Summary: In May 2013 Pakistanis overwhelmingly elected Nawaz Sharif as the country’s next leader, for an unprecedented third term, shifting the balance of power away from the military that ousted him in 1999, and from the independent judiciary that removed another prime minister less than a year ago. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, one fairly elected civilian government has served a full term and in the course of a fair election, has been replaced by another. Pakistani democracy has never looked stronger, but the reality on the ground is often vastly different. What is the next chapter for Pakistan, and what does this mean for the future of the precarious US-Pakistani relationship? This lecture will be followed by a book signing session of the book Taliban. Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist based in Lahore. He presently writes for the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Review of Books, BBC Online, The National Interest, and several other academic and foreign affairs journals. Previously, Rashid was the Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review for 22 years.
