A brisk look at KCNA, the North Korean regime’s news agency hosted from Japan, used to form an occasional part of my reading routine. It was a source of comic relief at first. As the rest of the world lurched between crises, the inhabitants of North Korea seemed splendidly insulated from anything approaching hardship or even inconvenience. Dear Leader Kim Jong Il – depicted by KCNA scribes as a man so absolutely devoted to improving the lives of his citizens that you wondered if he had a life of his own – was unrelenting in his efforts to spread prosperity and tranquillity among his people.

In 2008, the world was bracing itself for economic meltdown. But the North Koreans, according to KCNA, were “enjoying their holidays in sanatoria and rest homes built in scenic spots of DPRK”. Kim Jong Il, ever the visionary, had seen to it “that steps were taken to develop… holiday homes so as to provide full conditions for the health of the working people and for their cultural recreation.” The same year Kim ordered pine tree forests to be turned into pine-nut tree forests. “The scenic wonders unfolded there provide valuable experience in woodland transformation,” marvelled a KCNA story. This year, galvanised by Kim’s vision, North Korea’s engineering wunderkinds finally produced the country’s first portable toothbrush.

After a while, though, reading KCNA for pleasure seemed like a perverse exercise. KCNA was aimed, after all, at a foreign audience – and the fact that the Kim Jong Il regime could so cavalierly pass off complete fabrications to the outside world, knowing very well that the world knew them to be lies, was a measure of its contempt for common decency and its utter disregard for international opinion. To those who were condemned to enduring his rule, Kim Jong Il was no joke.

Born on February 16, 1941, in a military camp in Khabarovsk in eastern Russia, Kim Jong Il’s name was recorded in official Soviet documents as Yuri Irsenovich Kim. Years later, the propagandists in his father Kim Il Sung’s regime built a myth around Kim Jong Il’s arrival into this world. According to this, Kim was born a year later – on February 16, 1942 – in a log cabin on Mount Bektu. An ancient and mysterious tree with a prophetic message carved into its moist bark, announcing the birth of the “star of Bektu,” was duly discovered in the vicinity. The site was turned into a shrine. Then a group of Japanese tourists visited the place, and to Kim’s great misfortune, one of them happened to be a botanist. He took a look at the tree and laughed at the claim that it could be 50 years old. The shrine was immediately sealed off to the general public.

Kim grew up under the tutelage of his father, a megalomaniac whose success at building a personality cult made Nicolae Ceausescu look like a demure amateur. So thoroughly had he succeeded in conscripting North Koreans in the cause of worshipping his personality that when he died, in 1994, the official version of events was swallowed by the public without a squeak. A thousand cranes descended from the heavens to carry away the Great Leader, but they had to give up their quest when they saw the determination with which Kim’s people held on to him. So the heavenly birds struck a compromise deal with the North Korean authorities: the Great Leader would be housed inside a palatial mausoleum in Pyongyang, out of the people’s sight, but in their midst, with the new title of “Eternal President.” To this day, North Koreans believe that Kim Il Sung is resting in his mausoleum.

Kim Il Sung built the world’s first Stalinist dynasty. And for more than five decades, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea has existed as the most absolutist tyranny on earth. Internationally, Pyongyang’s crimes have ranged from nuclear proliferation and money laundering to the promotion of terrorism and aggression against South Korea. Kim Jong Il proved even more skilful at fooling the world than his father. He extracted a commitment of negotiations from the West by threatening to go nuclear – and then used the nuclear arsenal he acquired behind the cloak of those negotiations to blackmail the West into offering even more concessions.

Kim also possessed something of an artistic sensibility. He directed operas and public performances. And he loved cinema so much that he wrote a book about it. But he was, at his core, an incurable criminal. In the late 1970s, he had the South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee abducted and brought to Pyongyang. The aim was to pressure Choi into performing in North Korean propaganda films – but primarily the kidnapping was staged for Kim’s own amusement.

