The situation in Pakistan is so unprecedented that it cannot be comprehended in conventional terms. Almost every statement about it hangs in the air, so great are the uncertainties. It will one day take the genius of a historian like Tacitus, with deep insight into the moral psychology of elites in self-denial, to diagnose how a nation can open itself up to exonerating the cruelties of the Taliban. It is a more tragic version of Shatranj ke Khiladi. An otherwise sophisticated, cultured elite becomes blinded by a fatal combination: a distorting obsession and a comfortable illusion that its normal quotidian world can go on. Meanwhile, the barbarians at the gate have already transformed the game so much that there is no opportunity to recoup. The distorting passion in this case is India, which has now been used as a pretext much too long to contextualise away all the challenges Pakistan faces internally. And the game is that of a small ruling elite, which refuses to overcome its own ossified divisions; as if the PPP-Nawaz Sharif fight were even the most important game in town. A sense of crisis has made it even more defensive, rather than motivated.

But no one can be any longer sure of what we are dealing with. It used to be easy to make the assumption that the army called the shots in Pakistan. The army remains the strongest institution in the country. Many are clinging to the vestiges of hope that it can take on and clear out the Taliban whenever it wants. But is the assumption warranted? No one quite knows the extent of tacit support for the Taliban within the army. No one knows how its diverse patterns of

... contd.