At the start of Pakistan on the Brink, Ahmed Rashid confesses that he didn't really want to write the book and that it was "forced" out of "a very reluctant author" by editors and publishers. To which one might uncharitably reply: we didn't want to read it either. The third book in a trilogy, following Taliban and Descent into Chaos, is a compendium of statistics, bomb counts and Wiki knowledge. If you've paid attention to the news during the past 12 years, you already know most of this.

It's also a little out of date. The killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the deadly attacks on Pakistan's naval and military bases over the past year, the rise of the Punjabi Taliban, and the murder of Afghan president Hamid Karzai's brother are only fleetingly described; the coming US elections are ignored and Osama bin Laden's death in Pakistan last spring is given only a cursory glance.

But the book's central fault is that Rashid's teleology is dedicatedly western. And it is precisely this sort of thinking that got us into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place. There is no context that is not westernised for clarity (Bin Laden's retirement home of Abbottabad is like a "British country seat", a Pakistani military academy is a "West Point"). Rashid, whom his fellow Pakistani author Tariq Ali once called a "prize cock of the US defence establishment and videosphere", may have soured slightly in his views of the American government and its war in Afghanistan, but he still uses its language.

For Rashid the problem seems to be not that US and European troops are mired in a bloody, imperially designed and unwinnable war, but that there aren't enough of them to get the job done in good time. Only once is the conflict noticeably described in less than necessary terms, when Mullah Baradar of the Taliban is quoted as calling it a "game of colonisation". Rashid berates Obama for not "personalising" the war in Afghanistan and for not telling in any detail stories of Afghans and their plight. Yet he doesn't either. There's not one account of how people have suffered under Operation Enduring Freedom, merely statistics of doom.

Rashid made his name by bringing to light forgotten stories, but he has now become the story. The book's acknowledgments offer thanks to "all manner" of "bureaucrats, politicians and heads of state". Countless anecdotes begin with him advising the world's most powerful men on how to run their war (only for them to do the opposite). In his histories, power has replaced the people.

The chapter on the 2009 war in the Swat valley between the Pakistani army and Islamist militants is titled "A sliver of hope", but Rashid devotes hardly any space to the awful conditions 1.4 million internal refugees were held in after they had fled from the fighting. The UN called it "one of the world's worst displacement crises" and journalists, both international and local, were deliberately denied access. For Rashid, however, Pakistan gets an A grade for the war.

Pakistan and India are depicted one-dimensionally as paranoid powers unable to consider each other outside destructive paradigms  which indeed they might be, but their populations have long wanted peace, and are currently engaged in many hopeful people-to-people initiatives.

Sotto vocce, he tells us that anti-American sentiment in Pakistan is whipped up by the military and the nefarious Inter-Services Intelligence. According to Rashid, intelligence agencies manipulated the violent protests against Nato last November, following the airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers (and for which the Pentagon grudgingly expressed "deepest regret"). But the author fails to understand that after a 12-year war, diplomatic dealings that are a perpetual exercise in humiliation, and hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilian deaths at the hands of drones, the one thing the Pakistani army need not manipulate is anti-American sentiment. The US military, with its trigger-happy contractors and recent renegade shooters, Raymond Davis and Sgt Robert Bales, does a fine job of whipping that up all by itself.

At least, if belatedly, Rashid has cooled off in his affection for President Karzai. Gone are the days when he wrote articles entitled "How my friend outwitted the mullahs", as he did for the Daily Telegraph in 2001. Karzai, who has presided over gross corruption, factionalism and dashed hopes for Afghanistan for the past eight years, is finally described as he is: "increasingly paranoid" and "controversial". Rashid deserves credit, too, for going after Pakistan's villainous elite, often celebrated as the country's last hope.

Readers of his previous work will know that Rashid possesses a sophisticated understanding of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US, but here he offers disappointingly bite-sized analyses of places one would expect him to delve deeper into. On the decades-long secessionist insurgency in Balochistan, he references only a Human Rights Watch director called Brad: he doesn't speak to any Baloch groups or survivors of the army's campaign of violence. Karachi, Rashid surmises in a hurry, could easily be taken over by the Taliban "when they feel the time is right". Such foggy analysis is a betrayal of centuries of the city's syncretic, tolerant history, during which it has offered space to Christians, Hindus, Jews, Parsis and Sufis. We need to know more, but no nuance is available when an author is being pressed to complete a trilogy.

