As a BBC correspondent in Pakistan between 1998 and 2001, Bennett Jones witnessed at first hand many of the events that brought General Musharraf to power. His book contains the first detailed accounts of the 1999 coup, the Kargil conflict, and how Pakistan came to test its nuclear bomb. It will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand a country that was crucial to the expulsion of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the 1980s and which, after the 11 September 2001 attack, became a key coalition partner in America’s “war against terrorism.”