When he was not a menace, Kim Jong Il was a bloody nuisance.

The news of his demise at the age of 69 is welcome. Addicted to a diet of spicy and greasy food, the obese dictator had become significantly impaired by cardiac disease for some years. But Kim’s passing is unlikely – at least in the near future – to affect the dynasty or the conditions he did so much to entrench.

Kim Jong-un, the departed dictator’s third son, who had been promoted within the military and the Workers Party, will almost certainly succeed his father. The widespread ignorance and the absence of communities in North Korea – accomplished through decades of propaganda and violent repression – will ensure a smooth transition.

The only man with the power to challenge Kim Jong-un is Ri Yong-ho, chief of the Korean Peoples Army. But the existing structure is too profitable for him to make such a move. Ri was chosen to be Kim’s puppeteer: his interest is in perpetuating the current set-up.

Kim Jong-un’s own early education in Switzerland has led some to hope for a change of direction in Pyongyang. But the extremely mysterious nature of Kim Jr.’s Swiss sojourn – during which he displayed no signs of curiosity in the world around him, lived in isolation, and took greater interest in basketball than anything else – makes that prospect highly unfeasible.

North Korea will continue for now to be ruled by the same family in more or less the same fashion – an absolute prison with more than 24 million famished inmates. Who will liberate them?

Hitchens is gone. And the phrase that echoes in my mind is Nehru’s at the death of Gandhi: “The light has gone out of our lives.” For every young writer – and every victim and opponent of authoritarianism – there is now darkness.

To Hitchens, there was no difference between the two: he rejected the line that separates the observer from the doer. The master stylist of the English language was also the Western world’s most forceful opponent of authoritarianism. He savaged intellectuals who, obsessed with playing the thinker, refused to engage with reality and often became apologists for tyranny.

“The usual duty of the intellectual is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae,” he wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22. “But there is another responsibility: to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated…”

This clarity was not limited to thought. We must remember Hitchens also for the remarkable lack of gulf between his beliefs and his conduct.

Strolling through Beirut after an evening of drinking in 2009, Hitchens spotted a poster for the fascist Syrian Social Nationalist Party. He walked over to it, got his pen out, and scrolled a compliment that all Nazi sympathisers deserve to hear: fuck you. For this he was physically assaulted on the street by the SSNP’s thugs. Did Hitchens flee? Far from it: The next morning he delivered a lecture at the American University in Beirut. Its title: “Who are the revolutionaries in today’s Middle East.”

In his own lifetime, Hitchens inspired and shaped movements that displaced oppressors. His life – his tremendous body of work – is an indispensable spot of light in the darkness that presently engulfs us.

Earlier this week, in an essay that comprehensively debunked the so-called “memogate” controversy that has paralysed Pakistan and driven its already fragile civilian government to the brink of collapse, David Frum described the architect of the crisis, Mansoor Ijaz, as “a reckless fantasist motivated by childish vanity”.

Now Ijaz has responded with a rebuttal that vividly proves the case of those calling him a fraud.

Who is Ijaz and what has he done? He is an American businessman of Pakistani descent with an incurable addiction to self-elevating fantasies and a remarkable eye for opportunity – an expert at making hay when the sun has sunk. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he came forward with an astonishing claim: that the attacks happened only because the Clinton administration had snubbed his offer to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Sudan. Unsurprisingly, the 9/11 Commission found this claim to be a lie. In ordinary times, Ijaz would be confined to the fringes of political discourse. But in the fevered and uncertain atmosphere of the last decade, as the fringe appropriated the mainstream, Ijaz was among the multitude of clowns whose voices were amplified and legitimised by networks and newspapers.

Ijaz presented himself as a pro-Western secularist opposed to the Pakistani army’s interference in the country’s civilian affairs. He wanted the world to support civilian rule in Pakistan. He erupted with indignation when bin Laden was discovered in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad. The Generals, he argued, must be taught a lesson.

Then in October, after months of being outside the limelight, he decided to update the world on his recent exploits. In an op-ed in the Financial Times, he wrote that he had been plotting to subdue the Pakistani army. He alleged that a top ranking Pakistani diplomat had conscripted him in this grand scheme, and together they had crafted an extraordinary memo to Washington: if Barack Obama squeezed the Pakistani army, the civilian government would shut down state patronage of terrorism and offer the U.S. a free hand against militants inside Pakistan.

No one in the West accorded serious attention to Ijaz’s claims. Why would Pakistan’s ambassador seek the help of a character as utterly lacking in credibility as Ijaz to deliver a message that could be communicated securely through numerous other diplomatic channels? But in Pakistan, where a rightwing counterestablishment survives almost entirely on conspiracy theories, they lit a fuse. Televangelists and columnists clamoured for the “traitorous” Pakistani diplomat’s identity to be disclosed. The army seemed anxious to deal with the civilian who was said to have urged the Americans to curb their – the army’s – power. “Memogate” was born.

Then, inexplicably, Ijaz switched sides and joined the army. He named his “co-conspirator” as Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington. Having sabotaged his stated cause, and fully aware of the danger in which he placed Haqqani, Ijaz met the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in London and volunteered “evidence” of Haqqani’s involvement in the “conspiracy”: emails, texts and Blackberry messages.

Today, Haqqani – an unyielding advocate of democracy in Pakistan – is out of a job and awaiting prosecution. Some members of Pakistan’s ruling elite would like to see him executed. His wife, Farahnaz Ispahani, faces threats to her life. Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, has suffered a stroke and is in Dubai. In other words, the civilian establishment of Pakistan – the wing that Ijaz claims to support – is in meltdown. Pakistan’s military-intelligence mafia – whose machinery supports the Taliban in Afghanistan – is back in power, and keen to exact revenge for the humiliation inflicted on it by the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden.

Despite all this, Ijaz claims that his actions have helped democracy in Pakistan. Imagine John Wilkes Booth saying that his assassination of Lincoln was meant to promote emancipation – and you get a sense of what Ijaz is trying to sell. Far from supporting democracy, Ijaz’s actions have served to re-empower the most regressive elements within Pakistan’s security establishment. Pakistan’s most tireless champions of democracy and pluralism are in the line of fire because of Ijaz. To dismiss him as a vain or delusional braggart is to liberate him from personal moral responsibility for his actions.

This evening I had dinner with a friend from university who now hosts a popular current affairs show in Pakistan. When I mentioned Ijaz, this is what my friend, a pro-democracy secularist who has received numerous threats from his country’s religious reactionaries, said: “Throw the bastard in Guantanamo.”

I recently drew attention in an article for FrumForum to the imminent threat to the life of Andrei Sannikov, the pro-democracy opposition leader of Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship. Robin Tim Weis’s riposte to my piece coincides with news that Sannikov has disappeared. If nothing else, this should prompt us to question the policy of gradualism in dealing with dictatorships.

Robin’s article makes some interesting points, but there are too many contradictions packed into his argument. Robin says that the regime of Alexander Lukashenko is “upheld by the genuine appreciation of the majority of Belarusian people for their president, rather than the iron grip of the KGB”. If this is true, why does the KGB exercise an iron grip? If Lukashenko enjoys genuine popularity among Belarusians, why does he fear an open contest? Why do his opponents ineluctably end up in the vast network of prisons – or, worse, disappear? Why is public assembly banned in Belarus?

The idea of Lukashenko’s domestic popularity is an untested axiom – often stated, but never proved. The only way to test its validity is through the ballot. But Lukashenko will not consent to free and fair elections. Why?

It is true that Lukashenko did enjoy the support of a majority of Belarusians in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. An event that seemed like the end of history to triumphant spectators in the West was, for many Belarusians, the beginning of an inscrutable future. A populist by instinct, Lukashenko capitalised on their fears, vowing, in the words of one biographer, to “recreate the Soviet Union on a new, higher plane”. He was energetic and youthful, not yet 40 when the first general elections were held in 1994. Pensioners who watched his speeches on television were moved to tears. Dictatorship seemed a distant prospect, given that the speaker of the Supreme Soviet, the interim parliament of Belarus, was averse to the idea of a presidential system. Then Bill Clinton visited Belarus in 1993 – the only visit by an incumbent US president to date – and members of the Supreme Soviet, seduced by the sight of a young and charismatic leader, sidelined the speaker and opted for a presidential system.

Lukashenko won in a run-off election in 1994 – and it took him two years to consign the constitution to the trashcan, introduce the death penalty, have his opponents imprisoned and consolidate his control over the media. Parliamentarians who refused to rubberstamp his laws had their salaries withheld. Lawyers who opposed him were disbarred. By 1999, several prominent figures in the Belarusian opposition had disappeared. The presidential ukase became the ultimate law of the land. As a Belarusian legislator at the time phrased it: “Why are we sitting here? Why are we passing laws?” The image of the traditionalist babushka offers an uncomplicated explanation for Lukashenko’s hold on power. But it is an obsolete picture. Lukashenko’s rule is underwritten by force.

Individual tales of repression can produce mass action only if they are able to coalesce into a collective narrative. In order to challenge Lukashenko, Belarusians must be able to do something as simple as talk among themselves. After last year’s abortive uprising, the political space of the opposition has shrunk to the point of extinction. Virtually every opposition leader is under house arrest – and every opposition activist under surveillance. Those who participate in politics find their employment contracts phased out. The Belarusian opposition is trapped in a zugzwang: their progress is possible only through loss. Belarus under Lukashenko resembles not so much a country as a desolate captive.

How will Lukashenko go? In suggesting economic pressure as the “only” solution, Robin overlooks the fact that the void created by the West could potentially be filled by China and India. Belarus’s current economic woes are crippling. But it’s worth noting that when the US imposed fresh sanctions earlier this year, Lukashenko was rattled only momentarily: within weeks, China had agreed to help, offering not just a billion dollars, but also an assurance of “full backing for [Lukashenko's] stance on domestic and international questions”. Lukashenko has promised China a “stronghold in Europe”.

Robin closes his closes his piece on a hopeful note: “Only organically cultivated resistance and ‘revolution’ can ensure a sustainable change of Belarusian leadership and government”. But this sentiment is rather undermined by his suggestion in the preceding lines that the US recruit Belarus as a conduit for negotiations with Iran – which, to indulge the idea for a moment, would confer America’s imprimatur on Lukashnko’s regime. It’s not particularly helpful for the pro-democracy movement if Washington conscripts its nemesis as an ally.

Finally, I agree: It is Belarusians who will ultimately defenestrate Lukashenko. But it would help if the West – particularly the US – didn’t hesitate to speak up for them.

As despotic regimes across the Middle East crumble under the weight of pro-democracy uprisings, an obscene silence prevails over the savage dictatorship in the centre of Europe. For 17 years, Alexander Lukashenko has ruled Belarus, a former Soviet state, in the fashion of his hero, Joseph Stalin: public assembly is banned, the press is censored, the internet is monitored, telephones are tapped, and people’s livelihoods – and lives – depend on eschewing politics.

Virtually every major opposition figure is either under house arrest or has vanished into the vast network of prisons operated by the secret police, which still goes by the old Soviet name: the KGB.

Among them, Lukashenko fears Andrei Sannikov the most. A former diplomat and member of Lukashenko’s cabinet, Sannikov was the runner up in the presidential elections held last winter. When Lukashenko pronounced himself re-elected with an absolute majority for a fourth term, thousands of Belarusians poured into the streets and squares of the capital, Minsk, demanding a second round of voting. Lukashenko dispatched the state militia.

