NATIONAL WEEKLY EDITION: "A Perversion of Religious Law: Taliban-style 'sharia' justices stirs growing anger in Pakistan," by Pamela Constable, Washington Post, 18-24 May 2009.WORLD NEWS: "Refugee Crisis Inflames Ethnic Strife in Pakistan: Influx of Pashtuns to Karachi Sparks Clashes With Majority Muhajirs; Fears of a 'Growing Talibanization' of City," by Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 30-31 May 2009.
So long as the Taliban remained a FATA-only issue, it could be compartmentalized in those Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Once breakout was forced or enabled due to cross-border pressure generated by U.S. troops to the north, then the Taliban became Pakistan's problem in a far more urgent sense.
Risky? You bet, given Pakistan's nukes and it's mindless commitment to maintaining the all-important big-war standoff with India. But until that mindset was breached, we could expect the vast bulk of our security aid to be wasted--in effect, redirected.
Until the extreme forms of Islam spread by the Taliban started registering among Pakistan's far larger and far more moderate Islamic population, in which many sects and varieties of worship coexist with real flexibility, the government, dominated as it is by the military and security service, would remain unresponsive, preferring their bigger fight with India.
Pashtun refugees have been piling up in Karachi, a fairly tumultuous city to begin with, for years. Now the same struggles and extremism that have bedeviled Pashtuns in the north have spread to the south, adding to Karachi's volatility.
And yeah, that changes the political equation in Islamabad.
It is the forgotten weakness--the Indian rationale. Until the internal threat gets big enough to supercede that long-animating rationale (all focus on the Indian threat to our existence!), we will get a Pakistani government that wastes our aid and underperforms on purpose.
So I guess that this time around, we have to allow the village to be threatened in order to wake it up to its own salvation.
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