The deadly eastward spread

Violent extremism in Pakistan, particularly in the NWFP, has in recent months acquired a dramatic ferocity. An unprecedented number of suicide bombings have taken place across Pakistan, the latest of course being the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on 27 December. Whereas the problem used to be seen as confined to Pakistan's tribal areas, this step-up of violence was utilised as a prominent justification for the 3 November declaration of emergency by General Pervez Musharraf. Indeed, the response by the Pakistan Army has been nearly as ferocious. During a single incident on 7 October in the NWFP's Bannu District, military gunships are reported to have killed several hundred civilians, mostly women and children. During the course of November, 728 people were reported killed – including 293 civilians and 94 security personnel – making the month the most deadly for all of Pakistan since 2001. More than half of these casualties took place in Swat District, in the northern reaches of the NWFP.

The increase in violence follows on the heels of a gradual recognition of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, as having become the new operational base of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Following the toppling of the Taliban government in 2001 in Afghanistan, the tribal areas provided a natural gateway to the fleeing Taliban militants, and guaranteed them a safe haven owing to the shared Pashtun ethnicity. The appalling socio-economic conditions in the area; the installation of an Islamist, Taliban-leaning government headed by the Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal in 2002; and a series of peace agreements between pro-Taliban militants and Islamabad (two between South Waziristan and Islamabad in April 2004 and February 2005, and another between North Waziristan and Islamabad in September 2006) – together these factors have facilitated the consolidation of the Taliban in the area. The NWFP has also progressively come under the grip of Islamic militancy of a domestic variety. This process has particularly gained momentum following the July 2007 standoff between the Pakistan Army and radical Islamists that ended in the storming of the Lal Masjid, killing its chief cleric Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and several others. One of the more visible manifestations of this trend has been the intense fighting, in Swat since late October, between Pakistani security forces and pro-Taliban militants belonging to the militant outfit Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), led by the radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah.