A narrow majority of Pakistanis support the army’s offensive in South Waziristan, but many still believe Pakistan is fighting “America’s war”, according to a Gilani Research Foundation poll conducted by Gallup Pakistan.

In the poll, conducted in the last week of October, 51 percent supported the offensive, 13 percent opposed it and 36 percent were unsure. A majority held the United States and Pakistan’s own government –rather than the Taliban – responsible for the situation which required the offensive in the first place.

And in a country where many believe the government and army are being pushed to follow America’s bidding, in part to bolster the U.S. position in Afghanistan, 39 percent of respondents said the military was fighting ”America’s war”, while 37 percent said it was fighting Pakistan’s own war.

The researchers said 36 percent of respondents were hopeful the operation would bring peace, 37 percent believed it would worsen the situation and 27 percent were unsure.

Pakistani ambivalence about tackling Islamist militants has undermined efforts to rally the country against them, despite a spate of gun and bomb attacks in the country’s cities, though political analysts say the urban violence has now convinced many that action is necessary.

Many blame that ambivalence on what they see as a Pakistani military strategy of attacking only those militants who threaten Pakistan itself, while leaving alone other groups like the Afghan Taliban and Kashmir-oriented groups which can be used as “strategic assets” against Indian influence in the region.

But even in terms of Pakistan’s approach to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP) - a major target of the South Waziristan operation - some question whether the army is doing the right thing in launching military offensives in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

For an alternative view to the prevailing support for the South Waziristan offensive, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad argues in Le Monde diplomatique that Pakistan is creating its own enemy through ill-considered operations that alienate local people and drive more into the arms of the Taliban. 

In a country where conspiracy theories abound, many are also quick to blame India or the United States for the violence rather than the Taliban.

Do read this exchange recounted by Londonstani, a blogger at Abu Muqawama, about last week’s attack on a market in Peshawar which killed more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

  “Person 1: ‘The Taliban couldn’t have blown up the market in Peshawar because a Muslim wouldn’t do that.’
  “Person 2: ‘No, the Americans did it. But you know, the market that got blown up catered for women. And you know it’s haram for women to go out of  the house.’
  ”Person 1: ‘Oh…..yeah’”.

And if the bomb and gun attacks are turning people against the Pakistani Taliban, that does not mean they are likely to rally behind their government. According to this poll, 73 percent of respondents believe that the terrorism has worsened dramatically in Pakistan. But commenting on the government’s response, 44 percent said they believe they had completely failed while 44 percent said they had been successful to some extent.

(Photos: soldiers in Lahore; refugees from earlier Swat offensive)

When Northern Ireland’s Omagh bomb exploded, killing 29 people, I was in England, by cruel coincidence attending the wedding of a young man who had been badly injured in another attack in the town of Enniskillen more than a decade earlier.

I had just switched my phone on after leaving the church on a glorious, sunny Saturday afternoon when my news editor called. “There’s been a bomb. It sounds bad. We’re trying to get you on a flight.”

Memories of Omagh returned this week when a massive car bomb ripped through a market in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

Will the Taliban’s bloody assault on Pakistan’s cities deprive them of popular support and ultimately lead to their defeat?

The BBC’s Urdu service had reported earlier this month that sympathy for the Taliban in Peshawar — where many are deeply hostile to the United States – was waning due to the violence being unleashed on the border city since the Army began its assault on the militants’ South Waziristan stronghold.

Was this a sign the Islamists were overreaching themselves on their war against the Pakistani state, much as they had done in Swat?

Against that, as others have pointed out on this blog, a coherent leadership that might unite a stricken country against its attackers has yet to emerge.

In the immediate aftermath of Omagh there was a widespread fear that the Northern Ireland’s fledgling peace process would unravel in a familiar grim spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal.

In fact, the opposite happened. Such was the revulsion at Omagh that the “Real IRA”, the breakaway faction behind the attack, was finished as a serious threat.

