With one million Britons of Pakistani origin, and as the former colonial power, Britain has a unique relationship with Pakistan. But concerns about Britain’s vulnerability to bomb attacks planned by Pakistan-based militants — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said that three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by British authorities had links to al Qaeda in Pakistan — has made for a rocky relationship.

Irfan Husain, a columnist for Dawn newspaper who divides his time between Britain and Pakistan, writes that these tensions are being worsened by the problems Pakistanis have in obtaining visas to visit Britain.

“It is true that Pakistan is increasingly viewed as the epicentre of Islamic terrorism. Many plots, real and imaginary, have had their roots in the badlands of Fata (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas),” he writes. “Many young Brits of Pakistani descent have travelled to remote parts of the country to receive training in bomb-making. But the point is that these young men do not need visas to return to Bradford and Wolverhampton. Being born in Britain, they enter their country without let or hindrance.”

Among those denied entry were members of the Lahore Pipe Band hoping to take part in a world championship in Scotland, a trade delegation, a well-known columnist, and a guitarist.

It’s not entirely clear whether the visa problems are driven more by bureaucratic bungling than fear of terrorism. The Guardian newspaper says that several thousand Pakistani students hoping to start university in Britain are facing delays of three months or more for visas because of a “bureaucratic fiasco” - after a reorganisation, visa applications from Pakistan are now processed in Abu Dhabi.

Husain argues that by denying entry to the likes of writers and musicians, Britain is compounding the very problem it wants to contain - the spread of extremism. These are the kind of people who should be made welcome in the west, he says. ”Given the position they enjoy in Pakistan, they can influence many to see that the enemy is not the West, but the forces of darkness that have gained the ascendancy in our own country. By turning them down, the British government only provides ammunition to those who are convinced of the West’s inherent anti-Islam policies.”

In any case, most security analysts would argue that the main  concern is not about Pakistanis coming into Britain; it is about Britons of Pakistani origin leaving the country to attend militant training camps based in Pakistan. On this subject, Stephen Tankel has an interesting post about signs of growth in the operations of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militant groups. Based in Pakistan’s heartland Punjab province, these groups were initially focused on fighting India over Kashmir, but are increasingly seen as a potential or direct threat to the west.

“In the past JeM and LeT were valuable to al-Qaeda because of what is called the ‘Kashmiri Escalator’. A disproportionate number of British Pakistanis are of Kashmiri decent and those interested in making contact with a militant group often can employ familial connections in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to find their ways to Lashkar or JeM,” he writes. 

“Recruits procure training from one of the two groups, after which some of them are passed on to al-Qaeda operatives who are often in the FATA. In 2009 British security officials estimated that approximately 4,000 people were trained in this way since 9/11…”

The apparent growth of these two groups in the heart of Pakistan, he writes, give pause for thought about the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan. “Enormous sacrifices are being made to keep Afghanistan free from al-Qaeda and its allies. Meanwhile, next-door some of those same allies are building away in the seemingly safest of havens.”

The argument about who is responsible for British citizens seeking training in militant camps in Pakistan is a complex one - both countries tend to blame the other. And as Amil Khan wrote in this post last year, the attitude of British Pakistanis to Pakistan is far more layered than a simple question of which country should take the blame when something goes wrong.

But if one of the aims is to stop young British Pakistanis from being drawn towards hardline Islam, and at the same time offer them an alternative image of both Britain and Pakistan, why ban the bagpipers?

Saeed Shah at McClatchy has an interesting story about Jaish-e-Mohammad, an al Qaeda linked militant group, building a big new base in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

The group, which was blamed for killing U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, already has a headquarters in the town of Bahawalpur in south Punjab.

But Shah writes that it has now walled off a big new compound outside the town. The new facility, he says, is surrounded by a high brick and mud wall, has a tiled swimming pool, stabling for more than a dozen horses, an ornamental fountain and even swings and a slide for children.

