Yes, but this is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, better known these days for its  suicide bombings, a nuclear arsenal and labelled as  the epicentre of Islamist extremism including perhaps the last  redoubt of Osama bin Laden in the lands straddling the Afghan border. “Jihadistan” as one reader wrote on this blog.  

What is the reality ? Are there two Pakistans?  Is it really Pakistan: Now or Never ? Or is the image of Pakistan clouded by TV pictures of blood and gore in its  streets, feeding insecurities while shutting out  the important political, economic and social transformations that are underway in a nation of 150 million people.

Author William Dalrymple travels through the harsh scrublands of Sindh, home to  Kalashnikov-wielding landlords and honour killings, and then back up the Punjab and he  doesn’t find a country flirting with state failure or anything even approaching the  “most dangerous country in the world” as it has been so commonly branded in recent  months, right down to a group by that name on Facebook.

Instead, as he writes in the New York Review of Books, he found a countryside that “was  no less peaceful and prosperous than that on the other side of the Indian border”, and a far cry from the violent instability of post-occupation Iraq or Afghanistan. Pakistan’s cities are changing beyond recognition with shopping malls, expensive cars,  and a burgeoning fashion scene with gay designers and amazingly beautiful women, he says.

  And  capping all this is a middle class that grew almost out of nowhere in a country once  famously known as the land of 22 big feudal families, one of them the Bhuttos, for the  absolute political and economic power they wielded.  And it is this enriched and empowered urban middle class that has finally moved from their “living rooms onto the steets, from dinner parties to political parties,” Dalrymple writes, leading a lawyers’ movement that swelled into a full-scale pro-democracy campaign  that has arguably seen off a military dictatorship

Shades of India, the world’s most populous democracy? No, this is Pakistan, but then the world prefers its stereotypes simple. India successful, secular and forward-looking; Islamic Pakistan, a failure.   Are they really different, is it time to break down the stereotypes then?

“Over the past two months, U.S.-controlled Predator aircraft are known to have struck at least three sites used by al-Qaeda operatives,” it says. “The moves followed a tacit understanding with (President Pervez) Musharraf and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani that allows U.S. strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan, but not against the Pakistani Taliban.”

Stories of missile attacks by unmanned CIA-operated Predator drones in Pakistan are not new, and nor indeed is Pakistani anger at what it sees as a violation of its sovereignty. In early February I highlighted a story by the Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai in The News saying that the American policy of hitting targets inside Pakistan had now become “the norm than the exception”. Neither U.S. nor Pakistani authorities officially confirm U.S. missile attacks on Pakistani territory.

What is new is the amount of attention the missile attacks are now gaining, particularly in the United States.  It’s worth reading the comments on the Washington Post article – 161 of them when I last looked — to see how many people are learning about them for the first time.

Some comments give credit to Senator Barack Obama for suggesting targeted attacks on Al Qaeda militants in Pakistan — an idea he repeated this month, as I noted in a previous entry on this subject. As far as I know, the Predator attacks — including one in Bajaur Agency in January 2006 that was reported to have killed up to 18 people, including women and children — started before Obama suggested the idea. But he does seem to have got people talking about them.

So here is the question. If the American public is now waking up to the notion that the United States is launching missile attacks in Pakistan, will that affect U.S. policy? Will it become a U.S. election issue? And what does it mean for Pakistan and its new government?

The idea is to offer young people an alternative world view to combat the “narrative” of al Qaeda. ”We have learned from our opponents. This is exactly the age at which the Islamists are trying, through Koranic schools and other means, to fill young people with other values,” says Hartwig Moeller, from the German state’s interior ministry.

Of course, some people will argue that in a world polarised by the Iraq war and the Middle East conflict amongst others, tackling militant Islamism with comic strips is at best lightweight, at worst a failure to understand the issues.

But Moeller says the project — which is already attracting interest elsewhere in Europe and in the United States – could win over the hearts and minds of some youngsters.

“If I get through to someone this way, and it makes him more critical of people who want to make him a jihadist, then I’ve stopped him at some point committing terrorist attacks or going to a terrorist camp in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” he said. “Maybe he won’t slide off into this milieu — that’s the idea.”

What do you think? Read the full story here.

