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“India’s oldest text on realpolitik, the ‘Arthasastra,’ ” Dallek writes, “early taught Delhi’s monarchs that one’s neighbor was always ‘the enemy,’ while one’s ‘neighbor’s neighbor’ was always ‘the friend.’ ” while one’s ‘neighbour’s neighbor was always ‘the friend.’ Here we have one of the many small observations that Americans, feeling their way toward understanding the complex region in which they are increasingly entangled, will find in Dallek’s expert and brisk historical primer. He spends more time on Pakistan, mainly because its frequent swings between Loathsome democratically elected demagogues and even more loathsome undemocratically self-appointed generals make India look like a beacon of stability. Admittedly, Dallek notes, the 1947 partition saddled Pakistan with unfair borders, including the less appealing half of Bengal, which formed an awkward exclave until one of several wars with India led to its independence as Bangladesh and to the departure of more than half of Pakistan’s population. Dallek concentrates on the contested Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which has long had a Muslim majority. Generally a relentless realist, Dallek says the Pakistanis’ longtime preferred solution of a United Nations-administered plebiscite “will have little credibility and win scant support” until the government can “control the Al Qaeda and Taliban militants who inhabit its entire Afghan frontier and to end the nurturing on Pakistani soil of suicide bombers bent on killing innocent people the world over.” Still, one exits his book with the sense that Kashmir is not a be-all and end-all. Instead, bringing lasting peace to the all-important (and atomically charged) region will require, like a nuclear submarine, several actors simultaneously turning several keys.