The original Great Game was played out in the 19^th Century, between Britain and Russia in Afghanistan, an ever-shifting military, economic, and geopolitical competition, which often took the form of proxy wars, with the great powers backing local forces, to fight one another. Today, the region is host to an even larger and more complex Great Game, with implications for the fate of the modern world, as it is being played out between several of the world’s largest, nuclear-capable, armies: the United States, India, Russia, China, and Pakistan.

Much of Gorbachev's discussion hinges on East-West relations, particularly between Russia and the United States. This is logical, as certain interests of pre-Soviet Russia were taken up by the Soviet Union, and, post-Soviet collapse, these same interests were transferred to the nascent Russian Federation (and carried on to the present).While there is a brief chapter covering both China and India, with a brief discussion of Malaysia included, the discussion borders on the facile.

Much of Seymour Hersh’s extensive London Review of Books exposé of the attack that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 merely reiterates what common sense had argued all along. Pakistani intelligence could not have been unaware that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. Pakistani intelligence could not have been kept entirely in the dark about the plot to kill Osama bin Laden.

This may well go down as the Line of Control Nobel Peace Prize. Even as India and Pakistan talk tough and lob shells at each other across the border, here comes the Nobel Peace Prize committee doing their version of marriage counseling. A joint Nobel Peace Prize for Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi -- a Pakistani and an Indian. Now if that doesn't embarrass the two belligerent armies into a ceasefire, what can?

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency charged by Congress with monitoring liberty of conscience around the world, has just issued a report on prosecutions for blasphemy in other countries. Predictably, the leading offenders are Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Iran, Bangladesh, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Pakistan is cited as “the most egregious example … where blasphemy charges are common and numerous individuals are in prison, with a high number sentenced to death or life terms.”

It has been more than a decade since the first US drone strike in Pakistan, and can we say that we are safer for it? In recent years, the drone campaign has expanded from Yemen to Pakistan, Somalia, eastern Turkey and the southern Philippines. Has the violence in these regions lessened and hatred of America abated? The answer is a resounding no. The near daily attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and other areas where the war on terror is being played out, and countless lives lost — feeding into high-levels of anti-Americanism — are the clearest signals that the drone has failed.

Last week Mehtab Alam, 29, decapitated his sister Nilofer, 22, with a ceremonial sword, left her bleeding body on the street, and walked into the local thana with her severed head in one hand and the bloody sword in the other and surrendered to the police. His sister’s crime? The woman, a mother of two, married off at the age of 14, had run away from home to live with an old boyfriend, a rickshaw driver. Mehtab had already beaten up the rickshaw driver once for his earlier liaison with the sister. This time he tracked her down to the man’s house, dragged her out onto the street and killed her. 

The attempted assassination of Malala Yousufzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl being treated in a hospital in Britain after she was shot in the head by the Taliban Oct. 9 for championing girls’ education, has united her country like few other incidents in recent memory. That's according to Khushbakht Shujat, a member of Pakstan’s National Assembly from the MQM party, who spoke with NAM editor Viji Sundaram.