His plan is to rethink U.S. policy towards Pakistan – which has traditionally depended on cooperation with the military rather than civilian governments — to bolster the democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people, condition aid to Pakistan on its action against al Qaeda,  and show Pakistan that America is on its side.

But then comes the rub.  If the United States has intelligence about al Qaeda targets hiding in Pakistan then America should act if Pakistan will not, or cannot do so, he says.  So far that has meant sending in unmanned Predator aircraft to fire missiles at suspected Islamist hideouts, often leading to civilian casualties and outraging Pakistanis who feel their sovereignty has been violated.

So is there a contradiction in Obama’s commitment to Pakistan? Can the United States win over the people if it is also firing missiles at targets in its territory? Here is the whole excerpt:

“For years, we have supported stability over democracy in Pakistan, and gotten neither. The core leadership of al Qaeda has a safe-haven in Pakistan. The Taliban are able to strike inside Afghanistan and then return to the mountains of the Pakistani border. Throughout Pakistan, domestic unrest has been rising. The full democratic aspirations of the Pakistani people have been too long denied. A child growing up in Pakistan, more often than not, is taught to see America as a source of hate - not hope.

“This is why I stood up last summer and said we cannot base our entire Pakistan policy on President Musharraf. Pakistan is our ally, but we do our own security and our ally no favors by supporting its President while we are seen to be ignoring the interests of the people. Our counter-terrorism assistance must be conditioned on Pakistani action to root out the al Qaeda sanctuary. And any U.S. aid not directly needed for the fight against al Qaeda or to invest in the Pakistani people should be conditioned on the full restoration of Pakistan’s democracy and rule of law.

“The choice is not between Musharraf and Islamic extremists. As the recent legislative elections showed, there is a moderate majority of Pakistanis, and they are the people we need on our side to win the war against al Qaeda. That is why we should dramatically increase our support for the Pakistani people - for education, economic development, and democratic institutions. That child in Pakistan must know that we want a better life for him, that America is on his side, and that his interest in opportunity is our interest as well. That’s the promise that America must stand for.

“And for his sake and ours, we cannot tolerate a sanctuary for terrorists who threaten America’s homeland and Pakistan’s stability. If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot. Senator Clinton, Senator McCain, and President Bush have all distorted and derided this position, suggesting that I would invade or bomb Pakistan. This is politics, pure and simple. My position, in fact, is the same pragmatic policy that all three of them have belatedly - if tacitly - acknowledged is one we should pursue. Indeed, it was months after I called for this policy that a top al Qaeda leader was taken out in Pakistan by an American aircraft. And remember that the same three individuals who now criticize me for supporting a targeted strike on the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, are the same three individuals that supported an invasion of Iraq - a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. “

“Islamic extremists who regularly post messages to a pro-Al-Qaeda website in Egypt are accusing Afghanistan’s Taliban of straying from the path of global jihad,” it says.  “Internet criticisms of the Taliban follow a February statement from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar announcing that his movement wants to maintain positive and ‘legitimate’ relations with countries neighbouring Afghanistan.”

It caught my eye since it linked into comments in the Pakistani and other media about the relationship between pro al Qaeda Arab fighters and the Taliban based on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its implications for Islamist militancy now spreading into the heartland of Pakistan.  The usual argument is that while elements in the Pakistan army and the ISI, the country’s powerful intelligence agency, might have some sympathy for the Taliban — a legacy of the days when they worked together to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — they blame al Qaeda for turning on Pakistan. 

In a blog on this earlier this month I highlighted a feature on Salon.com headlined Killing ourselves in Afghanistan in which the writer accused the ISI of working against American interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This had begun to change, however, said writer Matthew Cole, with the attacks on Pakistan itself. 

“Of late, however, the foreign-led Taliban factions in the Tribal Areas, the ones believed to shelter al-Qaida’s Arab leadership, have begun focusing more attention on destabilizing Islamabad than Kabul,” he wrote. “Now Pakistani intelligence has reason to work with the Americans, at least when it comes to some jihadis, including those known locally as ‘the Arabs’. Many of these insurgents were once aligned with the ISI, but no more.”

Is there a pattern emerging here? Is there a split between the Taliban and al Qaeda that could be exploited by the Pakistan army and the ISI? Or is this just more smoke and mirrors about an invisible enemy that nobody can either understand or control?