“There are jihadist inscriptions painted on the inside walls, including a proclamation that “Jaish-e-Mohammad will return”, alongside a picture of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, implying further terrorist attacks against the Indian capital,” he says. 

It’s unclear what the new base is meant to be used for - Shah quotes Jaish and Pakistani officials as saying that the facility, which is still under construction, is simply a small farm to keep cattle.

What is clear is that many countries have an interest in what is happening with the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

The group was set up in 2000 after its founder, Maulana Masood Azhar, was released by India in return for the freeing of passengers aboard an Indian Airlines plane hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar in Afghanistan.  While its focus was on fighting in Indian Kashmir, it had links to Afghanistan dating back to the militant campaign against the Soviet occupation.  Shah says in his article that Jaish and other Punjab-based militant groups now recruit and train thousands of young men to fight western forces in Afghanistan.

“Bahawalpur also serves as a safe “R&R” stopover for jihadists battling in Afghanistan,” Shah quotes western intelligence officers as saying. “In Bahawalpur, militants can rest and recuperate away from the U.S. unmanned aerial drones that patrol Pakistan’s tribal area in the northwest.”

British nationals of Pakistani origin involved in militancy have also been linked to Jaish, making the group a major worry for the British government. These include Omar Sheikh, who was released along with Maulana Azhar after the Kathmandu to Kandahar hijacking and later convicted of organising Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping; and Rashid Rauf, accused of masterminding the plot to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic.

India, which has demanded Pakistan take action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group accused of involvement in last year’s attack on Mumbai, is also pushing for it to crack down on Jaish-e-Mohammad. Like Jaish, the LeT is also based in Pakistan’s Punjab province; unlike Jaish its focus has remained on targetting India. And while Jaish has been blamed for attacks inside Pakistan, including an attempt to assault then president Pervez Musharraf, the LeT is not believed to be behind any attacks on Pakistan.

Maulana Azhar has also been reported to have acted as the link between al Qaeda and Islamist militants who attacked U.S. forces in Somalia in 1993.

And if that is not already complicated enough, there are serious concerns about the danger posed to Pakistan itself from militants based in south Punjab.

(Reuters file photos: Maulana Azhar; the hijacked Indian Airlines plane at Kandahar; Rashid Rauf)

Memories seem to be short in the British government when it comes to Kashmir. Foreign Secretary David Miliband stirred up a diplomatic row over the region during his visit to India earlier this month. As this piece in The Times says, Miliband angered Indian officials by giving what they described as “unsolicited advice” on Kashmir, over which India has three times gone to war with Pakistan since independence from Britain in 1947 and over which it is in no mood to be lectured by outsiders, let alone the former colonial power.
It was on a visit to Pakistan and India in 1997 to mark the 50th anniversary of those two countries’ independence that the then British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, also got into trouble over Kashmir. Cook, who also served the Labour government, was forced to row back from suggestions that Britain might help resolve the long-running dispute. His intervention cast a serious shadow over the visit by Queen Elizabeth, who was at one point forced to cancel a long-planned speech.
The visit, during which the queen was accompanied by Cook, went downhill after that, and at one point a senior British diplomat was seen sitting, head in hands in despair, on the pavement outside Chennai airport. There were even suggestions, denied of course, that the British High Commissioner might be recalled. Tony Blair, then prime minister, had to patch up ties by assuring his Indian counterpart, Inder Kumar Gujral, that London would not meddle in Delhi’s dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir.
One wonders whether Miliband was reminded of all this before he went to India, and if he was, why did he walk into the Kashmir minefield once again. Or maybe he wasn’t, which poses a different set of questions about competence and institutional memory at the Foreign Office.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband may yet end up achieving the opposite of what he intended in India when he called for a resolution of the Kashmir dispute in the interests of regional security.

To some Indians, linking the attacks in Mumbai - which New Delhi says originated from Pakistan - to the issue of Kashmir is not just insensitive, it is also a wake-up call. The lesson they have drawn is this: for all the world’s sense of outrage over Mumbai, India will have to deal with Pakistan on its own, and not expect foreign powers to lean on its neighbour in the manner it wants.

