South Asia

Nepal officially abolished its monarchy on May 28.

For the first time since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, a royal dynasty has been toppled. A newly sworn-in parliament ended Nepal's 239-year Hindu monarchy and declared a secular republic in its place. King Gyanendra, grim and gloomy and out-of-touch, was given 15 days to vacate his pink palace in the center of Kathmandu.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates returned mostly empty-handed from India, with India's ruling coalition still sitting on a landmark bilateral deal on civilian nuclear cooperation.

Gates's setback says more about the frailties of Indian coalition politics than about a cooling of bilateral ties. The U.S. and India are much cuddlier strategically than during my days as a foreign service officer in Bombay in the late 1980s, when the CIA station chief had to use a rickety sailboat from the Royal Bombay Yacht Club to snoop on India's western fleet (or maybe that was just his excuse to go sailing on Uncle Sam's dime). From 2006 to 2007, U.S. military assistance to India more than quadrupled to more than $1 billion (up from near zero in my day), the Indians recently agreed to buy six C-130 cargo planes, and the U.S. may win a $10 billion deal to supply fighter jets. (Last year, India was -- after China -- the world's second biggest buyer of military hardware, mostly from Russia and Israel.) And Indians feel a lot warmer toward the United States than your average Pakistani, despite billions in assistance over the years to that putative "ally." MORE

Pakistan held elections, and the Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif parties trounced Pervez Musharraf.

The two victorious parties ruled Pakistan between the late 1980s and the late 1990s -- a disastrous period for Pakistan, with corruption out of control and sectarian violence endemic in Karachi. The situation was so bad that when Musharraf staged his coup, the country's civil-society intellectuals greeted it with relief. The two parties are still feudal, and there is little to indicate they will govern better than they did a decade ago. In Pakistan, neither military nor democratic rule has worked.

But there seems to be no other way forward. I expect a weakening of security with an unwieldy coalition, and a vacuum filled by extremists.   At least the Islamic parties fared badly.