Book Review - Pakistan: a withering State? Sreedhar and Eilesh Bhagat, 1999

This review examines Sreedhar and Eilesh Bhagat’s volume *Pakistan: a Withering State?*, focusing on its claims about institutional erosion, security path dependencies and economic vulnerabilities in the late 1990s. It outlines the authors’ indicators of state fragility—fiscal stress, civil-military imbalance and governance deficits—while considering alternative interpretations emphasizing resilience and societal adaptation. The review commends the book’s empirical range but calls for greater methodological clarity on causal weighting across political, security and economic domains.

After introducing the authors’ central question, the review summarizes chapters on political instability, provincial tensions and the security establishment’s influence over strategic choices. Section One assesses the treatment of macroeconomic imbalances, debt dynamics and IMF conditionalities. Section Two evaluates the evidence on militancy and external entanglements, including their feedback effects on governance. Section Three discusses counter-arguments around institutional learning, local government reform experiments and private-sector dynamism. Section Four draws policy lessons for neighbors and partners: the limits of sanctions, the importance of trade normalization and the role of targeted governance assistance. The review concludes that while the “withering state” thesis is provocative, Pakistan’s trajectory is better seen as cyclical stress within an enduring, adaptive polity—an interpretation that invites more granular, sector-specific research.