Miliband’s visit was a “jarring reminder to India to stop off-shoring its Pakistan policy,” writes Indian security affairs analyst Brahma Chellaney in the Asian Age. He then goes on to call for a set of measures including a military option short of war to weaken Pakistan.

New Delhi has diplomatic options that it has not yet deployed, he argues. These include recalling the Indian High Commissioner to Islamabad or suspending peace talks, or disbanding a “farcical” joint anti-terrorism mechanism or halting state-assisted cultural and sporting links or invoking trade sanctions.

On the military front, he suggests offensive military deployments along the entire length of the border. This would be different from the 2002 all-out mobilisation for a war that nobody really believed would happen, following the parliament attack in Dec 2001. Such a strategy, Chellaney argues, would put keep Pakistan on tenterhooks as to which front would be chosen for a quick, sharp thrust. Pakistan would have to follow suit and that would put unbearable pressure on a state already in severe financial difficulties.

Plausible? Well, two months after the attacks, you would have to argue the appetite for such tough measures has reduced. . If you had to act, you were better off even in the eyes of your own people to have done it then, rather than now.

But this may well be a pointer to a stiffening mood in India as it heads into an election that could bring the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party into power. And then all bets would be off as to what would be India’s policy towards Pakistan.

Over the weekend, the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Lal Krishna Advani gathered a bunch of military chiefs, security analysts and party bosses, and the verdict from that meeting was India had been too soft on Pakistan.

“After Mumbai, any self-respecting government would have adopted a much more robust response which alone could compel Pakistan to not only bring to book those behind the incident but also to wind down the infrastructure of terror,” the BJP said in a statement. “Instead India adopted the mildest of response, not like an emerging global player.”

India, it says, has a range of “diplomatic, economic and other options” to force Pakistan to see reason and stop being a base for anti-India operations. Tough words, but then this is a party that said way back in 1998 it would weaponise India’s nuclear deterrent in its election manifesto and proceeded to do exactly that soon as it entered office.

Even some members of the Congress government are not above flexing muscles. Defence Minister A.K.Antony said New Delhi knew of the existence of more than 30 militant camps operating in Pakistan and that it was telling foreign nations these camps were not just a threat to India but to the world itself. Pakistan has said that it is already fighting militants on its own territory and that the accusations from India are unhelpful.

[Reuters photos of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband with Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Indian policemen standing guard in Kashmir]

India is piling on the diplomatic pressure to convince the international community to lean on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants blamed by New Delhi for the Mumbai attacks.

According to the Times of India, “India has made it clear to the U.S. and Iran as well as Pakistan’s key allies, China and Saudi Arabia, that they need to do more to use their clout to pressure Pakistan into acting…” The Press Trust of India (PTI), quoted by The Hindu, said India had used a visit by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal to Delhi to drive home the same message.

As discussed previously on this blog, in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, India’s response was to look to the United States to put pressure on Pakistan. It also appears to have won some support from Russia, whose officials said publicly that the attacks were funded by Dawood Ibrahim, an underworld don who India says lives in Pakistan. China, Pakistan’s traditional ally, supported the United Nations Security Council in  blacklisting the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity accused of being a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba.  China’s Foreign Minister has also telephoned his counterparts in India and Pakistan urging dialogue, according to Xinhua. 

And to complete the tour of the permanent members of the Security Council, Britain blamed Pakistan-based militants for the Mumbai attacks, while France has also called on Pakistan to take action.

That’s a fairly broad consensus in favour of diplomatic pressure. There certainly seem to be more players more visibly involved than in 2001/2002 when India and Pakistan came to the brink of war over an attack on the Indian parliament that India blamed on Pakistan-based militants. You might therefore be tempted to argue that the diplomatic approach is working — and as long as this stands a chance, the prospects of military escalation are slim.

