A nation must think before it acts.
Abstract
Recent events have refocused attention on Pakistan’s role as an epicenter of global Islamist terror and called into question Islamabad’s reliability as an ally in the fight against a resurgent Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Pakistan in fact suffers from abiding structural pathologies that make it a questionable Western ally at best. In its foreign policy toward Pakistan, the United States would do well to consider the ancient Indian geopolitical concept of the raja-mandala (“ruler circle”), which seeks to balance opposing spheres of influence and exploit the tensions between them. This concept provides the key to containing and eventually eliminating South-Central Asian terror.