Doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that, to many Americans, what Pakistan meant was the smiling proprietors of businesses in our cities and larger towns? “Those Pakistanis,” we’d think, “they assimilate so nicely.” And who can forget the man who effectively served as the face of Pakistan? The late Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan reigned over world music in the nineties.

After 9/11, though, when we learned that its intelligence agencies sponsored the Taliban, which had hosted al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan became a nation non gratis to many Americans. Nor was Pakistan the first country that American Nicholas Schmidle thought of reporting from when he sought to kick off his journalism career.