Barack Obama’s decision to appoint Richard Holbrooke, whose robust diplomacy helped end the Bosnian war, as his special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, embodies the clear and welcome realisation that these two failing states form a single arena of conflict. But to have any chance of success, he will have to see the inter-linked problems of south Asia as a whole.

A good starting point would be to realise how the Bush administration’s support for the thinly disguised military rule of Pervez Musharraf buckled the institutions of a Pakistan already weakened by decades of misrule – a textbook replica of the errors of judgment the US has made across the Middle East.