So what is going wrong? Despite the flurry of diplomatic activity, the military tensions are rising.  Pakistan has cancelled army leave and redeployed troops.  The Washington Post said thousands of troops were being redeployed from the Afghan border to the border with India.

Are the two countries’ armies simply making sure they are prepared, just in case the diplomatic efforts fail? Or is there more going on behind-the-scenes?

When the British left India in 1947, they bequeathed what was arguably a European notion of the nation state on a region for which the very concept was alien. I say ”arguably” because anything one writes about Partition or the nation state is open to dispute. And until the financial crisis, I relegated this argument to the realm of historians – a subject that interested me personally, but did not seem relevant today.

That was until I noticed a new debate bubbling up on the internet about the future of the nation state. Will it become more powerful as countries scramble to protect themselves from the financial crisis as George Friedman at Stratfor argues in this article?  Or does the need for global solutions to the crisis sound a death knell for the nation state, as John Robb suggests here?

Let’s just suppose the paradigm has shifted and the 60-year-old model defined by the departing British colonial rulers is no longer valid. What does that mean for Pakistan and India? (more…)

Does the financial crisis mark the beginning of the end of American global dominance? And if so, what would the decline of American power mean for Afghanistan and Pakistan? It’s early days yet, but here are a few themes that are emerging from the maelstrom.

If you put aside the many arguments over whether the Americans were, or were not, guilty of latter-day imperialism, you can find consensus on two main points: that the U.S. model of free-market capitalism has been sorely challenged by the financial crisis; and that America’s reputation as a military superpower has been tarnished by its less-than-successful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this respect, there are obvious parallels with the collapse of the British empire after World War Two, starting with its departure from India in 1947. Although Britain likes to think it won the war, its postwar situation carried all the hallmarks of defeat. It was virtually bankrupt and with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 it had lost the myth of invincibility that allowed it to rule an empire on which the sun never set.  With neither the money, nor the credibility, to hold India by force in the face of a powerful Indian independence movement, it mustered as much dignity as possible for an emperor stripped of his clothes and left abruptly, partitioning the subcontinent into India and Pakistan on its way out.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this analogy works for the United States, and that it too begins to draw in on itself. The lessons of British imperial history suggest that when empires collapse, they do so not gradually, but in big leaps that create chaos for those left behind (for example in the estimated one million killed at Partition).

In an analysis in TomDispatch.com, Aziz Huq writes about how Britain, even after being forced to withdraw from India, only properly realised the limitations of its power in 1956, after its hopelessly miscalculated attack on Egypt following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. “The country’s monetary weakness led directly to its military collapse in the crisis,” he writes. ”The Suez fiasco … also marked the end of British imperial ambitions.”

This is not to suggest that the Americans are about to suddenly abandon Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In the short term, both U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are committed to stepping up the campaign in Afghanistan. At the same time, Western leaders are already lowering their sights on Afghanistan, according to this analysis from Reuters Kabul correspondent Jon Hemming. In a country that is ”famously unforgiving to foreign forces”, this may well have happened even without the financial crisis.

But it does suggest that whatever the next U.S. President decides to do about Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is unlikely to be smooth.

Now add into this mix the growing power of Afghanistan’s neighbours — Iran and Russia, traditional U.S. rivals buoyed up by petrodollars and so likely to benefit from the clipping of America’s wings that they have been dubbed along with Venezuela as a new “axis of oil“. Both Iran and Russia, along with India, supported Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban Northern Alliance when the Taliban were in power in Kabul, and are seen as likely to resist any attempt by the United States to seek reconciliation with the Taliban as a face-saving way out of the Afghan quagmire.

Then there is China, sitting on $2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari just visited China to seek help to bail out Pakistan’s economy, in a trip that also marked out his independence from the United States. China has yet to fully show its hand in how far it intends to use its new-found economic might to exercise global political power.  But it’s worth remembering that the United States, when it rescued Britain from bankruptcy after World War Two, insisted on an end to British imperialism and a withdrawal from its overseas colonies. We don’t yet know what China will demand.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess how all this will play out? America’s status as the lone superpower looks vulnerable; Iran and Russia are loudly assertive, and China is quietly buying up the world’s economy.  Personally, I think there are so many variables that we can’t possibly know yet; but whatever happens, it’s likely to catch us by surprise.

