Rather it was a rhetorical device to attack the government at a rally where Qureshi announced he was joining the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) , the party of former cricket star Imran Khan, a rising force in Pakistani politics.  Qureshi's assertion tapped into growing anti-Americanism, and a populist view that the  civilian government led by the Pakistan People's Party, to which he once belonged, had somehow sold the country's honour - in this case symbolised by nuclear weapons - in return for American aid.  (Pakistan first agreed its uneasy alliance with the United States under former military ruler Pervez Musharraf.)

Yet it is a measure of how distorted and narrow political discourse has become within Pakistan that Qureshi might use the safety of nuclear weapons to attack the government. That political discourse, difficult even at the best of times, is likely to become even narrower in the fury which has followed the NATO airstrikes which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border with Afghanistan on Saturday. 

The attack, which Pakistan says was unprovoked and NATO described as a "tragic, unintended incident", has outraged Pakistanis who have already endured thousands of casualties in a war they believe was forced on them by the United States.

Underneath the confusion about the aims and course of the Afghan war, lies a deep sense of hurt that Pakistani lives are somehow less valued than American lives, and a painful loss of pride over the country's inability to defend its territory from attacks by a foreign, and apparently hostile, power - whether from airstrikes, drones, or even the May raid by U.S. forces who killed Osama bin Laden.

The result is a society which is being shaped by the Afghan war in ways which neither Pakistan's neighbours, nor western powers, would choose.  The airstrikes, coming soon after the forced resignation of Pakistan's ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani for allegedly seeking American help to curb the power of the military, have added fresh oxygen to a combustible mix of anti-Americanism and religious nationalism enveloping Pakistan.  Haqqani denies the allegation, but the so-called "Memogate" scandal has badly weakened the civilian government, while the airstrikes have rallied the country behind the army.

In such an environment, there is little room for a discourse that might suggest Pakistanis should also be outraged at the deaths of civilians blown up by suicide bombers sent by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and therefore discuss ways to turn decisively against Islamist militants. Nor is there space for a realistic political debate on how Pakistan should manage its foreign relations that goes beyond a hatred of America and an illusory faith in China's readiness to ride to the rescue. 

Before the latest crisis, the government  had been pushing through legislative reforms to help democracy take root in Pakistan. It is difficult to see these making much more progress now as the government fights for survival. The tedious mechanics of documenting the economy, as a first step towards increasing the tax base and raising revenues, dropped off the political agenda long ago.

Expectations that the civilian government could become the first in Pakistan's history to complete its term and be replaced by another democratically elected government are being lowered by the day as the politicians descend into the kind of internecine feuds typical of the 1990s. That decade ended in Musharraf's military coup in 1999. 

The next casualty of the rising tide of nationalism could well be Pakistan's warming ties with India - one of the few relationships in the region that until now had been going well.   The civilian government had eased itself into the driving seat in pushing for improved trade relations with India, though no one would suggest that it made the progress it did without the approval of the Pakistan Army. It has a particular interest in better ties with India - the army has drawn its power from a perceived need to defend the country against an Indian threat, contributing to Pakistan's civilian-military imbalance. 

So when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani joined each other in early April to watch the Pakistan-India cricket semi-final in the town of Mohali,  they discussed a Pakistani appeal that India drop its opposition to an EU duty waiver on Pakistani textiles exports.  By the end of April, it was becoming clear that improved trade ties could be a game-changer.  (Pakistan had earlier resisted improving trade without first settling the Kashmir dispute.)  By early November, New Delhi agreed to the EU duty waiver and, more significantly, Pakistan granted Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India.

That mood has changed.  Reports have begun to surface in the Pakistani media that the army has reservations about granting MFN status to India. The Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the humanitarian wing of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group,  and an organisation close to the military,  has launched protests against granting India MFN status, saying that the Kashmir dispute must be settled first. 

After the NATO airstrikes, a JuD protest to mourn the Pakistani soldiers killed turned quickly into a protest against improved trade ties with India. While the government may yet be able to push ahead with its India agenda - albeit on a very tight military leash - the signs are not looking good.

Progress in relations with India had become - quite unexpectedly - one of the few release valves left to ease off the pressures building up within Pakistan.  On its western border, the United States and its allies are pushing ahead with an agenda in Afghanistan which has already integrated the possibility there will be no early peace settlement with Afghan insurgents - an idea long sought by Pakistan.   And while Pakistan won some initial sympathy from foreign governments over the NATO airstrikes, its decision to boycott next week's international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, will - at least symbolically - highlight its isolation. It is beginning to look like a country turning in on itself in dangerous ways.

We have always known there was a risk that Pakistan could become to Afghanistan what Cambodia was to Vietnam - a country horribly destabilised by an American war spilling across its borders.  We are not there yet. Perhaps those who say all will be well when the United States leaves the region will prove right - American influence for decades has tended to be toxic to Pakistan.

 But pay attention to the domestic political discourse.  There  is no point in winning the battle in Afghanistan and losing the war in Pakistan.

It’s rarely a nice thing for a foreign country to figure high in a U.S. presidential election campaign. If it is China, it is more likely to be about currency and trade disputes with Beijing, and how each of the candidates was going to tackle it than any bouquets. Or if it is Iran, you can be sure there would be some shooting from the hip as each candidate seeks to outbid the other in trying to convince voters he or she means business with the perceived threat from that country’s nuclear programme.