It can be dangerous and misleading to look for parallels between very different conflicts on opposite sides of the world. But tipping points in seemingly intractable conflicts do happen. The problem is, they are impossible to predict and often only apparent long after the event.

(Reuters photos: Peshawar; Omagh)

Pakistan’s militants have unleashed a guerrilla war in cities across the country in retaliation for a military offensive against them in their South Waziristan stronghold. But while they have seized all the attention with their massive bomb and gun attacks, what about the offensive itself  in their mountain redoubt ?

Nearly two weeks into Operation Rah-e-Nijat, or Path of Salvation,  it is hard to make a firm assessment of which way the war is going, given that information is hard to come by and this may yet be still the opening stages of a long and difficult campaign.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan whose uncharacteristically low profile over the past few weeks has spawned speculation, said at the weekend that it was too early to make a call on the operation. and that he had asked his intelligence officers and they had no definitive information. Pakistan’s Dawn quotes him as telling reporters in Washington “‘it’ll take a while before we know whether the enemy they’re fighting has been dispersed or destroyed or some mixture of the two.”

Looked at in another way and judging purely by what has not happened so far, this hasn’t shaped up into the mother-of-all battles that many had predicted it to be. No major ambushes or a tribal uprising has happened as the Pakistani army inches deeper into the Taliban mini-state,  taking the village of Kotkai, the home of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

As the BBC and the military-focused Strategy Page blog note, the Pakistani army appears to be moving slowly and deliberately.  “This is a campaign of small battles. The soldiers are advancing from three directions, often along a single road,”  the Strategy Page  says.

“The army is advancing slowly, to insure that the troops win all these little battles. It’s important for troop morale that the tribesmen do not pull off many of their traditional ambushes and surprise attacks that have, for centuries, killed and demoralized invaders. This has largely been successful, with one soldier dying for every ten or so Islamic radical fighters killed.”

Some people think the Mehsud fighters are doing  a tactical retreat to draw the Pakistani military deeper into South Waziristan, an arid land of mountains, dried-up creeks, sparse forests and rocky plains. Local administration officials have told the BBC that the Mehsud fighters are not fighting by holding ground against the military. Instead they are ceding territory to the security forces and then counter-attacking when the military starts to secure the area.

The Pakistani offensive holds lesson for U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, according to a presentation by Frederick Kagan and colleagues Reza Jan and Charlie Szrom at the American Enterprise Institute. The preparatory work that went into the fighting, especially the deals struck with surrounding tribal groups offers a paradigm for the coalition forces in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reports Kagan and his associates as saying in their 37-page analysis. Efforts were aimed at either getting support for the move against the traditional Mehsud area, where the Pakistani Taliban  was strongest, or having groups agree to refrain from joining the fight on the Taliban side.

Pakistan, in turn, is also being helped by the United States, discreetly, as it supplies the military with drone images of the battlefield. The  intelligence and surveillance video from armed Predator aircraft to the Pakistani army marks the deepest American involvement yet in a Pakistani military campaign. (L.A. Times)

The United States, which has long pushed Pakistan to take on the militants has rushed hundreds of millions of dollars in arms, equipment and sophisticated sensors to Pakistani forces in recent months. (NYT) . Pentagon officials have rushed spare parts for helicopter gunships,night vision goggles and body armour to the fight.  The one thing Pakistan has insisted on is that the assistance remain discreet.  There should be “no American face” on their war, officials say.

Many Pakistanis and their leaders may hate the Taliban, but few dare speak openly against them for fear of reprisals from the hardline Islamist group.

The militants have carried out four attacks and killed at least a dozen people since the army launched an assault on their South Waziristan stronghold, while more than 150 people were killed in a deadly spree preceding the offensive - including a brazen raid on army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Yet despite the attacks, few Pakistanis are prepared to come forward and bear witness against the militants.

