Word: frontier
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Rawalpindi is not a city where fortunes are made. It is a refuge for those seeking relief from the backbreaking labors of rural life and a home for those fleeing the violence on Pakistan's troubled frontier with Afghanistan. 'Pindi, as it is known, may be a stifling metropolis where crime goes unpunished and hard work unrewarded, but it also offers a chance at the first rung of a very long ladder toward financial stability. Yet that ladder goes only so high. The greensward of the Rawalpindi Golf Club teases the poor with dreams of the good life...
...love in the way of the Prophet," he says. "The problem is that the common people are not literate, so when the cleric says they will go to heaven if they do suicide bombs, they become entrapped and believe him." (See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable North-West Frontier Province...
...have originated in the Punjab. "What the militant groups are doing now," says political analyst and academic Ayesha Siddiqa, "is recruiting people and sending them to fight elsewhere." Some are going to Kashmir, she says, but many more are fighting in Bajaur and Swat, in the North-West Frontier Province, where government forces are waging a losing war to contain militancy. Groups like LeT have always been open about their goals for an Islamic state, and few doubt that they would resort to violence to achieve it. Says Siddiqa: "At a later stage, they will bring the jihad home...
...That sounds reasonable enough, except that historically it has proved to be impossible. "People talk glibly of 'the total disarmament of the frontier tribes' as being the obvious policy," wrote the young Winston Churchill, who gallivanted, a bit too gleefully, with a 19th century British expeditionary force through the areas where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are now ensconced. "But to obtain it would be as painful and as tedious an undertaking as to extract the stings of a swarm of hornets, with naked fingers...
...Through sheer brutality, the British were able to manage the area - now called Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province - but never quite subdue it. The chances of subduing it today are even more remote. "Obviously, we're not going to invade Pakistan," said a senior member of the Riedel review. "We have to convince the Pakistanis to do the job. But we haven't had much luck with that in the past." In fact, the Pakistani army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency have supported the Taliban as a counterforce against India's influence in Afghanistan, just as they supported jihadi...