Afghanistan’s rulers know exactly who is living in their house. They just won’t say so. There is a particular kind of diplomatic fiction that everyone agrees to maintain because the alternative — admitting the truth out loud — would require someone to actually do something about it. The fiction, in this case, is that the Afghan Taliban and the militants killing Pakistani soldiers, bombing Pakistani markets, and terrorising Pakistani families are essentially separate problems. Different groups. Different motivations. A coincidence of geography, nothing more.

That fiction has just become considerably harder to sustain.

South Asian Voices, a Washington-based journal not given to sensationalism, has published an account of what Pakistan has been saying for years at diplomatic tables where polite scepticism tends to greet such claims. The findings are not complicated: Afghanistan is providing Fitna Al-Khawarij — the network behind a sustained and bloody campaign of terrorism inside Pakistan — with safe haven, room to recover, and space to plan. The Afghan Taliban are not hapless hosts who don’t know what’s happening in their own backyard. They know. The question was always whether anyone outside the region would bother to say so.

The deeper problem, and the one that tends to get........

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