And so if you were a Pakistani, last weekend’s Republican presidential debate would be just as worrisome even though you know this is election season and candidates are given to competitive sabre rattling. The country was mentioned 55 times in the debate in South Carolina, notes Sadanand Dhume in a piece on The Enterprise blog. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the leading candidate, said Pakistan was nearly a failed state with multiple centres of power  including  a weak civilian leadership and a powerful military.

 Texas governor Rick Perry suggested cutting U.S. aid to Pakistan to zero because it was putting American lives in jeopardy and the Newt Gingrich   pulled few punches either, criticising the country for hosting Osama bin Laden “for at least six years in a military city within a mile of their national defence university.”

Another candidate couldn’t decide whether Pakistan was an enemy or a friend, which itself is quite telling in the way the country where Osama bin Laden was found living in relative comfort ten years after the Sept 11 attacks is perceived in America. Quite a far cry from the time President George W. Bush had trouble recalling the name of Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharaf during his election campaign.  But that was before the attacks in New York and Washington and from then on the focus turned to Afghanistan where bin Laden was initially holed up and to Pakistan later.

A lot of the tough-talk has to be seen as part of the election season as we said before, but equally its hard to dismiss the statements altogether  because any one of these candidates could be the next commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military.  Even more so, you have to consider the impact of the steadily escalating campaign rhetoric on the incumbent administration.  Its clearly harder for President Barack Obama to strike a conciliatory note with regard to Pakistan, even if the situation arises, in such an atmosphere when his opponents are turning up the heat.  Some people are already seeing it insofar as China is concerned, attributing Obama’s exhortations last weekend that it should behave as a grown-up economy to political posturing aimed at weary voters.

Candidates are only reflecting what they think are voter concerns and if the polls are any indication they are reading the mood right. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 40 percent of Americans consider Pakistan to be America’s enemy, according to Pakistan’s ambassador Hussain Haqqani. 

In "Terminator: Attack of the Drone", Hamid imagines life in Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan under constant attack from U.S. drone bombings.  His narrator is one of two boys who go out one night to try to attack a drone.

 "The machines are huntin' tonight," the narrator says.  "There ain't many of us left. Humans I mean. Most people who could do already escaped. Or tried to escape anyways. I don't know what happened to 'em. But we couldn't. Ma lost her leg to a landmine and can't walk. Sometimes she gets outside the cabin with a stick. Mostly she stays in and crawls. The girls do the work. I'm the man now.

"Pa's gone. The machines got him. I didn't see it happen but my uncle came back for me. Took me to see Pa gettin' buried in the ground. There wasn't anythin' of Pa I could see that let me know it was Pa. When the machines get you there ain't much left. Just gristle mixed with rocks, covered in dust."

It is powerful stuff, told in the language of a black American slave in the style of Toni Morrison's "Beloved".  It vividly captures the terror inspired by drones, and the helplessness of the people who live in the tribal areas. But is it true? And does it matter?

In a discussion on Twitter, literary critic Faiza S. Khan, who tweets @BhopalHouse, argued that the story should be judged as a work of fiction rather than taken as reportage. A fair point. But what if we turn this around and consider the story as reportage, not of the tribal areas and the drones, but of the way these are imagined in Pakistan's Punjabi heartland? As a writer who spends part of his time in Lahore, capital of Punjab, Hamid can be considered representative of at least part of that Punjabi imagination.

We will return to the short story later, but first step back a bit and consider that the narrative gaining traction, at least in urban Punjab, is that the people of the tribal areas have been radicalised by American drone attacks.  Pakistan's rising political star, Imran Khan,  attracted tens of thousands to a rally in Lahore last month with a version of this narrative. Stop the drones, and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, can be engaged in peace talks to end a wave of bombings across Pakistan. 

The simplicity of this narrative is beguiling. At a stroke it taps into the anti-Americanism prevalent in Pakistan and also promises peace. Yet it is incredibly problematic. Bear with me - this is not a defence of drones per se.  The use of "machines" to fight a war is disturbing, as indeed is the use of snipers in their capacity for personalised targetting by an unseen hand.  Emotionally, I would be far more scared of drones and snipers than I would be of artillery and airstrikes,  even if I knew the latter two were more likely to kill me. And nor is it a defence of the way the United States has fought its war in Afghanistan - the risks of the Afghan war going wrong have been obvious from the start to anyone with a knowledge of history.  But those are different subjects. This is about how the drone campaign is perceived in mainland Pakistan, and perhaps particularly in Punjab.

The first problem with the narrative is that it slides over the fact that radicalisation in the tribal areas (and Pakistan as a whole) began long before the U.S. drone campaign.  Many ascribe it to Pakistani support for the United States in backing the jihad against the Soviet Union after the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979.  I might go further back, perhaps to the 1973 oil boom when a disproportionate number of Pashtun from the tribal areas went to seek work in the Gulf . The results were twofold - the migrant workers were exposed to the Wahhabi puritanical Saudi Arabian tradition of Islam, and the remittances they sent home upset the traditional balance of power in the local economy.  I could go back even further, to the origins of the Pakistani state in 1947 and its use of Islam as a unifying force to counter ethnic nationalism, including Pashtun nationalism.  In short - it is complicated. Stopping drones may or may not be a moral imperative, depending on your perspective. But let's not be fooled into thinking that in itself, it will bring peace.

