The morning was lit up with the news that Pakistan carried out air strikes on targets in Afghanistan. The whole afternoon the news was not confirmed by official sources in Pakistan until the DG ISPR conducted a press conference in the evening. To the explicit question to confirm the validity or otherwise of this claim, the DG ISPR gave no direct answer. Yet the news was making round in the international media and in the end the Afghanistan government also accused Pakistan of carrying out air strikes on its territory.

My first reaction to this news is that Pakistan and Afghanistan are not at war, they cannot be at war. The conflict with Afghanistan can never be seen as a war in its traditional sense because it will never be an open, declared and a hostile conflict. Historically, our conflict with Afghanistan is characterised more by our own and Afghanistan's internal problems, some of them are of our own making and they spill over a long and porous shared border.

But clearly, today we may have witnessed the beginning of the unfolding of a new military strategy to resolve the Afghan problem. But is this the right strategy? The answer to this question is something reflected in the American experience in Afghanistan. I would like to quote two American-led Western assumptions that went horribly wrong in the decades that followed the end of Cold War. One was liberal and the other was illiberal.

The liberal assumption was that history is dead and has been replaced by interdependence and the illiberal assumption was that hard power could deliver political outcomes. Russia's resurgence from the death of Soviet Empire and China's........

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