Back in the spring of 2002 everything seemed possible. You could drive from Lahore, Pakistan's eastern city close to its border with India, across to Peshawar on the border with Afghanistan, and then on through the mountains and gorges to Kabul without any great concern for your own security. After years of neglect, Kabul itself was full of bustling aid workers, consultants, soldiers and journalists. The "international community" had arrived.

Now, of course, the border regions of Pakistan are unstable and violent, home to the remnants of al-Qaida and a series of other newer militant groups. Unable either to defeat a tenacious insurgency or to fashion a stable semi-democracy out of Afghanistan despite vast expenditure, the "international community" is now vacating Kabul almost as rapidly as it arrived.

Over the past 15 years Ahmed Rashid has established a well-earned reputation as a meticulous, reliable and authoritative chronicler of events in south-west and central Asia. This latest work is effectively an update of his lengthy and important Descent into Chaos (2008). Despite its title, it actually covers Afghanistan in as much detail as Pakistan. Rashid touchingly talks of his own occasional "exhilaration and hope" and says he is still "constantly looking for that open window and hoping that it will stay open long enough for peace to emerge". But Pakistan on the Brink is not a cheering read.

It is all here. In Afghanistan, Rashid revisits the early hubris of the west, the diversion of resources during the war in Iraq and in particular the strategic flip-flops of the Obama administration, the infighting between the Pentagon and other parts of the US government and the continued, increasingly frantic search for the silver bullet.

Nato, Rashid baldly states, has achieved none of its strategic aims. In Pakistan he takes us through the plunging relationship between the Pakistani security establishment and their American interlocutors, the violence in the "tribal agencies" of the frontier zone, the corruption of the political elite, the arrogance of the generals and the sufferings of the common man.

Many have covered this ground but few have the same access or depth of knowledge. Rashid mentions in passing having dinner with three presidents  Pakistan's Asif Ali Zardari, Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama  and innumerable conversations with other key players. The detail doesn't always make for an easy read, and it would have been rewarding to have heard more about the characters he has viewed at such close quarters. The occasional brief reference  to Karzai ruminating on whether to abandon the flawed elections of 2010, for example  leaves the reader hungry for more.

Unlike many journalists, however, Rashid does have the courage to outline how he believes the catastrophic situation in both his homeland (Pakistan) and its neighbour can be improved. For Afghanistan, he sensibly talks of the importance of a regional solution which would give countries including Russia, China, India as well as the various central Asian "Stans" a genuine stake in the stabilisation of the shattered country. Pakistan, he says bluntly, "must act as a normal state, not a paranoid, [intelligence service]-driven entity whose operational norms are to use extremists and diplomatic blackmail". He suggests that Turkey might be "an example of what success might look like in such a volatile region".

Many analysts have been looking at Turkey with interest in recent months, inspired by its successful mixture of economic growth, diplomatic sophistication and political stability in a time of rapid and radical change. Rashid describes Turkey as "a heavily Islamicised civilian power". This is interesting stuff. Pakistan is currently the opposite  heavily militarised with a weak civilian government. It also has an elite whose members are, crucially, considerably more secular, westernised and moderate than most of their countrymen. It is this elite that the US and western politicians like dealing with, in their own language, and when they have sought to support at every opportunity. But recent decades in Turkey have seen a fierce cultural and political battle between old secular elites based in the bureaucracy and military and a new elite, with its constituency of middle-class businessmen and small country towns. The latter have largely won the battle. The lesson is that no true stability will come to Pakistan (or to Afghanistan) while the elite there is not authentically representative of the culture of the country more generally. And that culture is increasingly pious and socially conservative, influenced heavily by the values and perceptions of populations in countries to Pakistan's west, rather than to its east. Rashid does not push his argument to this conclusion, but the depressing truth may be that the only stable Pakistan may be one that shares less with the west, not more.

Jason Burke is the south Asia correspondent of the Observer and the Guardian