I hate conspiracy theories. They reek of paranoia to me. People who ascribe to them seem to me to be living in a fantasy world where there are vast impersonal forces out to get them or their country or their religion or whatever. Name any group in the world and there are people - seemingly sane, rational people - who will fervently subscribe to such beliefs. There are a vast number of such conspiracies. So many that the Daily Telegraph has a list of the top thirty. There is nothing that one can do to dissuade someone from believing in a conspiracy theory. Such people will always find some small alleged anomaly or string of coincidences and thereby build a mountain out of a molehill.

Yet, events in the recent past have led to conclude that there is a conspiracy to isolate Pakistan internationally and damage it economically. There seems to be not one grand conspiracy but a nexus of them which may be operating independently but the effects of one are reinforcing the effects of others.