Parallels are being drawn between events in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rising tide of terrorist attacks in Pakistan many of which appear to be copycat acts in the methods adopted and the choice of targets. Actually it is a case of the biter being bitten or chickens coming home to roost. What goes around comes around.

As usual, Pakistan is putting up a façade of injured innocence; of being a victim rather than the fountainhead of the art and science of mass murder as per the theory expounded by former President and Chief of Pakistan Army Staff General Pervez Musharraf (of Kargil infamy). He has been trying to sell the idea to all and sundry that Pakistan is the victim of Indian secret service operations and that the Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence is only paying back in the same coin. Nobody has bought that yet.  On the contrary the emphasis remains that Pakistan must do more to wipe out all manifestations of terror emenating from its soil.

In its eagerness to show results under US-led pressure and the lure of lucre that it is earning as blood money for every terrorist killed or captured and handed over for interrogation in the many “rendition camps” (prisons for reverse terrorism) set up in Europe and other parts of the world, Pakistan is making superficial motions to show that it is acting against terror.

Enraged at this betrayal under what is seen as US pressure, Pakistan trained terrorists, largely drawn from the warlike tribes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are retaliating against Pakistan’s populations ranging from Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province, through the twin cities of Islamabad-Rawalpindi to the seaport of Karachi. The late Baitullah of the Mehsud tribe was one such exponent of the practice of mass murder. That the Americans were able to identify the place and time of his arrival at his second wife’s home may well be the result a joint operation between the US CIA and the ISI both of whom wanted him eliminated, the former for his role in crossborder terrorism in Afghanistan and the latter for turning against his traditional mentors.

The Taliban which is being chased around on both sides of the Durand Line dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan is but one manifestation of rabid Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Many of them burgeoned under the umbrella of the Al Qaeda and the United Jehad Council but there are now many more freelance terrorist organizations that have been nurtured in the madrasses inside Pakistan.

These cradles of international terrorism are still functioning and turning out hundreds of new graduates that are swelling the ranks of the Pakistan Army’s first echelon of territorial expansionism into the surrounding hinterland in search for the elusive “strategic detph” that Pakistan craves.  Evidence of just how many such killers are operating from Pakistani soil was inadvertently given out when Pakistan Army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kiyani threatened to transfer five lakh Islamist fighters from the Pak-Afghan salient in the west to the Indo-Pak border in the east if India reacted militarily to the Mumbai 26/11 terrorist attack.

It is only slowly emerging that the man considered a past-master in the art of creating “human bombs” the suicide-prone fidayeen is an operative of the Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence. The parallel that is drawn with similar operations in Iraq are only partially correct in that those under the influence of the Al Qaeda-United Jehad Council and the Saudi Arabia connection are using the methodologies taught by the ISI-sponsored terrorist training camps.

Essentially, the current Iraqi resistance to the regime change by the US-led Coalition from a Sunni minority rule to a Shia majority dispensation is led by members of the former Iraqi Army created and nurtured by the discredited Saddam Hussein under the Baathist philosophy which is moderate compared to the Wahabbi brand of Islam of Saudi Arabia which is the seedbed of the current crop of terrorists being cultivated in Pakistani madrassas.  When Shia congregations in Iraq are attacked by suicide bombers and car bombs it has the signature of the Pakistan Army-Saudi ethos.

When Pakistanis complain about Iraqi style terrorism they forget that this is the product of the jehadi culture that was used to fightr Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 70s. The spores have now dispersed over a wide arc of instability of which Pakistan is the epicenter.