As the US dials down relations with Islamabad, the Pakistanis have only one way to turn: towards Beijing. The US just managed to stop the fancy stealth technology on the helicopter which crashed in Abbottabad being freighted to China at a price. Pakistan has been helping suppress Islamist terrorists who menace China's western provinces, in return for significant amounts of aid. The Chinese see Pakistan as an investment opportunity and a route to the Indian Ocean, where they can counterbalance what will be a growing US challenge in the Pacific region once America has shuffled off the intractable burden of Afghanistan.  

All the British latter-day T.E. Lawrences and romanticising spooks who expatiate about Pashtuns and Tajiks are going to get a shock when Obama reveals he could not care less about the place as his re-election campaign gathers pace. The US has pumped $227 billion of direct military spending into Afghanistan, propping up the corrupt Karzai regime, widely hated outside Kabul. The Afghan National Army is a joke, with an annual desertion rate of a third. With nation-building a busted flush, Obama can choose between limited counterterrorism operations to ensure remnants of al-Qaeda do not revive and  disengagement, because with bin Laden's death essential US objectives have been achieved. Moreover, any major terrorist threat to the West is more likely to come from Yemen, Somalia, Tanzania, or even Brazil and Colombia, where al-Qaeda is active, than from Afghanistan. Victory is when the winner chooses to call it.