Popular perceptions of Pakistan in the West tend to be uniformly negative – corrupt, dysfunctional and dangerous are a few adjectives that come to mind. Do you think the country gets a bad press?

Yes, Pakistan does get a somewhat unfair press. It is, I’m sorry to say, all the things you have just described, so the press is not totally unfair. But there are two things that I think are unfair. One is when Pakistan is classed with genuinely collapsed states like Somalia or Congo – because, for all its problems, Pakistan is still a minimally functioning state. It’s deeply troubled but it hasn’t actually failed. The civil service continues to trundle along and there are bits of the economy which work surprisingly well. And of course there is a very powerful and united army. And although Pakistan is a violent society it isn’t the completely anarchic and savage violence seen in parts of Africa. You don’t have tribal militias rampaging around, gang raping and massacring villages. The violence is contained. So that’s one area where the coverage is somewhat unfair and I’ve tried to correct it in my book.

The other thing is that, although the Pakistani state does have a great deal to answer for in its behaviour, the Pakistanis do also have certain arguments on their side. They do live next to Afghanistan and they have been abominably treated by America in the past. Something that has disturbed me, and that I wanted in a tiny way to correct in my book, was this growing dialogue of the deaf between Pakistan and America, and even between highly educated officials. I have just been reading a memoir of Peter Tomsen, a former American official, who was there when I was a journalist in the country in the late 1980s. In his book he essentially puts the blame for everything that has happened over the last 30 years in Afghanistan on Pakistan. That is monstrously unfair, given some of the errors by the United States. But I’m sorry to say, it finds its precise echo in the statements of Pakistanis that Pakistan bears no responsibility for anything in the area and that it’s all the fault of the United States. This produces a kind of non-conversation, which is hideously dangerous given the way that the two countries are now confronting each other over Afghanistan.

Over the last 12 months the issues of drone strikes and border incursions by US troops into Pakistani territory have injected serious tensions into US-Pakistani relations. Can you envisage the US severing all economic and military aid to the country?

I think that’s very likely indeed. On the other hand it may not matter much. Americans tend to think that Pakistan is getting huge amounts of US economic aid but, due to the restrictions put in place by the US Senate, it just isn’t. It’s actually getting little – far, far less than key American allies got during the Cold War. Military aid is of some importance but the Chinese would probably substitute for most of it. Of rather greater importance is American goodwill when it comes to help from the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. Without American goodwill the IMF might be much, much tougher on Pakistan, and God knows they have got good reason to be, given the behaviour of the Pakistani state economically.

Severing aid is the mildest scenario. What worries me is that if American soldiers come in on the ground, on to what Pakistani soldiers regard as Pakistani territory, the mood now in the Pakistani army is that they will open fire. That could lead to a drastic deterioration in relations. Things could get much, much worse. If this develops into a major battle, and the Pakistanis, say, shoot down an American helicopter, the scenarios on the American side could get very radical indeed.

The other thing that really worries me is if there is a terrorist attack in the United States carried out by a Pakistan-based terrorist group. I don’t think for a moment that the Pakistani state or military would be involved in that because they have no interest at all in promoting terrorism against the United States itself, but, and I have been told this on very good authority, in that event public opinion alone would make it inevitable that the United States would retaliate militarily. Not by air strikes deep within Pakistan, but certainly by a vastly extended air campaign on the frontier with Afghanistan. Of course the consequences of that would be dreadful, not just in terms of relations with Pakistan, but in terms of support for terrorism by ordinary Pakistanis, radicalising still further the Pashtun population of Pakistan and providing more recruits for the Taliban.

Another argument of my book – and here I’m joining others such as [the University of Chicago academic] Robert Pape – is that terrorism and support for terrorism is not a fixed constant. It goes up and down according to popular feelings in the population as a whole and, above all, feelings about United States policy. What is really motivating support for the Taliban in particular in Pakistan is detestation of what the United States is doing. That’s another argument that I hope comes out very strongly in my book, and it certainly made it unpopular in some hardline circles.

When we talk about Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban, are we in fact talking more about Pakistan supporting Afghan Pashtuns and ensuring that they maintain their influence in the country after America and its NATO allies leave?

That’s precisely it, as far as the calculations of the Pakistani high command are concerned. Above all, there is the fear of India, the belief that once the Americans have gone the non-Pashtun nationalities in Afghanistan will inevitably look to India for support and will turn Afghanistan into some kind of client state. That theory is exaggerated but it’s not paranoid. I have heard indirectly of plans by hardline elements in Delhi which sound very like that.

It’s also a Pashtun thing because it represents support for what the overwhelming majority of Pashtuns in Pakistan see as a legitimate resistance movement in Afghanistan. It resonates very strongly with Pashtun memories of fighting against the British and the Soviets. Sympathy with the Afghan Taliban is very widespread in Pakistani society but it’s especially strong among the Pashtuns and a good many Pashtuns volunteer to go and fight with the Afghan Taliban.

Fears of an Islamist takeover in Pakistan are often voiced in the West. Do you think this is likely?

I believe that a mutiny in the army provoked by the behaviour of the United States could lead to a collapse of the state and a tremendous surge of Islamist extremism. That would not lead to an Iran and to an Islamic revolution, but to a Somalia or Yemen and the disintegration of the country along ethnic, ethno-religious and tribal lines. This would be absolutely awful for the mass of Pakistanis because all these groups would start fighting each other. It would also have hideous implications for the West in terms of safe havens for terrorism and the huge number of weapons falling into the hands of terrorists following the disintegration of the Pakistani army. Of course, the ultimate nightmare is what happens to Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent. So compared to others I think an Islamist revolution is much less likely but I don’t discount at all the possibility of a complete collapse. I draw attention to the fact that one of the many hideous ironies of history would be if it were the United States itself that brought about that collapse.