“God's acts are never irrational,” wrote Ziauddin Najam, commander of a Pakistani strategic forces division, in a 2008 essay: an essay remarkable for both the Major-General's unwavering belief in a divine project and his evident loss of faith in the doctrinal credo that the nation's nuclear weapons would ensure its survival. “Pakistan was created on the night of the 27th Ramadan”, the General went on, “and is [therefore] there to stay forever: we must have faith in it.”
Major-General Najam's despairing words could help an extraordinary effort to bring about a rapprochement in India's fraught relationship with Pakistan — an effort more than one commentator has dismissed as a consequence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's own theology of regional peace.
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