Secondly, the narrative on drone attacks takes at face value assertions that they cause high numbers of civilian casualties.  The Americans say they are precise; their critics say they are lying; the rest of us simply don't, and can't, know the truth.  With little independent reporting on the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), we can't possibly verify whether the claims of civilian casualties are accurate. We don't know for sure the numbers of the dead, let alone whether among those dead were Taliban foot soldiers who are also civilians.

What I have noticed however, is that at least some among the Pashtun intelligentsia say the drone strikes are precise, and that opposition to them increases the further away you get from the tribal areas.  Earlier this year, a senior Pakistani military officer was quoted as saying that "a majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements". Writer and academic Farhat Taj has taken this argument further by saying that people actually prefer drone strikes to living in fear of the Taliban and their foreign allies.

Now I don't know the truth. I have been to the tribal areas only once, on a one-day army-supervised trip to Bajaur.  Incidentally, I was struck by how far the landscape differed from my own Kiplingesque imaginings of "the Frontier". In Bajaur, I saw agricultural prosperity, neatly laid out fields,  and mountains which  in relative terms (ie compared to Siachen, the Karakoram and even the barren mountains of Scotland) seemed unexpectedly tame. I gather other parts of FATA are wilder, but that Bajaur trip was a lesson for me in how far my imagination (no doubt heavily influenced by colonial literature) was very different from reality. Many Pakistanis never get a chance to visit FATA at all - and so it remains in the Pakistani heartland as much of an imagined frontier as it was under the Raj.

So to get back to the drones, let's for a moment take the prevalent view that Pakistan is fighting "America's war" out of the discussion and consider what the people of FATA themselves think about drone attacks and peace talks with the Taliban.  As the people who suffer most at the hands of the Pakistani Taliban, their views - at least from a moral point of view - should predominate in any Pakistani discourse which set itself up as idealistic. What do they say?

This brings me to the most problematic part of the narrative, and loops back into Hamid's short story. In the "stop the drones, win the peace argument", the people of FATA are crucially assumed not to be able to speak for themselves. They are frozen in time in an  idealised village life, people who will revert to their ancient traditions as soon as the drones and the Afghan war ends, as though the last 60 years of history never happened. As though not not one of them had ever got on a plane, worked in the Gulf, or migrated to Karachi.

Look at how they are portrayed in Hamid's story (though since I have not asked him, I will concede this may have been an intentional parody of the way the people of FATA are often viewed).

In his story, our characters have no ability to grasp the big world events that have brought the machines to their land.  They speak in the language of black American slaves. The narrator's mother is compared to an animal, "snorin' like an old brown bear after a dogfight". Their primitiveness is underlined by the sexualisation of the weapon assembled by the two boys to attack the drone:  "We put the he-piece in the she-piece".

They are reduced to the cipher of  "the noble savage".

It is true that the people of FATA do not tend to speak for themselves. But given the scale of bombings and assassinations, fear seems to be a more likely explanation than an inability to articulate their thoughts.

And it is also true that they are not even proper citizens. Rather they are subject to the Frontier Crimes Regulation - a draconian colonial-era law which makes them liable to collective punishment, and which is only slowly being reformed by the Pakistani government.  The eventual abolition of the FCR, the incorporation of FATA into Pakistan, and other reforms meant to decentralise and accommodate Pakistan's different ethnic groups, would arguably be far more effective in the long run in allowing the country's Punjabi heartland to make peace with the Pashtun in the tribal areas, more even than ending drone strikes.

You will find people who argue you can do both - abolish the FCR and end drone strikes. But how can you tell? How do you make peace with a particular group and work out what suits them best, unless they are represented politically?  (Holding peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban is not the same.)

Now reread Hamid's piece and consider the gap between the characters imagined in his short story, and a people with full citizenship rights and political representation.  As Fazia S. Khan said, judge it as a work of fiction.  But as a window into the Punjabi imagination, it may also have  its uses as a political document.

A strategic partnership agreement between India and Afghanistan would ordinarily have evoked howls of protest from Pakistan which has long regarded its western neighbour as part of its sphere of influence.  Islamabad has, in the past, made no secret of its displeasure at India’s role in Afghanistan including  a$2 billion aid effort that has won it goodwill among the Afghan  people, but which Pakistan sees as New Delhi’s way to expand influence. 

Instead the reaction to the pact signed last month during President Hamid Karzai’s visit to New Delhi, the first Kabul had done with any country, was decidedly muted. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani  said India and Afghanistan were “both sovereign countries and they have the right to do whatever they want to.”  The Pakistani foreign office echoed Gilani’s comments, adding only that regional stability should be preserved. It cried off further comment, saying it was studying the pact.

It continued to hold discussions, meanwhile, on the grant of the Most Favoured Nation to India as part of moves to normalise ties. Late last month the cabinet cleared the MFN, 15 years after New Delhi accorded Pakistan the same status so that the two could conduct trade like nations do around the world, even those with differences.

And on Thursday, Gilani met Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh on the margins of a regional summit in the Maldives and the two promised a new chapter in ties, saying the next round of talks between officials as part of an engagement on a range of issues will produce results. Afghanistan or the pact, was scarcely mentioned in public, although it is quite conceivable that the two would have talked about it.