While Naveed Haider was not afraid to give his version of events after witnessing the drive-by shooting of an army brigadier in the capital, he said he understood why others were more relectuant.

“They are scared,” he said pointing to a dozen people standing around him. “The shooting took place in front of all these people, but no one will speak because they are fightened.”

“What can we do?” a man in the crowd responded. “We are poor people. How can we speak?”

The apparent fear is not confined to ordinary people and seems even to have struck the country’s leaders — many who don’t move without a heavy bodyguard.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani invited political leaders for a briefing with the army chief before the South Waziristan offensive,  but former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the main opposition leader, and Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, an Islamist ally of the government, declined to attend.

“Nawaz falls ill, Maulana flies off, both avoid Taliban fury,” The News said.

Though Sharif was represented by his brother Shahbaz, chief minister of central Punjab province, the newspaper quoted unidentified “knowledegable sources” as saying that Sharif opted out because he didn’t want to be viewed as supporting the offensive “at a time when the Taliban had already started vengeful strikes in different parts of the country”.

Underlining security concerns, Shahbaz is seeking the postponement of a Punjab by-election due early next month on the grounds that the family faced threats from the militants.

Rehman, head of Jamiat-e-ulema-e-Islam, the country’s largest Islamic political party which draws much of its support from the northwest where most of the militants operate, also missed the government’s briefing on the offensive, the newspaper said. He has received threats from the militants in the past.

Some analysts say Sharif’s ambivalence might be linked to his political rivalry with President Asif Ali Zardari who has seen his popularity plunge, but local media urged a stance against extremism.

“At this time of great danger, we must also ask: what else will shake leaders such as Nawaz Sharif, who are still on the fence, to take a firm stand against militants and support the effort to subdue them?” Dawn asked in an editorial entitled “The evil in our midst”.

Karachi resident Quratulain Shafi, in a letter published in the Daily Times, called on politicians to bury their differences in the face of mounting problems faced by the country. “Stick to your word,” he said.

“We need both major political parties … to work together and with an eye on Pakistan’s interests, rather than their own, if the country is to succeed in defeating the current challenges.”

(Photos: Police in Lahore, and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif)

The Jihadica website has just posted an item about an apparent rift between al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban in the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar.

“Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments ‘the beginning of the end of relations’ between the two movements,” it says.

“Beginning with a statement from Mullah Omar in September, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the ‘nationalist’ character of their movement, and has sent several communications to Afghanistan’s neighbors expressing an intent to establish positive international relations.  In what are increasingly being viewed by the forums as direct rejoinders to these sentiments, recent messages from al-Qa’ida have pointedly rejected the ‘national’ model of revolutionary Islamism and reiterated calls for jihad against Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan and China.”

Reports of rifts between different militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan have surfaced before, particularly between Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), over the latter’s insistence on targetting Pakistan. Mullah Omar, according to media reports earlier this year, wanted the TTP - which is believed to be close to al Qaeda - to focus instead on fighting western troops in Afghanistan.

Such reports of rifts are impossible to verify and may be deliberately designed to confuse - the talk of a break between Mullah Omar and al Qaeda comes as the United States has talked of stepping up pressure on the ”Quetta shura”, named after the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where Washington says the Afghan Taliban are based. Islamabad says Mullah Omar is not in Pakistan.

But history would suggest that the Islamist militants do not always form a cohesive whole or even follow a common ideology. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujahideen who had driven them out became fragmented, leading to a bloody civil war.  In Kashmir too, where a separatist revolt began in 1989, different militant groups rivalled and sometimes fought each other.

The general picture is of many different Islamist militant groups which often make common cause, and sometimes co-operate opportunistically when this suits their many different objectives. 

According to U.S. commander General Stanley McChrystal the three main insurgent groups in Afghanistan co-ordinate their efforts but have different command structures and work under separate strategic plans. These are the Quetta shura Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.

