The troubled U.S. relationship with Pakistan – whose tensions could doom any hope of stability in Afghanistan after 2014 – could be about to get worse after last week's elections.

I don't just mean that Nawaz Sharif, the new prime minister-designate, has taken a tough public stance against continued U.S. drone strikes on militants in Pakistan's tribal areas. Going way beyond that, Sharif is likely to take a much more conciliatory approach towards Islamic militants - both domestic and Afghan (in which he will be abetted by other smaller parties, including that of cricket-star-turned politician, Imran Khan.

So says Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States.

   The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” 

   That quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein, came to mind when I read about the U.S.-Russian pledge to convene an international conference within weeks that will aim to end the civil war in Syria.  The pledge came after Secretary of State John Kerry met his Russian counterpart in Moscow, but Kerry gave no hint of how he planned to overcome Russia’s unwillingness to pressure Syrian president Bashar al Assad, and the Syrian opposition’s unwillingness to talk with representatives of the regime that has killed almost 80,000 people.

      Indeed, the administration has been urging Moscow to use its influence to ease Assad out for the past year with nothing to show for it.  Russia has made clear, repeatedly, that it will not do so.
      In fact, it is hard to imagine how this conference will ever take place. Russia’s position doesn’t appear to have changed. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s statement that “We are not interested in the fate of certain persons,” which some interpreted as indicating that Moscow is distancing itself from Assad, is merely a repetition of things he has said before.  It probably means that, should Assad’s inner circle choose to oust Assad, the Russians wouldn’t oppose this, but they no doubt realize this is highly unlikely.

Today, April 29, I received a report from Syrian opposition activists that chemical weapons were used again, in a small town named Saraqeb, in northwestern Syria, near the city of Idlib. I can’t confirm the report, but it comes just after reports on April 25 of two chemical attacks that affected 130 civilians in the town of Daraya, not far from the center of Damascus.

I wrote about the reported Daraya attacks in my last blog post, citing Damascus-based doctors who said the victims reported muscle spasms, bronchial spasms, headaches, dizziness, vomiting and eye problems (miosis). I have attached a video that Syrian activists say shows the victims in Saraqeb (I can't confirm this but received the video from a normally reliable source).

If these reports are accurate, coming just as the White House is debating what to do about reports of previous chemical attacks in March, they demonstrate that Bashar al-Assad believes he can kill civilians with any weapon he pleases, no matter how heinous.

Yesterday the White House sent a letter to Sen. John McCain that said the U.S. intelligence community “does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States believes such weapons have been used in two instances (Britain has cited three episodes, 2 on March 19, and one on Dec. 24, when it believes chemical weapons were used.)

The reason this issue is so critical is that President Obama has said that use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “game-changer” and would cross a red line.

Of all the strange aspects of the tragic Boston Marathon story, this may turn out to be the strangest:

Both Tamarlan Tsarnaev's uncle Ruslan Tsarni, and his former brother in-law have told the Associated Press that he was radicalized in the Boston area by a Muslim convert of Armenian origins named Misha. This happened in 2008 or 2009, after which Tamarlan became an ardent reader of jihadist websites and gave up writing and playing music, according to his relatives.

“I heard about nobody else but this convert,” Tsarni told AP. “The seed for changing his views was planted right there in Cambridge.”

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Now that the surviving Marathon bomber is in custody, it’s possible to start thinking about what lessons have been learned from the awful tragedy. One is obvious: the FBI should have found a way to track Tamarlan Tsarnaev more closely after getting tips from Moscow that he was becoming a devotee of radical Islam.

But something else struck me when I was sitting in my brother’s home last Saturday, in Arlington, MA, one town over from Cambridge (where the brothers had been living) heeding the directives of local officials not to go outside:

If this is the new normal, where lone-wolf terrorists can upend an entire city and its suburbs, it becomes terribly easy to paralyze the entire country. Can we really afford to let them bring the daily lives of a half a million people to a total halt?

Now that Dzhokar Tsarnaev has been captured alive we may get some answers to the meaning of his and his brother’s Chechen connection – and whether any links to their ethnic homeland inspired their terrorist attack.

The Tsarnaev family apparently originated from the Russian Republic of Chechnya, which sits in the middle of a mountainous region in the northern Caucusus between the Black and Caspian seas.

At one point the family migrated to Kyrgestan in Central Asia, then moved to the Russian republic of Dagestan on the Caspian Sea – home to many Chechens. In 2002, the family received asylum in the United States.

If the Marathon Bombers are found to have had contact with Chechen jihadis, there is likely to be a backlash against Muslim immigrants and immigration reform. So it is especially important to listen to the words of Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the bombers, who gave an emotional press conference this morning near his Maryland home.

Tsarni, who was estranged for years from his brother – the father of the bombers, said: “If I had guessed [what they did], I would have submitted them [to the police] muself,” he said. “They have put shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity, on our entire family.”

When asked how he felt about the United States, Tsarni, also an immigrant, said passionately: “I teach my children this is the idea [country] in the entire world. I love this country, it gives the chance to everybody to be treated like a human being and to feel yourself a human being.”

ARLINGTON, Mass. - What made Dzhokhar Tsarnaev do what he did? My memories of Chechnya suggest some possibilities.

His high school history teacher, Larry Aaronson, says the youth came from "a war zone deep inside Chechnya" and had lived there during the ugly war with the Russians. He also says Tsarnaev was "a wonderful kid" and "nothing in his character" suggested the carnage he’s accused of.

I was in Chechnya briefly during the first modern Chechen war with the Russians in 1995 (the Russians launched a second war in 1999). This might offer some clues.