However controversial his reign as the chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani owed his elevation and particularly his second tenure to an overwhelming desire that former Obama adviser Bruce Riedel made an indirect reference to when discussing the difficulties the United States faced in dealing with Pakistan in his absorbing bookThe Deadly Embrace. On page 21, Riedel acknowledges candidly that 'Washington worked behind scenes' to secure a second term for Gen Kayani. This desire stemmed from the cordial notes two Pakistani and three American generals (including David Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen) had struck aboard Abraham Lincoln, the US warship in the Indian Ocean some time in July 2008. All five of them, including Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, sat across the table for several hours to try to understand each other view points on the complex nature of insurgencies that the US-led ISAF troops faced in Afghanistan, and the Pakistani army confronted in its northwestern territories bordering Afghanistan. With this began the honeymoon between Kayani and the American duo of General David Petraeus, then Centcom chief, and Mullen, the chairman of joints chiefs of staff. Gen Kayani had established an excellent rapport with Petraeus and Mullen. On an operational level, both the armies appeared to be working in tandem. This bonhomie bore fruition when, in mid-December 2009, Admiral Mullen told US journalists accompanying him he 'couldn–t give Pakistani Army anything but an ¿A–' for how they–ve conducted their battle so far' in Swat and Waziristan. There was a context to it. Together with Kayani, Mullen had spent several hours flying over the 3,000 meter high mountains and deep gorges in the Swat region. So impressed was Mullen that before leaving Islamabad he requested Kayani to take Gen Stanely McChrystel, then the US commander in chief in Afghanistan, on the same tour so 'Stanely can get a sense of how and what you need to fight in such a difficult terrain.' McChrystal...

There are three types of faultlines in South Asia - the fractures resulting from the movement of tectonic plates (as shown by the September 24 earthquake), the geopolitical differences that have kept Islamabad and New Delhi in a perpetual state of rivalry, and deprivation, with over half a billion people living below the poverty line in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh together. The latter expresses itself in the form of various insurgencies and militant movements in all three countries - the Chakma tribes in Chittagong Hills, some 30 armed insurgencies that sweep across India (reflecting an acute sense of alienation of the people involved and sustained mainly by failure to attend to their grievances and human rights violations by the government), and the various shades of militancy in Pakistan (almost all disguised as Taliban, pretending to be working for a socio-economically just society, driven by Islamic Sharia). Geopolitical faultlines and state interests in certain cross-border groups also aid these militant movements, for example the alleged Indian support for the Bangladeshi tribes and for Baloch insurgents in Pakistan, and the ISI's nexus with major Afghan Taliban groups and its support for Kashmir militancy since 1988. These movements also exploit internal faultlines, such as governance weaknesses, economic inequalities and social injustices. Pakistan's faultline begins in Kashmir, meanders via the Himalayas and the Karakoram through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and branches off to Kabul and Kandahar via Torkham and Chaman. It is a deadly triangular faultline largely caused by India's paranoia and essentially rooted in a megalomaniac and misplaced Islamist ethos. The anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan provided the crooked General Ziaul Haq with the justification for peddling "jihad" in Afghanistan and eventually in Kashmir for "wresting Kashmir from India in the name of support for the right of self-determination." Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the...