Within Pakistan, security forces appear to be fighting against a coalition of militant groups which include the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and the sectarian anti-Shi’ite Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), both of which have been suspected of involvement in gun and bomb attacks in Punjab province in recent weeks. The banned LeJ was originally based in Punjab, but has been operating increasingly out of the tribal areas.

The Pakistan Army has launched an offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the TTP. It says around 1,000 foreign fighters, mainly Uzbeks, are also holed up there.

Punjab is also the base for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai. Lashkar differs from many other militant groups in that it is not believed to have launched attacks within Pakistan itself, focusing instead on Kashmir and India. Nor does it share the Deobandi religious ideology of many of Pakistan’s militant groups and of the Afghan Taliban, instead following a tradition more akin to al Qaeda’s Salafist views.

Jaish-e-Mohammed, another Punjab-based group which like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) originally focused mainly on Kashmir, is seen as much closer to al Qaeda than the LeT.  It is one of many militant groups which is believed to have splintered in Pakistan as a result of various crackdowns following 9/11, creating many dangerous offshoots.

In Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, rebels have long been waging a separatist insurgency which Pakistan says is backed by India - a charge Delhi denies. But these rebels are quite separate from the Jundollah Sunni militant group blamed for last Sunday’s suicide bomb attack in Sistan-Baluchestan province in neighbouring Iran.  Analysts argue that Jundollah, whose religious ideology is Deobandi, is increasingly following a sectarian anti-Shi’ite agenda, under the influence of Pakistan’s own Deobandi groups.

But according to French historian Stephane Dudoignon, quoted in this Reuters interview, the group does not share the Islamic internationalism of al Qaeda. Instead, its leader Abdolmalik Rigi had always stressed that he was a Baluch and Iranian patriot. And the rise of Jundollah, he says, coincided with an explosion of drug smuggling on the eastern fringes of Iran, from which it drew much of its funding.

Meanwhile on the subject of drug smuggling and to return to the original subject of the jihadica post, it’s worth noting that the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar appear to be considerably better funded than al Qaeda nowadays. That would suggest that if there is indeed a rift between a nationalist and internationalist agenda, the Afghan Taliban may have the upper hand.

(Photos: U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan; the TTP, opium field)
.     

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have questioned before the value of the “AfPak” label, which implies that an incredibly complicated situation involving many different countries can be reduced to a five-letter word.

Having spent the last couple of days trying to make sense of the suicide bomb attack in Iran which Tehran blamed on Jundollah, an ethnic Baluchi, Sunni insurgent group it says has bases in Pakistan,  I’m more inclined than ever to believe the “AfPak” label blinds us to the broader regional context. Analysts argue that Jundollah has been heavily influenced by hardline Sunni sectarian Islamist thinking within Pakistan which is itself the product of 30 years of proxy wars in the region dating back to the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan towards the end of the same year.

This Sunni-Shi’ite faultline is showing up in suicide bombings in Iran, while at the same time Sunni Islamist groups continue to challenge the writ of state inside Pakistan even as the Pakistan Army presses ahead with its offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

Such is the power of the Sunni Islamist movement, that Pakistan has been forced to close schools for fear of more bombings in its heartland in response to its military offensive in South Waziristan.

So what is the response on the “Af” side of the “AfPak” strategists? After intense diplomatic efforts, President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a second-round run-off in a disputed election. Allegations of electoral fraud had undermined Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan, and delayed a decision by President Barack Obama on whether to send more troops to the region.

But how many people believe that a second-round run-off on Nov. 7 will change the dynamics of a region which is getting more, rather than less, unstable by the day? (That is not to say a run-off is a bad idea, but rather that it may be overrated in its significance).

In the meantime India is becoming increasingly worried about instability in neighbouring Pakistan. But it is in a difficult position in working out how to respond, since it wants action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai. Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the few militant groups which is not believed to have been involved in attacking targets within Pakistan, potentially pushing it down the priority list for an army already fighting in South Waziristan and facing an assault in the country’s heartland from Punjab-based groups.

