PAKISTAN’S fortunes oscillate between spectacular successes and forgettable failures. Take its recent role in the US-Iran negotiations. It led to a memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, signed on June 15. The parties will sit face to face in Switzerland on Friday, June 19. Will this MoU be enough for a chastened US and a revivified Iran?

There is no country on earth (except Is­­ra­­el) that does not welcome the cessation of this war. It had no legal justification, no palpable purpose. It has resulted in needless suffering, incalculable losses and avoidable deaths.

No war is ever necessary, no matter what belligerent politicians may postulate. During the 1939-45 war, prime minister Winston Churchill, on being asked by president Fra­nklin D. Roosevelt what it should be called, replied at once: “The Unnecessary War”.

Even seasoned soldiers like Churchill’s ally Gen Dwight Eisenhower, who led the D-Day invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, decried war. He confessed that he hated war, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity”.

Our closeness to Trump has sharpened Modi’s hostility towards us.

Despite this advice from a predecessor,........

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