Is there a shift in the ground, in both India and Pakistan ?  Pakistan is battling multiple  crises, including ties with the United States that at the moment certainly look worse than those with India. It is also struggling to tackle a melange of militant groups that have metastasized into a mortal danger for the Pakistani state itself and a deep economic downturn that a nation of 180 million people can ill-afford at this time. While it continues to invest time and energy in Afghanistan, a large part of the war has come home too and it is struggling to enforce its writ on its side of the Pasthun-dominated lands that straddle the two countries. A lessening of tensions with India can only help at this point.

India, meanwhile, has shot out of the blocks building a trillion-dollar economy  that dwarfs everyone else’s in the region, not just in size but also growth rates even if  it is slowing down now. It still has a long way to go to meet the aspirations of a billion plus people and realise its own potential, though. It needs peace within and on the borders and it needs closer economic ties with  all its neighbours.  Its economic stakes are rising across the region including Afghanistan where Indian firms, along with the Chinese who preceded them, are the only ones prepared to risk blood and treasure to exploit its mineral resources. Conversely if a pomegranate farmer in southern Afghanistan- the Taliban heartland – wants to sell his produce to the booming Indian market,  New Delhi wants to do whatever it can to try and make that possible.

A hostile Pakistan until now has balked at trade and transit, but  if India and Pakistan begin to have normal trade ties following the breakthrough on MFN, then easier flow of goods from Afghanistan seems a natural possibility. The long-running project to pipe gas from Turkmenistan and through Afghanistan, Pakistan and then India may seem less of a dream as the economies of India and Pakistan begin to interlock and both sides develop stakes in the well being of the other to protect their investments and trade.

Indeed, Sajjad Ashraf, a former Pakistan ambassador to Singapore and now a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, cautioned against a knee-jerk Pakistani reaction to the Indo-Afghan treaty. In a paper for the Institute of South Asian Studies, he said that  a careful reading of the pact suggests that the countries involved want to develop Afghanistan as a hub linking South and Central Asia since it sits in both regions.  Which isn’t such a bad thing  for the countries of south Asia but especially Pakistan which by its geography as landlocked Afghanistan’s neighbour with the longest  border has a key role to play.Ashraf said :

“If the three countries can reach an understanding and let India develop Afghan capacity leading to regional economic integration, Pakistan too becomes a winner. In the age of globalisation, following any other course will result in Pakistan lagging behind.

For India, peace in Afghanistan is important to be able to exploit the vast economic potential of the Central Asian states. It shares Afghanistan’s concerns about the security of the nation after the western withdrawal from a combat role in 2014. Ashraf wrote :

India is concerned, which everyone should be, at the return of a medieval Taliban like regime in Kabul that could become the staging ground for cross border extremism into India.

It makes little sense for India to keep the borders with Pakistan tense, least of all turning up the heat on its western flank with Afghanistan, Ashraf said. India doesn’t have a contiguous border with Afghanistan and the last thing it needs is a costly entanglement there.   Besides, it is obvious to everyone, including the stategic community in India, that there cannot be lasting peace in Afghanistan without the support of Pakistan.  

 Pakistan’s security establishment would worry about potential security cooperation between India and Afghanistan flowing from the strategic pact. ( A separate one is under negotiations with the United States) But so far New Delhi had been sensitive to Pakistani concerns, according to U.S. Under Secretary of Defence  for Policy Michele Flournoy.   She said New Delhi had avoided a playing  a major role in the training of Afghan security forces.

Ultimately, the key to Afghanistan’s future was unlocking its potential, tying it into the economies of its neighbours and hope that it will strengthen the state to stand firmly on its feet once its powerful backers retreat three years from now.  

I

She called, in return, for cooperation on the Pakistani side of the border to "squeeze these terrorists so that they cannot attack and kill any Pakistani, any Afghan, any American, or anyone."  Between the two countries, they would tackle the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban.

But squeeze them to what end?  To weaken all but the hard-core leadership of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network so that they agree to lay down arms and rejoin the political process in Afghanistan? Or to entice them into serious negotiations through which they might be offered a share of power in Kabul, or accommodated in a "soft partition" of Afghanistan (an idea deeply unpopular among Afghans) which leaves them in control of the south and the east?

As Pakistani columnist Ejaz Haider wrote in Pakistan Today just before Clinton arrived, the current U.S. policy looks a bit like the dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat. "‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ asked Alice. ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. ‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat."

True, Clinton stressed the need for a peace process to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan.  But that idea has been on the diplomatic agenda  for nearly two years. By the second half of last year, we were hearing that the United States had endorsed talkswith all of Afghanistan's main insurgent groups, including the Haqqani network. By January this year, western countries said there would be no preconditions set for insurgents entering peace talks - only end-conditions that they sever ties with al Qaeda, renounce violence and agree to respect the Afghan constitution. In February, Clinton stressed the need for negotiations in a landmark speech to the Asia Society which coincided with reports the United States had begun direct talks with the Taliban.

In other words, we have heard a lot about talk about talks without any explanation as to why these have achieved so little so far (some blame U.S. military strategy, others Pakistani interference, others Taliban intransigence, others poor Afghan governance).   And the danger is that as long as these talks about talks continue without  yielding results, all parties to the Afghan conflict arm themselves up in readiness for an escalating civil war.

