Blowback, Pakistan-style

[...]

Bhutto's return was the public symbol of the government's new, get tough attitude. "I know who these people are, I know the forces behind them," Bhutto explained to the New York Times.

Left unsaid, and unquestioned, was why Bhutto is so familiar with "these people," most of whom are hiding out in the NWFP: The governments she led during the late 1980s and mid 1990s were, in conjunction with Pakistan's notorious intelligence services (ISI), among the most important sponsors of the Taliban.

Successive Pakistani governments supported the Taliban and the militants who would form the core of al-Qaeda not just because of their role in expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan.

As important was the need to co-opt and keep busy this potentially destabilising new force in the complex political landscape of the NWFP.

The problem is that Pakistan's leaders were viewing the NWFP and FATA through the same distorted lens as the British did before them, seeing the region as a bastion of backwards tribes which could be manipulated and cajoled into preserving a status quo that left most of the people living in the region among the most underdeveloped people on earth.

[...]

The suicide bombings against Bhutto's welcome home procession are only a taste of the chaos and large-scale violence that would erupt if a politician or party actually challenged the finely honed corruption and horse-trading that has defined Pakistani politics for generations.

Although its causes would owe as much to economic and political inequalities as to religious or tribal ideologies, such a development would inevitably be interpreted as yet another example of "ancient tribal hatreds" dooming a developing country to perpetual war and

poverty.

Only this country is a nuclear-weapons state that is home to the world's most dangerous terrorists.

And unlike Bosnia or Rwanda, the US would be forced to intervene, fulfilling Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams when he turned commuter planes into cruise missiles on that warm September morning over the island of Manhattan, six years ago last month.