The sophisticated truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on 20 September, which took dozens of lives, was the latest incident in a campaign to destabilise the entire subcontinent. Most reports have blamed al-Qa’eda militants but the real blame for the crime belongs with the Talebanised sectors of the Pakistani armed forces and intelligence service (ISI), and the pusillanimity of the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto.
The Marriott assault was clearly a sequel to the bombing less than three months ago, on 7 July, at the Indian embassy in Kabul, which was also devastatingly murderous. Pakistani authorities tried to deny the involvement of ISI agents, as detailed in communications intercepted by US intelligence services. Less obviously, the Taleban on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and the Pakistani North West Frontier Province (NWFP) are engaged in a full-fronted invasion of Afghanistan’s eastern neighbour.
The shift of the global Islamist terror front from Iraq to Afghanistan has less to do with opposition to the Western presence supporting Hamid Karzai than is commonly supposed. The intent of the fundamentalists (claiming to act in the interest of extreme Sunnism) is to radicalise the whole of Pakistan or, failing that, to effect a third partition of the subcontinent. Following the split between Pakistan and India in 1947, and the secession of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) in 1971, the Pakistani Taleban, as the radicals are increasingly known, will settle for nothing short of full control of the NWFP.
The Pakistani Taleban could not wage war across the border were it not for the long-standing infiltration of the Pakistani army and ISI by jihadists. For years, the Pakistani-Indian conflict over Kashmir was the pretext for ignoring this.
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