recruitment may generate internal conflicts. And the deepest mystery is that if the army knows that it will one day have to take on the Taliban, why not do it early rather than later, when the task might become impossible without serious damage? The spectre that haunts Pakistan is now not that the army dominates, but that it appears conflicted.

Second, what are we dealing with in the Taliban? It is clearly an ideology that revels in cruelty, both to sustain its power and establish an oppressive normative order. While the Americans have managed the astonishing feat of uniting a whole range of different groups inside Af-Pak, the cohesiveness of the different groups and shuras is an open question. Their structure will determine the character of this conflict. For on the face of it the Taliban do not seem to have a single unified structure, more a series of overlapping groups. This may be a glimmer of hope or a source of

despair. In military and financial terms, if not ideological outlook, these divisions could at some point be exploited. But it also suggests that this battle will have to be fought on several fronts at once, a more anarchic prospect. But the real challenge is that the Americans seem not to have been able to make a significant dent in the political economy lifeline that sustains these groups: opium, arms and money seem freely available, as if the years of war in the region were a mere sideshow.

... contd.