There's a scene in the book, in 1957, the U.S. is aiding Pakistan to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in 1950s dollars, and you had Eisenhower in a meeting complaining that we're supporting the military to the exclusion of everything else, and it's the worst possible policy they could have, and he can't think of anything better to do.



JG: In this partnership, the Pakistanis aren't the only ones to make the same mistakes over and over again. Here's another image from the book that stayed with me: Nighttime golf at the military's golf course, acres of watered grass. Talk about the symbolism.

SI: This is one of the things that as a journalist, not as a citizen but as a journalist, you love about this story, because you have these abstract notions of power made very concrete. When you look at the real estate, it becomes abundantly clear to you that one institution in the country has first call on the best resources and it is obvious what this means for everybody else. This is not to say that Pakistan shouldn't have an army or doesn't need an army or that they don't live in a dangerous neighborhood, but you have this institution that will steer things in its own direction and do real estate development in a certain way to benefit certain classes of people. And you realize it's not just the military. There are is a lot of money being made there, even as the people on the bottom are straining.

JG: What was your daily life like in Karachi? This is the city in which Danny Pearl was murdered, after all.

SI: I think I behaved in the way reporters behave in dangerous areas. You try to sleep someplace secure. You get up in the morning, you try to make sure you know where you're going, you try to go see the people you're going to see, and you don't linger too long if it's a bad neighborhood, and you keep a low profile. You rely on this, plus the fact that anywhere you go most people are fine, most people are welcoming and in fact eager to tell their story to an American. There are some more extreme elements in Karachi, and because I know what happened to Danny Pearl, you think a little bit more about whether someone knows where you are, are you sure of your contacts, and you take extra care. But even in this situation, I was a little surprised at the more extreme groups. They would want to lecture me about the United States, but once you got there it didn't feel like a terribly hazardous encounter.

JG: Do you think the level of anti-Americanism has gone up over time, or has it stayed constant?

SI: I think in the last couple of years something is shifting, just because the country has been in this constant and increasing state of crisis. I think there was a feeling three or four years ago that the situation was going to improve, or that the military was on its way out. No one saw the financial crisis on the horizon or any of the other things that happened, or even the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. As the war has intensified, frustration in Pakistan has risen as well, because the media will put out a story that for one reason or another, the United States is arranging bombings inside Pakistan, or that the United States is manipulating the Taliban in some way. There is a vast conspiracy theory that the U.S. is trying to destabilize the country in order to have an excuse to get its hands on the nuclear weapons, as you know. This is a constant factor in people's thinking, especially in the military. When I interviewed people about the bombing that is at the center of my book, I ran across people who said that the Americans were responsible for it. These are victims who would seemingly have a motivation to try to understand who was really responsible, so that's awful.