In my 25 years of journalism, I’ve rarely seen a situation move so quickly.  I’d like to think there is someone in power who is not only keeping pace, but keeping ahead.

In the meantime, here are some articles worth reading:

Steve Coll makes a compelling argument for U.S. commitment to Afghanistan in an article reproduced by Foreign Policy

Shuja Nawaz, also writing at Foreign Policy, argues that the Pakistan Army deserves more support and equipment in its offensive in South Waziristan (read on to the bit where he writes about Frontier Corps scouts having to go out in open-toed sandals).

Andrew Exum has done us all a favour by arguing that comparisons with Vietnam depend entirely on how you view the history of that war (it’s hard enough to make sense of what is happening now, so maybe Vietnam analogies need to be consigned to the same cyber-dustbin as the AfPak label?)

And last, but not least, look at Reuters new Afghan Journal blog, combining the insights of our team of journalists on the ground with news from around the world.

(Photos: Presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; British soldier in Afghanistan)

A week after suspected Sunni Islamist insurgents attacked the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, a suicide bomber killed six senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and 25 other people in Shi’ite Iran in one of the deadliest attacks in years on the country’s most powerful military institution.

Were these two events connected only by the loose network of Sunni insurgent groups based in and around Pakistan? Or are there other common threads that link the two?

Iranian state media said Jundollah, an ethnic Baluch Sunni insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the attack in the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan. The group, led by Abdomalek Rigi, is believed to have bases in neighbouring Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

Jundollah has been linked in some reports to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an anti-Shia sectarian group based in Pakistan’s Punjab province, and to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Both the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the TTP are believed to have close ties to al Qaeda, and are suspected of involvement in the attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan Army.

Trawling through published reports about Jundollah, it is not easy to work out how clear its links are to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda. This article in the Asia Times Online cautions that there are two organisations with the same name, one focused on Pakistan and the other on Iran.  Pakistani newspapers, however, have reported links specifically between Rigi’s group and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and TTP.

Being fellow travellers in the network of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups does not necessarily mean they are pursuing a common agenda. However, it does raise intriguing questions about how far they are collaborating, and about how far al Qaeda might be directing operations behind the scenes.

According to the Jihadica website, al Qaeda has been publicly cementing its ties with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, whose declared aim is to take over Pakistan.  The TTP is currently under siege in its stronghold in South Waziristan, where the Pakistan Army launched a long-awaited ground offensive on Saturday. A series of militant attacks across Pakistan in the past few weeks have been seen as an attempt by the Tehrik-e-Taliban and its al Qaeda-linked allies to show it can outwit the Pakistani security forces.

So was the bombing in Iran part of that deliberate attempt to spread mayhem across the region? That’s almost impossible to tell for now, although the Long War Journal earlier this year quoted an al Qaeda commander as talking about expanding the jihad into neighbouring countries, including Iran.

Of all the many players in the region, al Qaeda probably has the most to gain from the fall-out of the attack in Iran.

The Iranian armed forces, which have long harboured suspicions that Jundollah was funded by the west to weaken Iran, have accused the United States and Britain of involvement in the attack and vowed revenge.  That could torpedo efforts by President Barack Obama’s administration to improve relations with Iran and seek its help in stabilising Afghanistan.

It could also raise tensions between Pakistan and Iran, which reacted sharply to the bombing of a mosque in the Iranian city of Zahedan earlier this year. As Pakistan struggles to fight militants within the country and defeat them in South Waziristan, the last thing it needs is trouble on its border with Iran.

So is there an overall plan at work here? Or instead, is it simply that the region has become so destabilised that insurgents are finding it easier to operate both inside and outside of Pakistan?

(Photos: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Pakistani soldiers in Lahore)

After last weekend’s attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi, one of the questions being asked with a rather troubling air of inevitability was: where next? That question was answered on Thursday with a string of attacks across the country, including three in Lahore.