True,  Clinton admitted in public during her visit to Islamabad that the United States had held a preliminary meeting with representatives of the Haqqani network. But we already knew that.    According to The Washington Post, U.S. officials met Ibrahim Haqqani, the brother of the group’s patriarch, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in a Gulf kingdom in August. The meeting was arranged by the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who also attended, it reported.

But that meeting does not seem to have gone well. It was followed by an attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul which the United States blamed on the Haqqani network and which prompted outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen to describe the group as a "veritable arm" of the ISI.

Clinton has made clear the U.S. strategy will continue. " We're going to be fighting, we're going to be talking and we're going to be building," she told reporters in Afghanistan.  And even if that carries a ring of "if at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again", that is no reason to dismiss it out of hand.

However much the United States and its allies are looking for a way out of the Afghan war, pressure is also mounting on Pakistan. Washington is stepping up efforts to bring supplies to Afghanistan through Central Asia - Clinton flew from Pakistan to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - thereby reducing U.S. dependence on Islamabad/Rawalpindi even as Pakistan's own deteriorating economic health is making it harder for it to risk losing international and U.S. financial support.

And more importantly India this month signed a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan - one unlikely to have been reached without U.S. approval -- which gives India the capability, if not the intention, to put Pakistan under pressure on both its western and eastern borders.

Yet even as the United States doubles down, do also consider two quite different approaches, both of which have the merit of greater clarity but which are also  diametrically opposed.

One of them I heard presented this month by Amrullah Saleh, the Tajik former head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) and a fierce critic of talks with the Taliban. At a conference organised by the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London,  he argued there was no reason to believe Pakistan would be any more inclined to cooperate with the United States now than it was when Washington sent in more troops to Afghanistan. "With that escalation, Pakistan did not cooperate. Why would Pakistan cooperate with de-escalation?" he said.

Rather than rely on Pakistan, he argued that the Afghan government must implement reforms to restore the trust of the Afghan people so they would at least have a state by 2014, when U.S.-led troops are meant to hand over responsibility for security to Afghan forces. And Kabul should change its policy of talks with the Taliban which had "blurred the narrative" for Afghans about who they were fighting, looking instead at reintegrating all but the 200 or so in the inner circle of the insurgency's leadership..

But a scenario which led to a ceasefire and a political deal which left Pakistan and what he called its proxies with control over eastern and southern Afghanistan would offer only "a temporary, deceptive, stability".  The Taliban would remain militant in order to put pressure on Kabul and extort further concessions from the west. Such a deal might provide cover for a withdrawal of western troops, but would also lead to "massive civil strife".

The opposite approach is the one advocated by Pakistan, which  - in somewhat unfortunately chosen words - is to "give peace a chance".  Articulated in detail in a report produced jointly by the Jinnah Institute and the United States Institute of Peace, it aims for a negotiated settlement giving Afghan Pashtun a bigger say in the political process and possibly including the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network.

According to this version, the U.S. position of fight, talk and build cannot work because the insurgents will not trust the Americans to negotiate sincerely as long as they reserve the right to use their very considerable force.  Only a ceasefire on all sides would pave the way for meaningful talks on a political settlement.

The report, criticised to some extent within Pakistan, also notes what is perhaps one of the trickiest issues in the whole approach to Taliban talks: this is not just about Afghanistan. Whatever Pakistan really wants to happen in Afghanistan, and whatever it support it does or does not give to the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, it is also dependent on them to keep control of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP).

According to this excerpt, those who contributed to the Jinnah Institute report questioned "the mis-perception that the Pakistani security establishment is unaware of the growing linkages between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani militant groups."

" However, they argue that while the current links remain limited, it is precisely the fear of these growing into full blown operational cooperation and coordination that prevents the Pakistani state from targeting Afghan insurgent groups on its soil. Moreover, the security establishment is able to take advantage of the present linkages between these groups from time to time by persuading the Afghan Taliban to pressure the TTP and other North Waziristan-based militants to curtail their activities."

Stretch that argument out further and you could make a case that Pakistan needs to get a reasonable deal for the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqanis in Afghanistan if it wants them, in return, to bring the Pakistani Taliban to heel.

So to get back to Clinton and the Afghan settlement. We have three possible approaches, with various permutations.  The one currently favoured by the United States is to keep fighting, to keep the door open for talks, and to keep piling pressure on Pakistan in the hope that it yields results. The second - as expressed by Amrullah Saleh - is to take the idea of talks with insurgent leaders off the table altogether, end the confusion and build up governance within Afghanistan in the years that are left before 2014. The third is to seek a ceasefire, so that in the absence of violence, talks might take place in a more conducive atmosphere.

Any one of those approaches has its merits.  But as long as all these conflicting ideas remain out there, we will see a lot of different groups lining up to argue with the Cheshire Cat.

"We fear the multitudes on two fronts. One is that we conceive of them as masses without politics – forever hostage to gross religious and ideological provocations. Masses which do not constitute a body politic or act with an interest in self-preservation or self-growth. Faced with that absence of reason, we are forced to support native royals to do the job (from Egypt to Pakistan). We justify it by stressing that we may not like these dictators but we know that if we did not have them, the masses would instantly betray us to the very forces of extremism that we seek to destroy," he wrote.

