‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land. The glib opener is a taste of what’s to come. It is both annoying and accurate. The 20th century created Pakistan, after all, and — apart from eight most difficult years since the turn of the millennium — the country has known no other. But Pakistan’s first 50 years certainly were troubled and the knowledge that the emergent nation was badly treated (over the division of assets with its neighbour in 1947 and India’s grabbing of Kashmir) and has been unlucky (with the death of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the country’s founder in September 1948 and the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951) is deep in the nation’s psyche.

The Duel that Tariq Ali talks about is ‘between a US backed politico-military elite and the citizens of the country’. Pakistan’s crucial conflict, he says, is not the struggle against militant extremism that preoccupies Western observers. In his view the real divide is ‘between the majority of the people and their corrupt, uncaring rulers’. Complicity between the country’s elites — civilian and military — and Washington has consistently distanced them from the masses.

Ali believes that Pakistan’s current difficulties are ‘a direct result of doing Washington’s bidding in past decades’ and walks us through the country’s short history to demonstrate how America has backed the military and the feudal political families .

It is a chronicle of unremitting venality, incompetence and opportunism. In this, Ali is even-handed. He despises everybody and no one emerges heroically from his telling; the revered Mr Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam himself, is derided.

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