The flower of Pakistan's intelligentsia, entrepreneurs, professionals and much of its small middle class long ago decided, like Tariq Ali, to make their lives in Britain, America or Canada, rather than stay and help shape their own country. Thus, the essential source of nation-building, the best and the brightest of its own citizens, have never been available to create the modern Pakistan that Tariq rightly appeals for in this splendid polemic.

Ever since his glory days at Oxford in the 1960s, Tariq has blamed America for all the world's woes. It is the comfort blanket of 20th-century leftism and the hope of 21st-century Islamism and its fellow travellers in the anti-Western comment pages of the press. In a world view that stretches from Gabriel García Márquez via John Pilger or George Galloway to Tariq Ali, with a more nuanced engagement from Jürgen Habermas, the belief is advanced that if only the US did not exist there would be happiness everywhere in the world. Of course, America has major interests. So, too, do India, China, Russia and Britain, all of which have in varying degrees meddled in Pakistan rather than offer a helping hand to a better future.

In a sweet renunciation of his classic Trotskyist formation, Tariq Ali ends his book with an appeal that the nations of the region, including Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and China, should form some kind of South Asia union. But for that to happen, Pakistan, which lies at the heart of the great powers of the region that are reinventing a new version of the great game, has to feel secure. India's refusal even to negotiate an extradition treaty with Pakistan and the relentless anti-Pakistan propaganda in the Indian press make this difficult to see happening. Afghanistan refuses to recognise its border with Pakistan and refutes any idea of adequate border patrols and frontier security. No border is satisfactory to those who think that on the other side of it lie profit, land and power. It took three horrendous European wars before Germany would finally accept the Rhine as its border with France.