"Second is that these masses are Muslim. This fear grounded in our history can, at best, be understood as the fear of the “Other” and, at worst, as the Lewis/Huntington model of civilizational clash. Either case, it is borne out of our inherent belief in 'difference'. They are not like us. They do not possess reason, etc."

That U.S. attitude has been changing slowly over the past few years, underpinned by the Arab spring, and in the case of Pakistan, Washington's increasingly difficult relationship with the Pakistan Army over its alleged support for, or tolerance of, Islamist militants based in Pakistan. 

Democracy has become the new mantra, expressed most recently by former White House adviser Bruce Riedel in an op-ed in the New York Times.

"America needs a new policy for dealing with Pakistan. First, we must recognize that the two countries’ strategic interests are in conflict, not harmony, and will remain that way as long as Pakistan’s army controls Pakistan’s strategic policies. We must contain the Pakistani Army’s ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy," he said.

Somewhat more diplomatically, President Barack Obama made a point of saying that the United States' argument was  not with the people of Pakistan but with the army's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), agency.

Asked if he would be willing to cut off aid to Pakistan, hit this summer by a second year of flooding, Obama hesitated, the New York Times reported.  The United States has a “great desire to help the Pakistani people strengthen their own society and their own government,” it quoted him as saying.  “And so, you know, I’d be hesitant to punish flood victims in Pakistan because of poor decisions by their intelligence services.”

With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flying into Pakistan to push for greater cooperation on Afghanistan, one of the more interesting, but less obvious, themes of her visit will be how she navigates her way around the country's civilian-military imbalance.  

The arguments, from a U.S. point of view, for supporting democracy and civilian rule are many.  In the short-run, the United States wants to weaken Islamist militants - including the Afghan Taliban as well as India-focused groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba which it says still enjoy support from elements within Pakistan's security services - an allegation the army denies. By weakening the grip of the army on the country's security policy, it would -- in theory - dislodge support for militants.

 Tentative steps taken by the civilian government to change the way the country is governed -- including through greater provincial autonomy - would provide a means for Pakistan's different ethnic groups to try to negotiate their differences without taking up arms. But they would also undercut the centralising authority of the military, as would an ambitious but politically fraught proposal to split in two Pakistan's dominant Punjab province, a major recruiting ground for the army.

And civilian governments have always tended to be more in favour of peace with India than the army, which once nurtured Islamist militant proxies to offset what it saw an existential threat from Pakistan's much bigger neighbour.

Yet to consider how this might look on the other side of the table, read this column by retired army officer Ikram Sehgal who wrote in response to Riedel's op-ed that the real aim of the United States was the "Balkanisation of Pakistan".  By supporting civilian rule, he argued, the United States aimed merely to serve its own agenda given what he called "atrocious (civilian) leadership that excels in nepotism and corruption of the worst kind".

"The majority in Pakistan sees the army and the ISI as Pakistan’s front line of defence and do not approve of the US thus tarring and feathering them," he wrote.  "Propping up corrupt leaders in Pakistan allows the U.S.  to pursue its core national interest even if it is detrimental to ours, eg impose Indian hegemony on us and ... the US sees the Pakistan Army and the ISI as roadblocks in pursuing their own core national interests."

In other words, an army which sees itself as the guarantor of Pakistan's territorial integrity is unlikely to hand over power over foreign and security policy any time soon to the country's civilian politicians.  As it is, the army barely disguises its impatience with the civilian government over what it sees as its failure to provide the governance necessary to underpin its own military campaigns against Islamist militants inside Pakistan.

And the country's politicians themselves have been unable to expand the space available to them to assert their influence over foreign and security policy.  Barring a few politicians who questioned Pakistan's policies -- among them former prime minister Nawaz Sharif - an All Parties Conference held last month largely rubber-stamped the army's response to American pressure to "do more" against Islamist militants. While one of three parliamentary committees due to be briefed by the army week refused to go to army headquarters - saying the military should  come to parliament, two others did so.  And as columnist Ejaz Haider has argued, the civilian government has yet to draw up a national security strategy which might allow it to examine military strategy through a different prism - as happens elsewhere when military leaders are called to testify before parliamentary committees. 

 So the question is this: Does the United States have the patience to nurture civilian rule in Pakistan when it is looking for a way out of the 10-year-old Afghan war? Only the Pakistan Army can either help deliver parts of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network into an Afghan political settlement, or raise pressure on them enough to weaken them significantly and allow the Kabul government to hold its own as U.S. troops begin to withdraw.

The United States has always dealt with the army, even after Musharraf - who took power in a military coup in 1999 - was forced to quit in 2008. It was Musharraf's successor as army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani,  who was feted in Washington rather than its president or prime minister. Even after the May 2 raid by U.S. forces who killed Osama bin Laden, Washington appears to have  given the details to the military first, thereby depriving the civilian government of the power of information and leaving it floundering in its response.

In an article in Foreign Affairs,  C. Christine Fair at Georgetown University argues that the United States needs to change this approach, following the same rules that it applies for other countries when it deals with their militaries.