So now, what next?

Many expect the attacks to continue, as militants based in the country’s heartland Punjab province unleash a wave of violence ahead of a planned military offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in their stronghold in South Waziristan.  Few are prepared to predict either how much worse they could get, nor exactly how Pakistan will respond.

The blogger “Londonstani” at Abu Muqawama writes that, “the media, foreign and domestic, seems to be split between two narratives: ‘Militants are getting stronger and we are stuffed’ or ‘This is the last gasp of militants who are about to be ground to pulp by the army’”.

He argues however that “the downfall of militancy of this kind is built into its success. It can only really thrive when it is seen as a by-product of unpopular government policies, foreign occupation etc. But when the militancy gets powerful enough to pull off spectaculars like the operations today in Lahore, that’s when the local population see it as a threat in its own right. When it starts looking like a realistic possibility (even if pretty distant) that Taliban types might soon be telling you how to live, ambivalence towards their activities falls away.”

But in a column in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, Nadeem Paracha writes that it may yet take a while for Pakistanis to drop their ambivalence. 

“What is it that makes these terrorists so sure and confident about themselves? It’s simple. We do!” it says.

“It is the sheer hesitancy that we show towards fully realizing the grave dangers these terrorists hold,  and a weird, inexplicable sense and understanding of reality that most Pakistanis look to be suffering from, that gives these terrorists the psychological edge and opening; providing them as convoluted a justification to commit acts of barbarism in the fine name of God, as is our own habit of ending up actually recognizing their many deeds as being either a sympathetic socio-political outcome, or, of course, a wild conspiracy by our many (largely imagined) enemies lingering on our borders.”

No one is suggesting that Pakistan is about to be overrun by Islamist militants. But what is clear is that there has been a step-shift in the nature of the insurgency in Pakistan. This is more than mere geography, as the violence spreads increasingly from the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan into the heartland of the country. It is more even than the rising frequency of attacks. What is perhaps most worrisome is that there appears to be a coherence to the attacks that has not yet been fully understood.

Does the apparent mayhem mask a clear strategy on the part of the militants which goes beyond targetting security forces wherever they can as a pre-emptive strike against the planned offensive in South Waziristan?  Which militant organisations are involved among the Punjab-based groups and the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban? And how does the attempt to destabilise Pakistan fit with the situation in Afghanistan?

Britain’s Guardian newspaper says in an editorial the implications of the attacks over the last week or so are profound.

“Militant attacks of this sophistication and scale represent more than just a pre-emptive strike against a long-heralded army offensive in South Waziristan …  A new front has been opened. It is a battle that the army cannot afford to lose, because it is being fought in the Punjab itself, the very heart of the Pakistani state.”

Security analysts argue that historically insurgencies have failed far more often than they have succeeded, although there might be months, or years, of  “irregular warfare” (in the case of Pakistan this has meant suicide bombings and fedayeen attacks).

If you wanted to apply that framework to what is happening right now in Pakistan, you would need to understand both the nature of the state and the nature of the insurgents. Much has been written about the state in Pakistan. But how much do we really know about the insurgents? Until we work that out, it seems unlikely that anyone can answer with any confidence the question of what next.

(Reuters photos: soldiers and police in Lahore)

An atmosphere of stale defensiveness has sunk over Kabul. The mood has been lowered by the protracted saga of the Afghan election count, almost two months on from the first round August 20 vote. It's a drama veering towards farce more often than post-modern play, as we wait endlessly for a result, that like Godot, does not want to come.