Sannikov and his wife, Iryna Khalip, were beaten severely and then taken into custody. The KGB then raided their home in an attempt to seize their three-year-old son, Danil. In the ensuing international outcry, Irina was released from prison and placed under house arrest. Her husband was sentenced in May to a five-year prison term.

Since then, the KGB has repeatedly moved Sannikov between labour camps. Earlier this year, I met Sannikov’s mother, Alla, in Minsk. She told me that she had not been allowed to see her son since his arrest in December. No one knew where he was being held. Still, she was optimistic.

Last month, Khalip managed to locate Sannikov in Mahilou, a detention centre where he was being held en route to a labour camp in Babrujsk in the country’s south. Khalip announced that her husband was being taken to Babrujsk to be killed: the prison guards had informed him that his cellmate at Babrujsk would eliminate him. Since then, Sannikov has been forced to share his cell with an inmate suffering from tuberculosis. In desperation Khalip has written to the first ladies of France and the United States, urging them, as mothers and wives, to “persuade your husbands to take all possible measures and use all instruments to prevent the physical elimination of my husband”.

The presence of a dictatorship on the frontiers of New Europe is a damning indictment of the European Union. Other than issuing a stream of anaemic statements of condemnation, Brussels has made no meaningful effort to challenge Lukashenko. The idea of a “Russian sphere of influence” has traditionally served as a convenient alibi to justify the EU’s inaction.

But Russia’s influence with Belarus is often exaggerated: for all the power it is alleged to possess, Moscow has not been able to persuade Lukashenko to recognise the sovereignty of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow’s relationship with Lukashenko has been in steep decline since the 2004 oil crisis, when Lukashenko sabotaged Russian oil pipelines, forcing Russia to build expensive alterative routes of supply.

Lukashenko has now forged a partnership with China, offering Beijing a “stronghold in Europe” in return for loans and support. But as Brian Bennett, Britain’s former ambassador to Minsk, explains in his authoritative new book on Belarus, The Last Dictatorship in Europe, the only power Lukashenko truly fears is Washington. A passing criticism by President George W. Bush in 2004 did more to scare Lukashenko than all the bromides thrown at him by the EU.

The Belarusian economy is in ruin. Inflation has spiralled to nearly 70 percent. People’s earnings are losing their value by the day. Shops are running out of food. For the first time in his 17-year reign, Lukashenko fears a popular uprising. The threat to murder Sannikov is designed to frighten the opposition into submission before it is infected with the revolutionary rage that deposed Col. Gaddafi, one of Lukashenko’s closest friends, from power in Libya.

At this crucial stage, Washington’s intervention will not only halt Sannikov’s killing – it will also serve to boost the besieged opposition’s morale. President Obama should warn Lukashenko against harming Sannikov and demand the release of all political prisoners. This can be followed up by an invitation from the US State Department to Khalip and other high-profile members of the opposition. The European Union has failed abysmally in standing up for the citizens of Belarus. America is their last great hope.

Yet apparently not all people of faith are to be protected from government, at least not according to one candidate on that stage: Herman Cain, pizza-maker turned presidential candidate.   In January, the restaurateur-turned-presidential candidate justified the invasion of Iraq in simple, recipe-book English: “The people of Iraq, they wanted to be a democracy. Once it was clear that they wanted to be a democracy, President Bush pledged to help them out”.

But at the debate on Monday, Cain couldn’t countenance the thought of American Muslims sharing that aspiration. In Cain’s eyes, every Muslim must be judged according to the actions of the fanatics “that are trying to kill us.”

For that reason, Cain explained, he would not be “comfortable” including Muslims in his cabinet if elected president. Cain attempted to offer further justification by conjuring the bogey of Sharia law. He needn’t have to: a portion of the audience had by then drowned his words in applause.  Only Mitt Romney — himself sometimes a target of religious prejudice — spoke up against Herman Cain, and then only in the most velvety manner.