Britain’s commander in Afghanistan has said the war against the Taliban cannot be won and suggested talks with the group might be a way of making progress.

“We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army,” Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith said in an interview with the Sunday Times.

“If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this,” he said. “That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable.”

His comments are perhaps not quite as startling as they first appear. NATO commanders and diplomats have been saying for some time that the Taliban insurgency cannot be defeated by military means alone and that negotiations will ultimately be needed to bring an end to the conflict. In some ways, it’s almost stating the obvious since insurgencies are never totally defeated and all sides have to sit down and negotiate at some point.

Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he had made a call for peace to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and had asked Saudi Arabia to help in talks with the group. A senior Taliban commander rejected the call and said the Taliban would not negotiate while there were still foreign troops on Afghan soil.

But despite the rejection, there does seem to be a growing sense that something is going on, and that people on the ground are beginning to think about how eventually to end the war in Afghanistan.

In an article in Canada’s Edmonton Sun, Eric Margolis has no doubts that it is time for Canada to bring its troops home, arguing that the occupation of Afghanistan is not about preventing another 9/11 but rather to secure routes for pipelines bringing Caspian oil and gas from Central Asia to the West.

“The Taliban are not ‘terrorists’,” he writes. “The movement had nothing to do with 9/11 though it did shelter Osama bin Laden …  Only a handful of al Qaeda are left in Afghanistan. The current war is not really about al Qaeda and ‘terrorism’, but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin to the West. Canada and the rest of NATO have no business being pipeline protection troops.”

But in an op-ed in the New York Times, Robert Kaplan writes that the Afghan campaign is “more than a manhunt” and must be secured,  at the very least to ensure the stability of neighbouring Pakistan.

He writes that it may be necessary to make make deals with some Taliban groups against others. “For the Taliban are not a monolithic organization, but bands of ornery Pashtun backwoodsmen who have been cut out of the power base in Afghanistan by an increasingly corrupt and ineffectual government in Kabul. They are not al Qaeda …”

Then picking up the same theme as Margolis but reaching a different conclusion, he says Afghanistan would benefit from becoming a transit route for Central Asian oil and gas.

“Even under a weak central government, Afghanistan could finally achieve economic salvation: the construction of a web of energy pipelines that have been envisioned for years connecting Central Asia with the Indian Ocean. These might run, for example, from the natural gas fields of Turkmenistan down through Afghanistan and into the dense population zones of Pakistan and India, with terminals at ports like Gwadar in Pakistani Baluchistan and Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat,” he writes. “In other words, in Afghanistan we are not simply trying to save a country, but to give a whole region a new kind of prosperity and stability, united rather than divided by energy needs, that would be implicitly pro-American.”

(I wrote just a couple of days ago about whether energy pipelines could become a cause for peace rather than war, in a post about long-delayed plans for an Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline bringing Iranian gas to Indian markets.)

So is it time to think about bringing an end to the Afghan campaign? And if so, on what terms? By walking away and trying to avoid any more bloodshed? Or by achieving peace – if necessary by offering parts of the Taliban a share of power in Kabul – and then securing it by giving Afghanistan a strategic importance that binds it into the regional and global economy?

Last week, the Pakistan Army said it had recovered the wreckage of an unmanned aerial vehicle in the South Waziristan region, but it didn’t identify the aircraft.

The United States military, which has stepped up flights of the Predator, its main unmanned aerial vehicle, on the Afghan-Pakistan border and into Pakistan in recent months, said none of its planes had gone down inside Pakistan. One of its aerial vehicles had crashed but that was in Afghanistan, about  60 miles west of the Pakistani border and U.S. forces had immediately recovered the aircraft.

