Next Gen Taliban?

The article in the Sunday NYTime's magazine on the radicalization of the younger Islamic fanatics in Pakistan is a case study in how quickly unintended consequences can overwhelm a simplistic American foreign policy. The 'established' radicals inability to reign in the younger, more militant and bloody "next gen taliban" is a truly frightening and harrowing development. A great deal of their fervor is directly attributable to our blunders in the Middle East and in Western Asia as a whole. The most radical groups, which are mainly Pashtun, and therefore not truly Al Qaeda, fear that Musharraf is a tool of the Bush administration, but were probably also directly responsible for the murder of Bhutto. They regard the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as a broad US move towards destroying Islam throughout the region. Cheney and Bush's predictable response, to step up covert US efforts in the tribal areas of Baluchistan and Warzistan will only incite more violence and suspicion, and will go a long way towards working against our national interests, but that is that legacy of the fool's errand in Iraq.

The question, then, is this: Where does Pakistan stand in the cycle right now? Do they represent a country sliding towards the chaos and tribal hatreds evident in the sectarian violence we see in Iraq? Will the inevitable removal of Musharraf lead to the same sort of power vacuum and civil war that we see in Baghdad and Anbar? Or, does Pakistan today represent Iraq's future? Is the eventual outcome in Iraq the Pakistan that we see today, with the only functioning institution being the corrupt and power mad military, armed to the teeth, with seething ethnic, tribal and religious hatreds bubbling just below the surface?

Either or both may be true, and the only thing that we can be certain of is that we don't possess much in the way of options in dealing with this. Our influence on the ground is weak, our military limitations have been exposed, and the reality is that we will be forced to sit by and watch, hoping for an outcome over which we cannot predict.