Time was when every time militants set off a bomb in Pakistan, India’s strategic establishment would turn around and say “we told you so”. This is what happens when you play with fire … jihad is a double-edged sword, they would say, pointing to Pakistan’s support for militants operating in Kashmir and elsewhere.

Not any more. When India’s opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party – which has consistently advocated a tougher policy toward Pakistan – tells the government to be watchful of the fallout of the security and economic situation in Pakistan, then you know the ground is starting to shift.    

“Pakistan is on the verge of an economic and political collapse,” party leader and former foreign minister Jaswant Singh said in remarks that  seem to have escaped much public attention. “It is time we understood the influence and be prepared to face it.”

Former Indian High Commissioner to Britain Kuldip Nayar, who is from the opposite end of the political spectrum, made a similar point shortly after the bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott hotel. 

“If ever Pakistan goes under, India’s first line of defence would collapse. The Taliban would have secured the launching pad to attack India’s values of democracy and liberalism which do not fit into their scheme of things,” he wrote in the Gulf News. 

“Terrorism is the means, Talibalistan is the end. New Delhi and Islamabad should jointly fight against the menace,” Nayar, who has long campaigned for peace with Pakistan, said.

On Thursday, a suicide attacker struck again in a high-security part of Islamabad, this time on the police headquarters itself, underscoring the militants’ ability to strike at will anywhere across the nation.

“The grim truth is that Pakistan is becoming something alarmingly close to a failed state,” wrote Sumit Ganguly, director of research at  the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, in a piece for the Washington Post.  Pakistan, he said, faces an “existential crisis on its streets and in its courts, barracks and parliament”.

The world, led by the United States, must work to put the country back together again, he said. “If not, we will face a terrifying prospect: Pakistan’s collapse (slow or otherwise) into a full-blown failed state, armed with nuclear weapons, riven by ethnic tensions, infused with resentment and zealotry, with roving bands of Taliban sympathizers and bin Ladenists in its midst. ”

So is New Delhi ready to play ball? Given that India looms large over the Pakistani mind and its security/foreign policy has been predicated to meet the threat from its larger neighbour, one obvious way for Pakistan to be more at ease with itself would be to reduce tensions with New Delhi.  

 The Pakistan Policy Group, comprising independent, bipartisan American experts on U.S.-Pakistan relations, said in a report that while America couldn’t really impose normalcy between India and Pakistan,  “it can continually point out  both countries’ interests would be served - now more than ever - by building better relations because both face existential terrorist threats.”

This weekend Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launches a rail link in Kashmir, which fueled much of the hostility between the two nations all these years and remains the main stumbling block to better ties.

Is this an opportunity for Singh to announce concessions? Pakistan’s Dawn, citing unspecified news reports, said that Singh was expected to announce important peace measures with Pakistan during the trip to Kashmir.

The weekend bomb which tore through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing 53 people, was a reminder that Pakistan is entering the eye of the storm of Islamist militancy. But for me, it was also a more personal reminder of a childhood friend who went from a suburban upbringing in London to become one of Pakistan’s most notorious militants.

Omar Sheikh, a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of the Prophet) organisation which has been linked to the bombing, is currently on death row in Pakistan for organising the kidnapping and beheading of the brilliant Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in February, 2002.
 
I had long since lost contact with Omar since we both graduated from Forest School in north London in 1992 and the sight of a heavily bearded Sheikh flanked by Pakistani police during the Pearl trial came as a shock. My jumbled memories of Omar were of a tall, lantern-jawed adolescent with dark-rimmed glasses, a serious but polite demeanour, a childish sense of humour but an unblinking, fearless appetite for a fight. Even as a boy, he spoke feverishly and often of “My Country” and praised the authoritarian and strictly Islamic regime of General Zia — who ousted and killed Benazir Bhutto’s father and helped the mujahedin throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

A tangle of contradictions, Omar’s other great love aside from patriotism was arm-wrestling and the would-be Islamist would often be found in smoky pubs — drinking only milk — competing with his team.

We had both started at Forest School at the age of 11 and I remember he never cried at anything - unless he was angry with himself. He loved chess and often spent his lunch breaks pouring over a chess board with a group of friends who were mainly from Sri Lankan, Indian or Bengali families.

The son of a clothes merchant in Wanstead, north London, Omar lived in a nondescript house in a cul-de-sac, where he invited me for lunch after he returned from three years of schooling in Pakistan at the age of 16. Wary of England’s influence, Omar’s father sent him to study at Lahore’s exclusive and disciplinarian Aitchison school — he returned a junior boxing champion and full of stories of contacts with organised crime, gun battles in the ghettos of Lahore, visits to brothels. At the time I thought they were all tall stories - as the chess-lover that he was, Omar’s conversation was full of bluffs and feints — but now I’m not so sure. What I remember of our long lunch were Omar’s fascination with girls and his shock at the liberal relations between young girls and boys in England.

In the sixth form, he became interested in economics, dreamed of going to study in the United States at Harvard, and even sat the SAT exams, and he went everywhere with a sturdy black plastic suitcase which weighed a ton (I think he carried weights around to pump up his muscles for arm-wrestling). He seldom had fights at school after he returned from Pakistan and had trained as a boxer, but he would often joke around by letting his fists fly within inches of your face as if he were shadow boxing.
 
