As India proclaims enduring hostility to Pakistan and refuses all the offers of talks from either the unlamented former President Musharraf or Pakistan's new leader, President Zardari, the reaction in Islamabad is to become more defensive and more nervous, and the army's offer to provide security trumps the political desire to negotiate a new deal. This might be changed if the powerful and influential Pakistani diaspora, particularly in Britain, were willing to accept a greater responsibility for the future of the country, to which many still remain attached.

People of Pakistani origin in Britain are still called immigrants. It would be more accurate to describe them as semigrants - those who remain linked to their country of origin despite having physically moved to a new homeland. The practice of cousin marriage and the blurring of the fake frontier between so-called forced and arranged marriages means that Pakistan village life is reimported into the settled immigrant communities of Britain every week. The same is true of India and Bangladesh, and the practice of taking children out of school to go back to Pakistan or the continuing connections made by the presence of Pakistani TV in many households as well as the morning papers of Pakistan on sale in the newsagents of Bradford and Birmingham continue to form this semigrant Brit-Pak community in a way that few policy-makers understand.

As Tariq Ali rightly points out, 70 per cent of all Pakistani women are illiterate. The provision of schools for girls in Pakistan could now be a huge national project for Britain's Pakistani community with the help of government and charitable aid donors.