue penned in May 2011, Ahmed offers some final reflections on the multiple meanings that the U.S. killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan at the beginning of the month had for the interaction between Pakistan and the 'West'. In September 2010, Ahmed was reflecting on the "failure of imagination" on behalf of U.S. officials, to which the authors of the American 9/11 Commission report ascribed the officials' failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. To combat terrorism, he noted, the report's authors thought American officials needed to work harder on developing a more specifically novelistic (à la Tom Clancy) kind of imagination: "the capacity to imagine this Other, to give them an interiority, a mindfulness, an agency, a history." But it did not work out that way. Where the Wild Frontiers Are vividly captures the failure of most members of the U.S. elite to successfully "imagine" the reality of people's lives and society.