"For one, the United States should follow its standard protocol for high-level exchanges. The Pakistani chief of army staff should meet and communicate with his American counterpart, not with the secretary of state or the president, as he does now. Rather than consult on political issues, the two countries' military leadership should focus on security matters, such as the war in Afghanistan, continued joint training, and foreign military sales -- preferably all geared toward supporting Pakistan's counterterrorism and insurgency capabilities. It is worth remembering that the U.S. secretary of state meets with the military leadership of virtually no other country. Meanwhile, flagrant disregard for diplomatic protocol in almost every high-level exchange between Pakistan and the United States, is frustrating for even ordinary Pakistanis who are exhausted with U.S. pandering to their men on horseback, even if Americans are oblivious to it," she writes. "Alongside diminished contact with the military, the United States should engage Pakistan's civilian centers of power, including the parliament, the judiciary, educational institutions, and the economy."

And while she acknowledges that greater civilian engagement will not transform Pakistan "over any useful time horizon -- if ever", this was not a reason for giving up, she says. "Although democratization efforts may take a long time to bear fruit, if they ever do, one thing is clear: the most likely path toward a stable country involves empowering Pakistan's civilians to exert control over security and foreign policy. U.S. assistance to help Pakistanis do so is a high-stakes gamble worth taking."

But that is long-term thinking from someone who has followed Pakistan closely for years. What about an administration facing a jittery political environment, the instant demands of 24/7 television news, and a desire at home for early results on Afghanistan? What about that nagging worry that Manan Ahmed captured in his book?  What if you support democracy and end up with a government you don't like? The way Clinton and the U.S. administration finds its way through this particular minefield may end up telling us as much about the current state of "the American imagination" as it does about Pakistan itself.

Last month driving up Afghanistan’s magnificent Panjshir valley, you couldn’t help thinking if the resurgent Taliban would ever be able to break its defences, both natural and from the Tajik-dominated populace. With its jagged cliffs and plunging valleys, Panjshir has been largely out of bounds  for the  Taliban, whether during the civil war or in the past 10 years when it has expanded a deadly insurgency against western and Afghan forces across the country. But on Saturday, the insurgents struck, carrying out a suicide bombing at a provincial reconstruction team base housing U.S. and Afghan troops and officials.

They were halted outside the base, but according to the provincial deputy governor they succeeded in  killing two civilians and wounding two guards when they detonated their explosives. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the first suicide bombing in a decade was a message to Western forces that they were not secure anywhere in the country. They said the  bombers came from within Panjshir, which if true  would worry people even more  because that would suggest the penetration was deeper and there could be more attacks.

The Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio wrote that the bombing was a propaganda coup for the Taliban. Panjshir is the home of the legendary Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by two days before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. Under Massoud’s leadership the Panjshir Valley held out against not only against the Taliban, but famously the Soviet before them.

All along the drive by the side of the rushing Panjshir river on way to Massoud’s hilltop mausoleum, the relics of the war against the Russians have been preserved : rusted tanks on roadsides and an overturned  armoured personnel carrier in the river. There were giant Massoud posters everywhere and because it was the anniversary of his assassination at the hands of a pair of men who pretended to be journalists, the ceremonial gates to the valley were draped in black.

And yet there were concerns even then . Security was tight at each of the gates on the narrow and winding highway through the tall mountains, and the Afghan police who stood guard said if Panjshir had been spared the kind of attacks the Taliban had mounted in the rest of Afghanistan,  it wasn’t for lack of trying . They had already carried out attacks in neighbouring Nuristan province and according to a local Afghan police commander responsible for security at one of the checkpoints, American helicopters had been spotted in the area a few days before the anniversary, firing rockets over a hilltop. It wasn’t clear who they were targeting, the commander said.

Even the proud Panjshiris were worrying about the expanding Taliban influence, especially concerned at the time about government attempts to seek reconciliation with them.  One Afghan elder who lost his son in the war against Russians said his village was fully armed to fight  the Taliban.  There was no way they were going to accept the Taliban in the Panjshir, he told me.

Another local who ran an eating house by the side of the river said he was worried about the growing number of outsiders in the valley. Many, including a group of people from the southern Kandahar province we met at Massoud’s mausoleum, said they were visiting the  area attracted by its cooler climes.   But there were also others,  including a militia commander surrounded by gun-toting guards who swept up to the restaurant the day we were visiting in a cavalcade of vehicles and demanded food. Those were the ones that worried the owner  Jamaal Mohammed the most.

With a series of spectacular attacks over the past few months, first in the provinces and then in the Afghan capital Kabul, the Talban have captured attention and even prompted comparisons with the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive. But they are not the only ones attacking Afghanistan, according to The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). It lists a series of attacks from early this year to build the case that Pakistan has joined the Taliban in what it called a “military invasion of Afghanistan”, driving another nail in the faltering U.S. effort in the country.

Beginning from the February bombardment of Afghan  border police posts in Nangarhar and Khost provinces in eastern Afghanistan by Pakistani planes to the firing of hundreds of rockets last month in Kunar and Nuristan, Pakistani forces have stepped up cross border action, MEMRI  said in a report.  It quoted Afghan officials  as saying the artillery and missile strikes backed by air intrusions were an “act of intrusion.”

