Best Books on Pakistan, India and Cold War in South Asia

South Asia entered the Cold War through a violent door. Partition in 1947, which created India and Pakistan from the former British Raj, killed somewhere between two hundred thousand and two million people and displaced fifteen million more. The two states that emerged from that catastrophe immediately went to war over Kashmir, and they have never fully resolved the dispute since. When the Cold War layered superpower rivalry onto that foundation, the results were some of the most consequential and least understood episodes in twentieth-century geopolitics. These books are the most useful guides to understanding how the region's history, the Cold War's dynamics and the nuclear age intersected. ## Why South Asia Got Tangled in the Cold War Pakistan and India took different paths into the Cold War. India, under Jawaharlal Nehru, was a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, formally refusing to join either superpower bloc while quietly accepting Soviet support for its industrialization. Pakistan, anxious about Indian military superiority and needing security guarantees, joined the SEATO and CENTO alliances that the United States had built as Cold War bulwarks. That alignment gave Pakistan American weapons and diplomatic cover but also committed it to American strategic priorities that did not always match Pakistani interests. The 1971 war, which split Pakistan and created Bangladesh, showed the limits of those American commitments. The United States tilted toward Pakistan under Nixon and Kissinger, not out of any sympathy for the Pakistani military's conduct in East Pakistan (which included mass atrocities), but because Pakistan was the back channel to China during the opening. India, which backed the Bengali independence movement, had just signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. The Cold War geometry overrode everything else. ## The Books ### Bruce Riedel, *Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad* Riedel spent decades at the CIA working South Asia, including service on the National Security Council. His book is an insider account of the American relationship with Pakistan from the Cold War through the post-9/11 period. The chapter on the 1980s, when the CIA and Pakistani intelligence jointly ran the largest covert operation in American Cold War history, the arming of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union, is the most detailed account available from someone who was in the room for parts of it. Riedel's central argument is that American policy toward Pakistan has repeatedly prioritized short-term security cooperation over the long-term consequences of empowering groups and institutions that created serious problems later. That argument is difficult to dismiss. ### Srinath Raghavan, *1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh* Raghavan's book is the definitive account of the 1971 war and the events that surrounded it. He is an Indian strategic analyst who writes with unusual clarity about all sides, including India's role, which is sometimes too easily celebrated in Indian accounts and too easily dismissed in Pakistani ones. What makes the book valuable for understanding the Cold War specifically is Raghavan's reconstruction of the superpower calculations: Nixon's tilt toward Pakistan, the Soviet-Indian treaty, China's reluctance to intervene on Pakistan's behalf despite Pakistani expectations. He shows how a regional war was shaped at every level by global alignments. ### Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, essays collected in *Confronting the Bomb* Hoodbhoy is Pakistan's most prominent public intellectual on nuclear issues, a physicist at Quaid-i-Azam University who has spent decades arguing that South Asia's nuclear arms race makes the region less safe rather than more. The essays in this collection cover the history of Pakistan's nuclear program, the Indian tests of 1998 and the Pakistani response, and the strategic doctrines both countries have built around their arsenals. The nuclear dimension is inseparable from the Cold War history because Pakistan's nuclear program began as a direct response to India's 1974 test, and both programs received Cold War assistance: China helped Pakistan, the Soviet Union and later France helped India. The bomb in South Asia is a Cold War artifact that has not gone away. ## Reading These Together The three books give you different angles on the same story. Riedel gives you the American perspective on Pakistan. Raghavan gives you the 1971 crisis from all sides. Hoodbhoy and Mian give you the nuclear logic that makes the whole region permanently tense. Together they explain a part of Cold War history that most Western accounts underweight. --- **Further reading:** [Browse all history books on Skriuwer](/category/history)