Cricket bus attack reveals state on verge of paralysis

IT'S difficult to decide what is the most terrifying aspect of the terrorist attack that last week killed six Pakistani policemen and a driver in Lahore and came within a coach driver's instincts of wiping out the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team.

Was it the fact that armed gunmen toting RPGs and automatic weapons presumed that they could operate with impunity in the centre of Pakistan's second biggest city? Was it the fact that they were right? Or that the Pakistani authorities are so inept that they have yet to catch a dozen heavily armed men who were all caught on camera?

Perhaps it was the fact that the "security" promised the Sri Lankans proved so woefully inadequate. Or maybe it was the realisation that the Islamists have such contempt for their countrymen that they simply don't care if they alienate the whole cricket-obsessed nation. Maybe it was just the outrage of breaking new ground by attacking sportsmen for the first time since the Black September terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes in Munich 37 years ago?

Yet the attack's main significance lies in none of those factors, although they all ramp up the sense of outrage and alarm. The real horror is that the emboldened forces of radical Islam within Pakistan feel that the nuclear-armed state they abhor, the state which they've been fighting to overthrow since it became embroiled in the war against terror, is so weak that it just needs one big push to tip it over the edge into becoming a fully non-functioning state. Worse still is the fact that they may be right.

If the attack upon the Sri Lankans was atypical, it was business as usual yesterday morning when eight policemen were killed by a roadside bomb outside the northern city of Peshawar. Attacks on the forces of law and order are an almost daily occurrence, so commonplace that they barely merit a paragraph or two in non-Pakistani press.

Consider for a moment the major attacks perpetrated by suicide bombers in the last 18 months alone: 140 killed and 400 injured in Karachi; 24 people were killed and 80 injured outside Lahore's High Court; 30 killed and 200 injured at Lahore's Federal Investigation Agency headquarters; 20 policemen killed and 40 injured in Islamabad; 70 soldiers murdered at the gates of the Pakistan Ordnance Factories near Islamabad. Then there was the attack on Islamabad's Marriott Hotel last September when a dump truck filled with explosives killed 54 and wounded 266.

The pressure being exerted on the state by fundamentalist groups such as Tehrik-i-Taliban and the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Taiba is unprecedented. Whether it's the assassination of Benazir Bhutto within weeks of returning to the country, or the attack on Mumbai which placed Pakistan on a war footing with India, the cracks are beginning to show in a nation whose unity has been stretched to breaking point by the country's participation in the deeply unpopular war on terror, a part that now appears to be over.

For long periods of its existence Pakistan has only been held together by its army but even that 500,000-strong institution is now a neutered presence. No longer controlling the levers of power since president Asif Ali Zardari took over from Perez Musharaff, the army was ordered into the semi-autonomous frontier region of the North-West frontier as part of the war on terror and promptly humiliated by the same Pashtun fighters who are fighting the American and British forces in Afghanistan so effectively.

Besieged from one direction by Lashkar-e-Taiba and from the other by the Taliban, with serious fractures beginning to appear in the Pakistani state Zardari's government had little choice but to sue for a temporary peace. In doing so, however, they made several crucial concessions to the Taliban. In the Swat valley, for instance, where 3,000 militants had held 12,000 at bay while also attacking civic institutions such as schools, the government conceded that the Islamic system of law, the Shariah, would now apply and that government troops would only react to defend themselves.

It was a masterstroke by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In last year's elections Swat's 1.3 million inhabitants voted overwhelmingly for the secular Awami National Party, so the Taliban simply singled out elected politicians with suicide bomb attacks and chased virtually all of them from the valley, turning a hotbed of moderate opinion into a launchpad for Jihad against the hated Pakistan state.

The Swat valley is only 100 miles from the capital Islamabad, and taken together with similar deals in frontier provinces like north and south Waziristan, the government has now effectively created a no-go zone where the Taliban holds sway. A huge arc of border provinces are now effectively outwith government control.

The accommodation with the Taliban will, claim many, simply embolden militants elsewhere and further undermine the authority of the state. "This means you have surrendered to a handful of extremists," said leading lawyer Athar Minallah. "The state is under attack; instead of dealing with them as aggressors, the government has abdicated."

It is a horrifying development for Britain, given that virtually all of our home-grown terrorists have been trained and directed from Pakistan. Few doubt that the extension of militant-controlled territory will increase the likelihood of bombs detonating on the streets of London, Manchester and Glasgow.

The Americans, who effectively isolated Musharaff and pushed for the elections that brought Zardari to power, are equally aghast at developments. Most worryingly of all, it brings the disintegration of the Pakistani state one big step nearer.

This has forced a change of tactics by the Americans. Historically the Pakistani army, and in particular its intelligence wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has had links with Islamic militants and has proven itself unable to combat the extremists. In any case, as the Mumbai bombers perhaps hoped, the army remains preoccupied with the perceived threat from India, so the Americans have turned to the all-Pashtun paramilitary force of the Frontier Corps to combat the growing Taliban threat.

Run by Major General Tariq Khan, a portly 52-year-old tank commander who made his name fighting the Taliban in South Waziristan and who spent several years in Florida as part of a Pakistani military mission there, this lightly-armed 60,000-strong force is the last hope for halting the spread of the insurgency.

Khan's commandos have had notable successes against the Taliban in Bajaur, Mohmand and Khyber provinces, which is why the Pentagon has already given it $40m for new body armour, vehicles, radios and surveillance equipment, with $400m more in the pipeline over the next few years. Yet even Khan admits that the only long-term solution is to enable the tribes to withstand the Taliban, which will take time the Pakistani state doesn't have.

Beset on all sides, Pakistani institutions are struggling to cope, and they are not helped by the fact that long periods of military rule mean the hierarchy is not well-defined. As India's home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said of his neighbours after the attack in Lahore, the first problem is knowing who to communicate with: "In Pakistan, with regret, I would say we don't know who is in control there, whether it is the army or the president or the government."

The reality of a country with nuclear arms not having a defined control structure and at risk of falling to India- and West-hating Islamic fundamentalists is the Armageddon scenario. A rogue state with nuclear weapons and a predilection for jihad is one that the world's leaders could not possibly ignore.

India's external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee last week called for co-ordinated efforts by the international community to eliminate the terrorism emanating from Pakistan. "If we do nothing, no part of the world would remain immune to the flames."