Responding to Benazir Bhutto's death, Bill Richardson immediately quipped:

“President Bush should press Musharraf to step aside, and a broad-based coalition government, consisting of all the democratic parties, should be formed immediately... It is in the interests of the U.S. that there be a democratic Pakistan that relentlessly hunts down terrorists.”

One way to look at what’s happened over the last five years is simply that Afghanistan and Pakistan have swapped roles. In the Eighties, Washington used Pakistan to subvert Afghanistan. Since the fall of Mullah Omar, the Taliban, a monster incubated by Pakistan, has swarmed back across the border and begun subverting Pakistan. Today, it’s the tribal lands that have a 200-yard corridor through the rest of the country, exporting Islamist values through the network of madrassahs to the fierce young men in the cities. Just as the Taliban eventually seized control of Afghanistan, so they believe they’ll one day control Pakistan. Stan-wise, the principal difference is that control of the latter will bring them a big bunch of nukes. Meanwhile, life goes on. Just as the tribal lands seem to be swallowing Pakistan, so Pakistan is swallowing much of the world. It exports its manpower and its customs around the globe, and Pakistani communities in the heart of west have provided the London School of Economics student who masterminded the beheading of Daniel Pearl, the Torontonians who plotted to do the same to the Canadian Prime Minister, and the Yorkshiremen who pulled off the London Tube bombing. Saudi men pay lip service to Wahhabist ideology but it rouses very few of them from their customary torpor. In Pakistan, Islamism spurs a lot more action.

No people are immutable. It’s worth noting that Muslims next door in India are antipathetic to jihad. Yet they are ethnically and religiously indistinguishable from the fellows in Islamabad wiring up one-year old babies as unwitting suicide bombers. The only reason one’s an Indian and the other’s a Pakistani is because of where some British cartographer decided to draw the line in 1947. Since then, Indian Muslims have been functioning members of a modern pluralist democracy, while Pakistani Muslims have been mired in incompetence, backwardness and dictatorship, and embraced jihadism as the most viable escape route. Reversing that pathology would have been beyond Benazir Bhutto’s pretty face. Or even the best-laid five-minute plans of Bill Richardson.