Pakistan remains a country of many contradictions. While the most brutal repression of women takes place in remote mountain districts, its major cities throng with women in all positions of power, film and media as well as culture, dressed not in the anti-woman garb of Islamist ideologues who seem to think that faith is expressed by how you dress, but in the most stunningly modern fashion on offer anywhere in the world. Pakistani journalists are among the most rumbustious in the world. Pakistani trade unions, although suffering from all the usual splits and divisions and personal fiefdoms of modern trade unionism outside a few European countries, are free and lively.

Far from being a failed state, Pakistan has not gone the way of authoritarian communist dictatorships like Milosevic's Serbia. And unlike the sad drabness of Cuba, where there are fewer cinemas today than when Castro took power, Pakistan's writing and popular culture bursts with excitement and passion and is available to all.

Yet the country remains utterly distorted by the overwhelming dominance of its military. Two-thirds of Pakistan's official national budget goes to the army. As in the Turkey shaped by Ataturk, the army is a political and economic force as much as a defender of the nation. Sadly India, which hardly gets a mention in Ali's book, insists on maintaining 500,000 occupying soldiers in Kashmir. This provides the justification for a huge Pakistan military presence.