So whose unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was it that the Pakistan military found and why have they not revealed its identity? Tribesmen earlier said they had brought down the plane with fire, but the Pakistan military said there weren’t any bullet marks and it appeared to have crashed because of  mechanical failure.

If it was a Predator and this is  by no means certain, then you can narrow down the list to a small group of countriies.  Predator-maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.   names the Italian Air Force, the Turkish army and the Royal Air Force (RAF) as customers of the Predator family of unmanned spy planes, besides the United States. All three have forces in Afghanistan but so far none has been known to fly missions into Pakistan.

Danger Room blog, which has been asking the same question about the downed drone,  says a General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc spokesman said they also have classified sales which they wouldn’t discuss.

 So what really is going on in the skies over Pakistan’s northwest ? Are there other players getting involved in the face of now almost visceral opposition to strikes by the United States? There aren’t any obvious answers out there.

Or perhaps it wasn’t a Predator at all, and was some other pilotless surveillance plane. Which then opens a whole range of countries that fly such planes including Pakistan itself, and even India. Reuters quotes a Pakistani intelligence official as saying that the aircraft that they recovered was about 3 feet (1 meter) long with a wingspan of about 5 feet. If those dimensions are correct, that would make the aircraft much smaller than the Predator.

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone.  The writer is a former Reuters Middle East correspondent who now works in documentaries for Channel 4. Here he writes about how Pakistan looks from London.

                                               By Amil Khan

It’s nice to feel wanted. If you are British-Pakistani, British of Pakistani descent, Anglo-Pakistani, or whatever, it’s a familiar and complicated state of mind. Britain is keen that you feel British - even though no one can explain what that really means. On the other hand, if you describe yourself as “British” to a born and bred Pakistani, you might as well have “traitor” stamped on your forehead.

This identity tug of war partly explains why I have a love-hate relationship with my father’s country, but it’s not the whole story. Pakistan - like other former colonies - has a national love-hate relationship of its own with Britain. But that’s not why I have one with Pakistan. Being born of immigrant parents always means that you have more than one part of the world claiming your loyalties. But that’s not it either. After all, many people have multiple loyalties. You can be far more content being British and Indian.

As a teenager, Pakistan provided refuge when you were made to feel as if you didn’t belong. When right-wing politicians said you weren’t British as adamantly as their successors in the same party now tell you that you can’t be anything else, it was satisfying to cheer the Pakistani cricket team - and it still is. Pakistan was the place grandparents became all misty eyed about when they spoke of “home”. I heard that Pakistan was a country born of its people’s desire for self determination and steely will. I knew Pakistan could be chaotically disorganised and fractious, but always pulled together in the end and answered adversity with guts, genius and determination. For me, the core of Pakistan’s character was a “don’t take no s**t” attitude. When I went to work as a journalist in the Middle East and saw posters of dictators adorning every wall, while in Pakistan military rulers past and present were lampooned in cartoons, I thought it was a national character I could relate to and respect.

Early disappointments with Pakistan came when I visited the country as a teenager. But I brushed away the reality of grinding poverty, corruption, deep inequality and crushing injustice by blaming British colonialism and America for its proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. That was enough - for a while. When I was at school, Nawaz Sherif came on an official visit to Britain as prime minister. He told the press he would turn Pakistan into an economic powerhouse and all the Pakistanis in Britain would want to return. He then went back to Pakistan and built a couple of mansions. A couple of years later, Pakistan carried out nuclear tests just to show India it could. The U.S. imposed sanctions and Sherif said; “If the nation is forced to eat daal (lentils), so will my children”. He then promptly built another mansion.

I watched all this from Britain and thought; “Come on Pakistan! What’s wrong with you? Get rid of these idiots.” I had come to think of Pakistan as a nation of immense potential, and I badly wanted it to realise some of that. I wanted to believe - as I had been led to believe - that malevolent outsiders conspired to keep Pakistan underdeveloped. It was confusing and disenchanting to realise the blame lay with Pakistanis themselves.

