Opinion

PAKISTAN’S RISING ISLAMIST TIDE

FOR a misery junkie, Pakistan’s got it all: gruesome Islamist terror; a phony democracy drowning in corruption; wretched poverty and obscene stolen wealth; a terrified army – and nukes.

Last weekend, Pakistani security forces launched a desperate counteroffensive in the Khyber Agency on the Afghan border. They hope to prevent medieval tribesmen (with modern weapons) from overrunning the city of Peshawar and severing the main supply route for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani Frontier Corps made some local gains. But their efforts amount to belated sandbagging against the rising flood of militant Islam.

Of course, trouble on Pakistan’s Afghan frontier isn’t new: It was long the stuff of adventure novels and splendid black-and-white movies. A friend reminded me that, during World War I, the Brits fired artillery from the walls of the fort in downtown Peshawar to fend off tribesmen shouting, “God is great!”

But there’s a vital difference now: In the past, jihads were tribal and local, if fierce. The Islamist rebellions sweeping the country’s Northwest Frontier and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas reflect a global vision: It isn’t just the Khyber Pass and Peshawar that are threatened these days.

What happened? For decades, Pakistani politicians preached anti-Americanism at home while sucking up to Washington in official circles. (Your teeth fell out? Blame the godless CIA.) Not one leading politician in the country’s history argued that Pakistan’s problems began at home.

As fake democracy failed the people again and again, Islamist demagogues found open ears in the dirt-poor tribal areas. Mullahs still blamed Uncle Sam – but they were the first to also blame the country’s own politicians for poverty and corruption.

The bulk of the country’s population in the densely populated regions east of the Indus River still hasn’t signed up for extremism – but the fundamentalists now enjoy de facto control of most of the Afghan frontier.

Why did one Islamabad regime after another let the cancer worsen? They didn’t care. The tribal areas are poor – nothing there to steal, except for drug profits (and the pols got their cut from the dope). By the time Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized the president’s chair, a crisis was blazing.

Under Musharraf, the security forces (which never fully cut ties with the Taliban) made half-hearted efforts to fight the militants, then tried to bargain with them. Nothing worked.

But credit Musharraf: He genuinely cared about his country. Now the situation’s worsening by the day.

After the assassination last year of the dazzlingly dishonest Benazir Bhutto, her party won a sympathy vote, leaving her jailbird husband as the national power broker.

Perched on his wife’s grave, Asif Ali Zardari doesn’t share Musharraf’s patriotism. “Mr. Ten Percent” is delighted to cut deals that leave the fanatics in charge of the impoverished regions west of the Indus – as long as he and his gang remain free to loot what remains in “wealthy” Sindh and Punjab.

The army’s caught in the middle. On one hand, it’s got the most capable chief of staff it’s had in many years, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani. And it’s the only responsible, remotely capable national-level entity. On the other hand, the generals are terrified that an all-out offensive against the militants would fail.

And only the army holds Pakistan together.

So the military’s trying limited operations – sticking it halfway in. In the Khyber, the generals sent out the paramilitary Frontier Corps to push back militant gangs threatening the two-lane “highway” to Afghanistan. They held back the regular army as a reserve – and to protect Peshawar, if things went south.

Why act at all? Unlike Zardari and his ilk, the generals now grasp that the Islamists can’t be bought off, that no deal will last a day longer than the fanatics find useful.

They also realize that the US can’t allow the severing of the prime supply link to our forces in Afghanistan. We’d have to do the job ourselves – and that would trigger a political deluge in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the extremists have imposed Sharia law; assassinated or executed officials and insufficiently devout Pakistanis; allied with the Taliban; welcomed al Qaeda – and detached huge swaths of the country.

The Pakistani military doesn’t know what to do. And the government all the Western Benazir groupies howled for doesn’t give a damn.

The only remotely positive note is that, despite their public protests, the Pakistani generals are pleased when we hit al Qaeda and Taliban targets on their soil – doing their work for them. But were we to move beyond air strikes and special ops to major incursions, their military would be forced into a face-off with us.

What’s the underlying lesson? That corruption and sham democracy are the Islamist fanatic’s friends. Nothing in al Qaeda’s message, or in the calls to arms from other extremists, rings so true to embittered Muslims as attacks on uncaring governments.

We should listen.

Ralph Peters’ latest book, “Looking for Trouble,” has just been released.