No one, by now, needs to be told that the war in Afghanistan is going badly, and that the western allies are in a quandary as to what to do about it. Yet, dreadfully urgent though this drip-bleed insurgency is, the real strategic challenge in central and south Asia is Pakistan. There are three useful and overlapping ways of thinking about this.
Pakistan is unstable, with nuclear weapons and on permanent alert against India, and hosting a cast of swaggering jihadi groups with a fathomless appetite for violence.
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