“We recognize that the people of all faiths are welcome in this country,” said Romney. “Our nation was founded on a principle of religious tolerance. That’s in fact why some of the early patriots came to this country and we treat people with respect regardless of their religious persuasion.”

As if to offset any offence these words might have caused, Romney added that he would only employ people he knew would honour their oath to defend the constitution. This was more than Newt Gingrich. He interrupted Romeny to remind the audience that breaking an oath was easy — and, to applause, called for more rigorous measures, invoking, as a useful precedent, the treatment of Nazis.

Gingrich justified his treat-Muslims-as-Nazis prescription by citing the case of Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American who attempted to blow up Times Square.

But what would Gingrich have done with Mohammed Salman Hamdani, another Pakistani American who died while attempting to save lives at the World Trade Centre on 9/11? Hamdani didn’t have to be at the World Trade Centre that morning, but he chose to go.

Would Cain have discharged Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a Muslim American who was killed while serving in Iraq? It is Hamdani and Khan, not Shahzad, who are more accurately representative of the ordinary Muslim immigrants to America — and the instincts which drove him to the World Trade Centre on 9/11 transcend the distinctions of race and faith: they are the instincts of the best of humanity.

Six decades on, that template continues to ensure the survival of Pakistan. Its ruling elite believes that America, terrified by the potential cost of dealing with nuclear Pakistan’s failure, will always pay the price for its survival. So instead of contrition and conciliation in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s discovery in Abbottabad, Washington received a contemptuous lecture on the sanctity of Pakistan’s sovereignty – accompanied by the deliberate release of the CIA station chief’s name in Islamabad.

Pakistan’s brazenness catches the breath. But there is method to what looks like madness. This is a high-stakes gamble by Pakistan’s military-intelligence chiefs. Having been exposed as the principal guardian of al Qaeda’s chief for the last six years, Pakistan is attempting preemptively to diminish the leverage Washington has acquired over Islamabad. By being shrill, by refusing to cooperate, by threatening to retaliate, Pakistan is shifting the focus away from the question of its complicity – and hoping that, rather than assume the role of prosecutor, Washington will scramble to play the pacifier.

A decade ago, at the height of its fury, Washington threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it so much as refused to cooperate in the war against al Qaeda. Today, trapped in the labyrinth of Af-Pak, it stares with impotent rage as Islamabad refuses even to grant access to bin Laden’s associates – congratulating itself on bin Laden’s killing, but still stuck in an alliance with his custodians.

Washington now has two options. The first is to return to business-as-usual. Washington can carry on pretending that Pakistan’s behavior can be altered with more incentives. This will make it easier for President Barack Obama to initiate a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. But far from repairing Afghanistan, the purpose of America’s mission will have been to secure the country for Pakistan. The Taliban leaders presently hibernating in Pakistan’s mountainous north will, with the ISI’s support, eventually return Afghanistan to its pre-2001 condition.

There are influential voices in the West which continue to exhort us to recognize and respect Pakistan’s “interests” in Afghanistan. But having fought the forces of medieval barbarity for a decade, can we hand Afghanistan back to those who foisted – and wish to re-impose – the worst elements of the Taliban upon the Afghans? To accommodate Pakistan’s “interests” in Afghanistan is to consign Afghans to a future of servitude – and to turn their country into an untrammeled training ground and launching pad for Pakistan’s relentless jihad against India. It should surprise no one that 91% of Afghans view Pakistan unfavorably.

The second option is for America to repudiate the myth of Pakistan’s indispensability and embrace the country which most Afghans view favorably: India. Washington has all along been aware of India’s overwhelmingly positive contribution to Afghanistan’s development. New Delhi is the fifth-largest donor of civilian aid to Kabul. It has constructed the new parliament building, the Palace of Democracy; trained the country’s parliamentarians; and donated aircraft to resuscitate Afghanistan’s national airline, Ariana. Its workers are engaged in major infrastructure projects ranging from highways and electricity grids to dam projects, telecommunications, and the expansion of a TV network.

As Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote in his assessment of the mission in 2009, “Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people.” Yet India was denied a larger role for fear, in Gen. McChrystal’s words, of “Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan and India.” This, to borrow David Frum’s words, was the geopolitical equivalent of locking up Martin Luther King, Jr., for fear of the Ku Klux Klan’s “countermeasures”.

Washington must now seek an all-out alliance with India. It makes no sense for the US and India to function as practical strangers in Afghanistan in order to mollify forces that threaten the existence of both these secular democracies. For Pakistan, the indulgent era of bottomless bribes and easy exonerations must come to an end. Pakistan must be held to account. This does not mean going to war. It means taking concrete measures to blunt the power of the military-intelligence camorra that rules Pakistan:

1. Washington must identify and pursue Pakistan’s military and intelligence officials who collude with extremists of any stripe.
2. It must impose severe travel restrictions on senior officers of the Pakistan army and the ISI – and their personal assets in the west must be identified and frozen.
3. Washington should make it clear to Islamabad that it will no longer plead its cause with India.
4. The ISI must be declared a terrorist organization. At least five Americans were killed in the attack on Mumbai in 2008 – an attack sponsored by the ISI. And according to the CIA, the 2008 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul – the deadliest since the Taliban’s fall in 2001 – was planned and executed in concert with the ISI. Afghanistan’s former foreign minister, Rangin Spanta, has confirmed that the “same sources’’ were behind the repeated attack on the Indian embassy in 2009.
5. Finally, Pakistan must be told in no uncertain terms that if it does not act against the terrorists in its midst, then those likely to be affected by their actions have the right to intervene in self-defense.

Pakistan can no longer presume a place in the comity of nations. It must earn it.

Follow Kapil on twitter: @kapskom

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The second possibility: Palin was out of her depth.  It’s appalling enough that a contender for the American presidency, the putative leader of a popular anti-government movement, cannot conjure up a compelling vision for her country. But the speech also confirmed Palin’s illiteracy in foreign affairs. Talking about energy – the centerpiece, apparently, of her “vision” for America — Palin had no words to assuage Indian anxieties about nuclear energy in the wake of the tragedy at Fukushima in Japan. Energy-starved India is likely to be one of the world’s biggest markets for American nuclear technology, but Palin was content with empty platitudes: there was repeated praise of free-trade, condemnations of government spending, and even a mention of the moose her daughters had recently spotted outside their house in Alaska. Standing in the capital of the world’s largest democracy, she said nothing in her speech about the pro-democracy uprisings in India’s neighborhood. When prompted, she repudiated President Obama’s approach, but offered only a vague alternative of her own. What’s the biggest security challenge facing the world right now? The “evil dictator” of Iran (or, as she put it, “eye-ran”) and his nuclear program. Fair enough. How would she stop him? She seemed lost, suggesting economic sanctions and then military action. How will the pro-democracy movement in the Middle East affect Iran? Can India, which has strong relations with Iran, mediate? On China, she was refreshing, unafraid to sound the tocsin: India and the US should be partners in containing China, she suggested straightforwardly. And yet, for someone seeking the presidency, Palin seemed astonishingly unimaginative.

The world once marveled at Sarah Palin. In a very dull sport, the gun-tottin’, straight-speakin’ Alaskan was a refreshing star. But as we become acquainted with the dangers of reducing politics and policy to sport, how embarrassingly obsolete Sarah Palin looks.

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The temptation to explain away its causes is difficult to resist. Slogans now emerge from across the world. Yet the force most visibly driving this revolution is rage – the sudden explosion of latent resentment triggered by Tunisians’ brisk dethroning of Ben Ali.

