Whatever the personal beliefs or proclivities of leaders in Pakistan, their practices have invariably played upon and reinforced extremism, producing a politics dominated by obscurantism, on the one hand, and authoritarianism, on the other. Indeed, the 'ideology of Pakistan' precludes the possibility of a secular democratic politics�"as any such movement would easily be construed as an attack on Islam itself. The purported 'threat to Islam' has been the essence of political mobilisation from pre-Partition days to the present, and there is, given the present social, political and strategic architecture of Pakistan, no possibility of its dilution in the foreseeable future. Indeed, Pakistan's intervention in Kashmir has exponentially deepened these proclivities, as Jean-Luc Racine notes, putting "incompleteness and exteriority at the heart of its national vision".