At about the same time, I came to think about my identity as more than a convenient cloak I could use to stick two fingers up at the world around me - which led to the question; “What does Pakistan actually do for me?” The answer was; “not much”. Nawaz Sherif’s comments in the UK before the political turmoil that led Pervez Musharaf to take power were the only time I can remember British Pakistanis were even acknowledged by the Pakistani government. For all the “always remember that you are Pakistani” from grandparents hankering back to the promise of Pakistan’s founders, its politicians were glad to see the back of us.

Israel, for example, arranges for young British Jews to visit the country every year. The notion that Pakistan could have the foresight to try to instill an attachment among a captive audience of millions across Europe and North America is laughable. A growing and confident India talks of British Indians as “ours” and an asset in the geo-political future the country sees for itself. After the 7/7 bombings in London, however, Musharaf said the young British men of Pakistani parentage were a British product and problem, not a Pakistani one. Instead of an asset, we became a problem that no one wanted to take the blame for.

Pakistan’s answer to the challenges of the post 9/11 world have shown it at its worst. Nawaf Sherif and Benazir Bhutto saw the rise of sectarianism and terrorism as an opportunity for personal advancement rather than as a national crisis. I saved a fair amount of my anger for the British news media, which failed to take Bhutto or Sherif to task, and instead bought into the “democracy against the dictator” news template. They failed to ask what Bhutto would do about the militants that Musharraf hadn’t already tried. Or question her about Pakistan’s arming of the Taliban during her term in office. Sherif plugged away at Musharraf for sacking Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudhary, but didn’t he sack a good few judges himself when he was in power? And underpinning it all, why did no one think to question the premise that these people are in any way democrats? Most Pakistanis seem to believe - probably rightly - that elections for prime minister are settled in backrooms and hinge on who can offer the biggest bribe to feudal landlords. He who buys the landlords, buys the votes of their millions of peasant farmers.

But where British journalists can be partly excused for having a sketchy understanding of a far away place, it is Pakistanis themselves who have to shoulder the real blame. I have been in Pakistan when both Sherif and Bhutto were serving as prime ministers. Their unpopularity when in office was staggering. Everyone knew about the corruption and ineptitude. So why did Pakistanis vote for their parties in the recent elections?

“There are few choices in Pakistani politics,” was one answer I got from a friend in Pakistan. Why is that? Pakistani diplomats are always keen to point out that their country is not a run-of-the-mill dictatorship because it has a strong civil society, a free press and no leader personality cult; so why there aren’t new people and parties ready to deliver good governance. Maybe that tenacious “take no crap” attitude I always wanted to believe lay at the centre of what it meant to be Pakistani has finally been defeated.

That attitude, I think, was the basis of Pakistan. The promise of an independent, modern, Muslim state that Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisaged morphed into another promise - a strong, militarily capable Muslim nation ready to stand up for suffering Muslims. But after 9/11, when Pakistan lined up in America’s corner, that last promise was destroyed. Suddenly - it seemed to the children of its diaspora - Pakistan was actually happy to take a lot of crap and some British Pakistanis gravitated to another promise; the Muslim pride and action of al Qaeda.

Last summer, while researching extremism I went to a rally organised by a radical Islamist group in London. When the protestors’ coach  passed a memorial to Commonwealth soldiers, one young guy from Luton shouted out; “Look! You die for them and they give you a bit of stone with ‘Pakistan’ written on it. God forgive our grandfathers for letting themselves be divided into meaningless nations created to serve the kuffar.”

The young man’s rejection of Pakistan comes from the same place as my dysfunctional relationship with the country; its failure to live up to its promise. It’s not a modern Muslim state charting its own way in the world, it’s a feudal mess that keeps failing to live up to the potential of its people. And the final straw has been its loss of backbone.

Then again, maybe that attitude I was drawn to is still there? But it no longer resides with the government or the ordinary office workers, mechanics, traders and farmers that make up 90 percent of Pakistan. It now resides with the ultra conservatism of Tehreek e Taliban. If that’s the case, Pakistan and I are beyond therapy.