The massacre in Mumbai has stirred the ghost of war between India and Pakistan, just when relations were supposedly improving. That is what the terrorists wanted. That is the lesson that came from the west after 9/11. If belligerence and thumping retaliation are the lodestars of counter-terrorism, India is now entitled to assault Pakistan.
Until Washington went to war on Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, virtually every nation in the region sympathised with the US over 9/11. The widespread view was that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida had gone too far, much too far. It might take time to curb him, but even Iran and Egypt sent condolences, and Yasser Arafat gave blood for the people of New York. We tend to forget this.
The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq crushed all opportunity to use the disaster as a prelude to reconciliation, though Tony Blair did boldly pursue that opening in the weeks immediately after 9/11. It was obliterated by the Pentagon's rush to war. The spirit of jihad fuelled a retaliatory jihad. The west breathed the word crusade.
A similar opportunity can be detected again. Sensible Indians know that sensible Pakistanis are appalled by the horror taking hold of their country. Opinion in both states can see that the surest route to curbing extremism is to normalise relations and collaborate against an insurgency that is feasting on the Nato occupation of Afghanistan. More Pakistani soldiers have died as a result of the occupation than those of any other state.
Exhausted is the best word to describe the so-called arc of instability from the Mediterranean to Islamabad after eight years of western intervention. Last week I watched Lebanon celebrate its independence day in the streets of Beirut. Soldiers marched, bands played, politicians saluted under awnings while planes roared overhead. But the streets were totally empty, cleared of people for fear of terrorist attack. There was not a murmur of applause. Even in modern Beirut, bleak, fearful exhaustion ruled the day.
Lebanon is exhausted by its feud with Syria and Syria by its feud with Israel. Hamas in Gaza is exhausted by its feud with Fatah. Israel, even as it approaches an election, is exhausted by the threat from Hizbullah. As a result its politicians might, just might, at last cut a deal with Syria - through the agency of the Saudis - on Golan and the West Bank.
Eastwards, the war in Iraq is petering out through sheer exhaustion. Two million Iraqis camped outside Damascus cannot hope to go home until the Americans have left and some new settlement reached between Sunnis and Shias.
Iran, too, is a nation exhausted by external sanctions and internal squabbling between clerics and secularists, its economy deteriorating and oil revenues crashing. If only the outside world can back off, a moderate victory in its forthcoming election is just possible.
In Afghanistan exhaustion is reflected in the desperate pragmatism of its ruler, Hamid Karzai. He surveys his dwindling sphere of power but cannot cleanse his regime of the corruption and drug-lordism that exasperates his western masters. Seven years after the toppling of the Taliban, the leaders of the west now advocate talking to them.
Along the North-West Frontier, Nato is entering precisely the strategic trap that closed round the Russians in the 1990s - and the British in the 19th century. Yet even here, the rough coalition of Taliban, al-Qaida and other insurgents is hard pressed by the Pakistan army, while extremist subsidies flowing from the Gulf are said to be declining. It is possible, just possible, that even al-Qaida too is exhausted.
Long wave theory suggests that the Muslim world may now be ready for a reaction against the extremism that has brought such devastation on its head for the past two decades. It has not just torn apart small countries, such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, but convulsed large ones, such as Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Pakistan. It has given unprecedented potency to sects, militias and gangs, yet has failed to create peace - let alone the caliphate.
Any traveller to these parts at present is overwhelmed by Obamania. From the dinner tables of Lahore to the lecture halls of Beirut's American University, the president-elect carries an astonishing burden of expectation. To a people for whom George W Bush became synonymous with mindless anti-Americanism, Obama's race, name, moderation and lack of bombast have risen like a messiah from another land.
The hopes are unreal. Obama will back the Saudi plan for the Middle East and push Israel to the negotiating table. He will end the occupation of Iraq. He will calm relations with Iran and recognise that US aggression has aided only extremism. He will unleash his general, David Petraeus, to negotiate with the Taliban. He will stop bombing Pakistan villages and recruiting thousands to al-Qaida. Obama will aid Pakistan's secular schools, not its army.
These expectations are close to absurd. The new president, in his appointments and public statements, promises to be no more coherent in his regional strategy than other Democrats. Anyone who thinks a "surge" can win the war in Afghanistan, or is ready to invade Pakistan to guard its nuclear weapons has, at best, a steep learning curve ahead.
Yet Obama's store of goodwill must be unprecedented for a US leader in modern times. Were he to visit Cairo or Beirut or even Tehran, he would be greeted as a custodian of promise. An area battered by dreadful US policies for a decade wants only a smile, a nudge and a promise to do better from a country that has done it such harm. It is not the plausibility of these expectations that is significant but the fervour with which they are held. The Lebanon Daily Star wrote for the region last week when it declared: "We all went to the polls on November 4." If Obama can withdraw his troops from the region, stifling the chief oxygen of jihad, a moment of opportunity would be at hand.
When I last visited Beirut 25 years ago an American battleship, the USS New Jersey, was lobbing shells into Lebanon's Chouf Mountains, overlooking the city. It was smashing the hillside villages for no other reason than to give US marines cover for what was a humiliating retreat from Beirut.
It took Lebanon more than a decade to rebuild from that intervention. Perhaps when Obama withdraws from Baghdad and Kabul, their recovery will be quicker. That is today's opportunity.
