Pakistan has had military coups, constitutional crises, political breakdowns, and economic collapses. Each of these has been studied, debated, and argued over for decades. But there is one seizure of power that has never been properly examined, because the people who carried it out also control the records, the files, and the narrative. Tariq Mahmood Awan’s book, The Bureaucratic Coup: How Bureaucracy Betrayed the Nation, is the first serious attempt to name what happened and trace exactly how it was done.