 By August there had been 50 incidents of border violation by Pakistani forces, Afghan border police commander Aminullah Amarkhel said. He also made the startling claim that  Pakistani forces had established 16 checkpoints inside the territory of Afghanistan in the east, taken control of some parts and even offered offered citizenship to the local tribes. He said there was proof that Pakistan provided Pakistani citizenship cards to Afghans in the eastern border towns, particularly in Kunar and Nuristan provinces.

It’s hard to tell what is going on in the remote and rugged area straddling the two countries. Pakistan says it has legitimate security concerns with many of the militant groups fighting the state operating from sanctuaries just over the border in Afghanistan.  With foreign forces stretched and focused largely on securing the Afghan south, the eastern region was left largely uncovered, allowing militant groups to reconstitute themselves.  Indeed there is growing concern that some militant groups may have shifted their base from Pakistan’s Waziristan strongholds to provinces such as Kunar.

Pakistan has in recent months faced down attacks from groups of up to 400 militants crossing the border from Afghanistan. On Sunday, Pakistani soldiers killed 30 Afghan militants who had crossed the border to attack the Pakistani army, it said. One Pakistani soldier was killed and four were wounded in the latest frontier incident, which lasted close to an hour when  some 200 militants launched the attack. The Pakistani army says that with the Afghans and the foreign forces unable to crack down  on militant nests in the east, it risks losing the hard-fought gains made against them in offensives over the past few years on its side of the border.

Whatever the claims and the counter-claims,  what is indisputable is that ties between the two countries are rapidly deteriorating.  Tension has been high since Afghan officials accused Pakistan’s main intelligence agency of masterminding the September 20 assassination of Kabul’s chief peace negotiator with the Taliban. Pakistan strongly denied the allegations.

A strategic partnership agreement between India and Afghanistan  during President Hamid Karzai’s trip to New Delhi last week will further rankle Pakistan which has doing everything it can to limit Indian involvement in what it sees as its immediate sphere of influence. The agreement lifts the relationship to another level just as Islamabad’s ties with Kabul  nosedive. No longer will Indian involvement be confined to offering aid and development; it will also get involved in the training of Afghan security forces as they prepare to take over responsibilities from Western fores by 2014.

India was a great friend, while Pakistan was a twin brother, Karzai said trying to sooth ruffled feathers in Islamabad. 

At the moment, though, the brothers are looking dangerously estranged.

As I write this blog, I am on the 38th day of my current assignment to Afghanistan as an embedded journalist with U.S. military forces. I have been assigned here several times since 2001 to cover the war that is still going on 10 years after the al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil. Mullah Omar, popularly known as the one-eyed Taliban, was the first member of the Taliban I met back in 2001. He held press conferences almost daily at the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan a few weeks before U.S. forces and its allies attacked Afghanistan to remove the Taliban government.

Ten years and several trips back to Afghanistan later, I still haven't seen a lot of Taliban fighters. My present assignment is the time I’ve experienced the most encounters between the combined U.S. and Afghan forces and the Taliban.

It is remarkable how the Afghan soldiers and Taliban fighters are more aggressive now. The insurgents, though they know their artillery is no match to that of the Americans, are daring enough to attack at every opportunity, be it with small arms, RPGs or, on occasions, IEDs and rockets. Most of the time, it is a “hit and run” kind of attack wherein they flee after firing some shots. Such eagerness, however, could cost lives.

In Kunar province last week, U.S. and Afghan military engaged insurgents near Combat Pirtle King close to the Pakistan border. I saw Afghan soldiers unloading from the back of their armored vehicle the bodies of two Taliban fighters killed in the encounter. They also captured a wounded insurgent. The Taliban fighters looked barely out of their teens, had unkept long hair and beard, giving the impression that they have been in the mountains for some time.

Afghan soldiers from the joint U.S.-Afghan forces also show the same boldness although their moves are more calculated. On one of our patrols, we saw a white Taliban flag mounted on top of a hill in an area that is known to be a Taliban stronghold. Without hesitation, Afghan soldiers went up the hill to seize the flag as U.S. soldiers watched their backs. There was a fire fight but it was brief as the Taliban immediately fled on motorcycles.

“Afghan soldiers are good fighters, they are very brave that sometimes I have to tell them to stop pursuing the enemies. They always want to be on the front line. They have so much hate for the Taliban,” an Army officer said.

Not just the Afghan soldiers hate the Taliban. In one of the meetings between U.S. soldiers and residents in a village overlooking a valley where Taliban fighters frequently mount their attacks, a teenage boy came out of one of the bunkers made of sandbags and showed the soldiers an AK-47 rifle. Speaking in the local dialect, a village elder told an army officer “This (the firearm) is the only one we have here. I bought this for 6,000 Pakistani rupees (about $150). I sold a cow to buy this rifle.” And then he pleaded, “Please give us more like this and we will help you fight them (Taliban).” When an officer asked what they want in return if they fight the Taliban, the old man said, “Just help us repair our well, or build us another one,” referring to a well which is the source of their daily supply of water for drinking and farm irrigation.

When troops conduct patrols and gather biometrics of the males, they sometimes talk to villagers. People act and speak like things are normal. Perhaps because 10 years of war is already so long that it has become their “normal” way of life. They just carry on with their daily chores, not minding the presence of soldiers and the sight of firearms. All they care about now are life’s very basic essentials such as clean toilets, water supply and electricity.

(Click here to view a selection of iconic images by Reuters photographers from the war in Afghanistan)