Precisely because these attacks are random and not state-threatening they fundamentally alter the nature of bilateral relations. Just look at the security controls now in place in Britain to get on to an aeroplane and one day perhaps to board a train or enter the Tube if another terrorist attack takes place. Islamist ideological terrorism has fundamentally altered the nature of relations in the Middle East. Just about everyone agrees that Israel needs to move back to its 1967 borders, but this will not happen if Israel believes that the lands it has to evacuate to create a viable state for the Palestinians will be turned, as was Gaza, into a zone for thousands of rockets to be launched against its towns. Again, for Tariq Ali all this is somehow the US's fault, but he might also wonder whether the denunciations of the enlightenment duality of liberal market economics, rule of law, parliamentary democracy and freedom of expression which his politics has stridently voiced over the decades might not have made a small contribution to the present mayhem.

Admonitions apart, his book remains the best and liveliest account of the Pakistani dilemma available. A great deal is available on the web from writers in the region, but for those who do not have time to bury themselves in these chronicles, Tariq Ali's book is a masterful account.

But for Pakistan fundamentally to change there will have to be movement from within the country itself. Perhaps a 50-year ban on its elite and upwardly mobile citizens leaving the country might do the trick. After all, the great struggles for freedom and democracy in Britain or France or America or almost anywhere in the world could not have happened if Cromwell, John Stuart Mill, Emily Pankhurst, John Maynard Keynes and Clement Attlee, or Margaret Thatcher or even Anita Roddick, had all gone to live somewhere else like Tariq Ali rather than stay and forge and form their own country.