Everyone who opposes authoritarian rule must support the Egyptian revolutionaries. They must also, in the same spirit, urge them to consider the consequences of their revolution. By erasing order, revolution creates the illusion of empowerment. But without order, the mighty rule the weak. True revolutionaries know that their struggle is a means to an end, the chaos a necessary route to stability.

Egypt’s revolutionaries are determined to bring down Mubarak’s regime, but have they given thought to what will replace it? Can their revolution transcend its origins as a movement opposed to Mubarak and produce a nationalism that stands for something superior? Will the quick satisfaction of ridding the country of Mubarak make Egyptians unalert to the more objectionable ideas for their country that will follow? Will they resist the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to subsume the revolution? History is handing Egyptians the extraordinary opportunity to renew their nation.  If they allow secular tyranny to be replaced by theocratic absolutism, they will not have another chance.

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“Facts”, Louis Fischer wrote in his autobiography Men and Politics, “cannot compete with a fiction that is comforting”. If history is a reliable guide, comforting fiction is what is likely to emerge from Pakistan. Who bears the responsibility for Taseer’s death? To Pakistan’s liberals, the principal cause of religious extremism in their country begins and ends with one person: Zia-ul-Haq, an austere bigot who governed the country from 1976 until his death in 1988. But apportioning the blame so disproportionately exonerates his predecessors, erases the deeper history of religious supremacism that underpins the very idea of Pakistan, and promotes, to the present generation, the false idea that, prior to Zia, Pakistan accommodated pluralism.

The formal Islamisation of Pakistan was initiated as early as 1949 by Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister; the Objectives Resolution he introduced that March set out the core constitutional principles by which the new country would be governed. Among other things, it proclaimed that Allah, who held sovereignty “over the entire Universe”, had “delegated it to Pakistan”. Most alarming of all, it called for the creation of conditions “Wherein the Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and the Sunnah.”

By the time Ayub Khan launched the first military coup in 1958, 11-year-old Pakistan had been ruled by seven prime ministers. His finely clipped moustache and fondness for scotch whiskey led outsiders to view Ayub as a great modernizer. Indeed Ayub’s first major act as president was to commission the construction of a new capital city. A Greek firm of architects was tasked with the job. On 24 February 1960, Ayub gave the city its name: Islamabad, the City of Islam. Fittingly, while the parliament and the supreme court built by the Greeks are frequently forced into abeyance, the one building that is always open for business in today’s Islamabad is a lavishly built mosque named after a Saudi despot who funded it.

What followed was an intensive program of indoctrination. Education was the principal target – textbooks were filled with myths; the study of “Islamiyat” was promoted at universities; a whole new discipline called “Pakistan Studies,” locating the country’s origins in the history of Islam, was created; and the army, particularly Ayub, was portrayed as its saviour.

To validate this myth, Ayub launched a war against India in 1965. At the battle of Badr in the 7th Century, the Prophet’s tiny band of Muslim soldiers claimed to have vanquished the Quraysh with the help of white-turbaned angels sent by Gabriel. Ayub’s propaganda machinery borrowed directly from that legend, reaffirming Pakistan’s position as the defender of Islam. Stories about Pakistan’s forces being assisted by green-robed angels who deflected Indian bombs with a wave of their hand were circulating, as were legends about Pakistani soldiers shooting down Indian aircraft with Enfield rifles. Pakistanis weren’t just being invited to celebrate the valor of their soldiers – they were being told that their side had received celestial sanction.

Salman Taseer’s security guard seemingly felt blessed by that very divinity when he pulled the trigger yesterday on the man he was commissioned to defend. To all those in Pakistan’s armed forces who sympathize with Taseer’s killer, this may be a logical culmination of the journey that began in 1947. Advocates of tolerance have gone into hiding. The government has surrendered. Taseer’s killer is now a hero, beatified by Pakistan’s mullahs and televangelists. Dissent carries the death penalty. Historians will look back at the murder of Salman Taseer as the point at which Pakistan was irrecoverably lost to extremists. This was Pakistan’s very own Khomeini Moment.