Winter has not yet arrived in Kabul, though the evenings are cold, quickly taking the heat of the sun out of the day. Afghan politicians are frustrated and twitchy, second-guessing the reasons for the U.N.-backed election watchdog's plodding. We are being solidly methodological to retain the confidence of all, says the Electoral Complaints Commission, as it examines thousands of dodgy votes. A thankless task, most likely. The ECC officials will be puzzling over whether a box of votes has been mass-endorsed for one candidate, and should not stand, or if the suspiciously similar ticks on the ballot paper are attributable to only one man in the village knowing how to write. Many of the rural voters will never have held a pen in their hand, argued one official. It is natural in such a tribal society for the village to establish a consensus on who to support. Do such ballot papers count? Remember Florida, and how 'hanging chads' and the U.S. Supreme Court gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore? It's that kind of agony.

Behind the scenes the whispers are that hesitation and delay are because the outcome is excruciatingly close, too close to call. President Hamid Karzai, once set clear for victory, may find first round success ripped from his grasp by the disqualification of votes stuffed into ballot boxes by his supporters. He'll likely win a second round, if it happens, against his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah; but there will have been a loss of dignity, of self-confidence and of an opportunity to stabilise Afghanistan and get on with fighting the Taliban.

Other more fraught scenarios are possible, as outlined by my colleague. Would Karzai gamble that the West has no alternative to him in Afghanistan? And that he can therefore afford to ignore the opprobrium that would follow if he rejected an outcome he did not like? Or are the suspicions of chicanery, back-room pressure on election officials and string-pulling by all involved just a proliferation of nonsense to fill the void left by the lack of a clear outcome?

Eventually the result will be out, perhaps by the time some of you get round to reading this. Most likely I will be back in London, watching from afar. Optimists would have it that clarity will clear the air, the Afghan political mood will lighten and spoils to all will come from the haggling over the shape of the next government.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is Limbo-stan. Obama won't decide his strategy on Afghanistan until he sees what kind of Afghan partner he has to deal with. At least until then, and possibly longer, he won't say yes or no to the extra troops that General Stanley McChrystal says he needs to carry out the counter-insurgency strategy that he has prepared. (Though he'll carry out a different strategy, with no or fewer extra troops, if that's what he's ordered to do by his commander-in-chief). So in this limbo - the Washington policy void is filled with echo-chamber exhortations across the political divides; the Taliban is emboldened; Afghanistan's neighbours are positioning themselves to benefit or at least guard against strategic loss should Washington fold its tent; and Western publics are wondering if there is a real purpose to their boys getting their limbs blown off while trudging through the fields of southern Helmand.

A few weeks ago I asked a Pakistani diplomat what was, among the multiple threats facing the country, the single biggest challenge?

It wasn’t al Qaeda or the Taliban, it wasn’t the United States as many Pakistanis believe. And it wasn’t even India, for long the existential threat the military and succeeding generations of politicians have invested blood and treasure to checkmate.

It was the economy which has virtually ground to a halt as the global recession erodes exports and investment, the diplomat said. Fix the power shortages, win investors back and get the economy moving, the tide of militancy could begin to be pushed back.

You could of course argue that the miitancy itself has sapped the economy and if it weren’t for the militants, Pakistan would have done far better . So tackle them first, and the economy would take care of itself. In the light of the attacks of last week and this, that certainly would seem to be an overiding immediate objective.

But the diplomat’s point was that the opportunities created by an expanding economy would, in the longer term,  make it a bit less likely for young men to gravitate to a hate-filled career of violence in the name of religion.

The suicide bomber who struck in Shangla near the Swat valley on Monday was apparently in his early teens, one report put his age at 13.  Was he from the impoverished masses that the Taliban have increasingly turned to, to carry out the attacks ?

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Quereshi told National Public Radio that the Taliban had been “extracting out of poverty and the misery of people.” If the people were educated and enlightened they wouldn’t join them, he said. And it doesn’t stop at Waziristan or other parts of the northwest where the Taliban and al Qaeda are operating out of. It may well be also Punjab in the very heart of Pakistan; its poverty stricken, feudal dominated southern part with a  large illiiterate population a huge pool to tap. 

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