Looking back, Omar’s years in Pakistan were the first step in a transformation which was completed when he went to the London School of Economics and threw himself into the cause of persecuted Muslims in Bosnia. After a mysterious trip there at the end of his first year in 1993, Omar dropped out of his studies and his conversion to militancy began.
 
By the time of the Pearl kidnapping, Sheikh was already a high-profile militant: he had been detained in India in 1994 for the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in the volatile Kashmir region. Via our school, his lawyer asked if I would be willing to testify as a character witness at his trial, a request I turned down. In any case, I couldn’t see what my testimony as a character witness could achieve, given that Omar appeared to have undergone an ideological transformation by that stage.

Finally, Omar walked free in 1999 when Islamist militants hijacked an Indian Airlines flight with 155 people on board from Kathmandu, forcing it to land in Kandahar in Afghanistan. The Indian government exchanged Omar and two other prisoners in return for the release of the passengers and crew.
 
In many ways, Omar’s Westernised identity made him a precious commodity in the militant world. In his book “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”, left-wing French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy cites evidence Sheikh had spent time with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the al Qaeda founder referred to the genteel and well-educated economist as “my favourite son”.
 
Levi also cites evidence Sheikh was a conduit for funds from the head of Pakistan’s fractious but powerful military intelligence agency ISI to the pilots of the 9/11 planes in the United States. The Wall Street Journal’s Pearl was investigating the embarrassing allegations that one of the U.S. government’s most important allies in fighting terrorism was actually linked to the New York attacks at the time he was kidnapped — a charge Pakistan has denied.
 
Sheikh appears to have spent a week in the hands of the ISI before being turned over for trial for Pearl’s killing, and Pakistan has steadfastly refused to hand him over to US authorities. Sheikh remains a mysterious figure: Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf alleged he was actually working for British intelligence and downplayed his significance.
 
Even before the July 7, 2005 bomb attacks on London, Omar was an early reminder of the fragmented and conflicted identity of some young Muslims in England. Indeed, the Jaish-e-Mohammed group, linked to Pearl’s beheading and the Islamabad bombing, is alleged to receive much of its funding from Pakistanis living in Britain. While Omar had a reckless longing for adventure which propelled him along his path to radicalism, he also shared with many second-generation immigrants to Britain a longing to belong and he struggled to find anything in British society with which he could strongly identify.

Can Britain be called a functioning multi-cultural society? Has the appeal of armed Islamist groups been heightened by Britain’s military intervention in Muslim states like Iraq and Afghanistan? And as the United States frets about the risks of young men with western passports being trained up by militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas to carry out suicide bombings at home, what can be done to prevent them from being drawn into militant circles?
 

Just two days after a suicide bomb attack on the Marriott killed 53 people in the heart of Islamabad, there were reports of trouble both on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and on the Line of Control with India.  

On the Afghan border, Pakistani troops fired on two U.S. helicopters that intruded into Pakistani airspace on Sunday night, forcing them to turn back to Afghanistan, according to a senior Pakistani security official.  On the Indian side, Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged fire across the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, in the latest breach of a ceasefire agreed in 2003. And as if that was not enough, Afghanistan’s top diplomat was kidnapped in Peshawar.

None of this is new in the sense that we have known about the tension on Pakistan’s borders, and its fragile internal security situation, for a long time. What is new is the scale of it. And how everything seems to be happening at once. And also the number of players involved — not only the United States (in mid presidential election), Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, but also the Pakistan Army and Pakistan’s new civilian government, along with the other powers on the sidelines, Saudi Arabia, China, and U.S. allies in NATO.

So which of these many players do you track most closely to assess what is happening in Pakistan? My hunch is to watch the Pakistan Army, and Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

In a posting on the Pakistan Policy Blog, Arif Rafiq wrote about how army chief General Ashfaq Kayani had gone twice to the frontlines with India, each time after the civilian government had talked of making peace over Kashmir (small quibble - the photo in his blog looks like it was taken at the brigade headquarters at Yuching, rather than on the Siachen glacier, which is in Indian hands).

The Pakistan Army, and by extension the ISI, rightly or wrongly, sees itself as the ultimate defender of Pakistan. It would seem obvious that the Pakistan Army would not tolerate its authority being challenged on both fronts – by U.S. raids over the border with Afghanistan on one side, and by peace moves with India on the other. I realise too that there are many who argue that only democracy can save Pakistan.

The point of this posting is not to say who to judge. Simply who to watch. And who do you watch when a country’s borders are fragile and its capital city attacked?
 

A suicide truck bomber hit the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Saturday, killing at least 40 people, wounding nearly 250 and starting a huge fire.

The explosion came hours after President Asif Ali Zardari made his first address to parliament a few hundred metres away, calling for terrorism to be rooted out.

Defence analyst Talaat Massood said that militants, who had launched a string of bombings in retaliation for attacks on them, were giving an “unambiguous message that, if the government pursues these policies, this is what we will do in response”.

“They are saying ‘We can strike anywhere, at any time, regardless of how good you think your security is’ … They are are also giving a message to the people of Pakistan: ‘Your government and army are allowing the Americans to attack our territory’.”

It was the biggest attack in Islamabad since Pakistan signed up to help the Americans in their campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban in 2001. But was it the size of the blast, the death toll and the live television footage of the Marriott in flames that prompted one analyst to call it the “9/11 of Pakistan”? Or was there an even darker meaning to it; that this attack might mark a turning point that will send Pakistan in unpredictable directions that no one can yet foresee?