Less noticed than it should be amidst the turmoil shaking the world’s financial system, Pakistan is fighting for its life. The spectacular recent bombing in the heart of Islamabad that destroyed the Marriott hotel dramatised this. But there is much, much more.

The spread of the conflict in Afghanistan across the border into Pakistan, and the fusion of Pashtun nationalism with Islamism that has given Pakistan an indigenous Taliban, are turning the two countries into a single battlefield. But Afghanistan, ultimately, is strategically insignificant in comparison to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed federation that is coming apart at the seams under a weak government, at the crossroads of central Asia, the Middle East and south Asia, where Pakistan remains dangerously at odds with its arch-rival India.