*Sources: DTN News / Daily Mail U.K. By David Rose In Pakistan Last updated at 12:26 AM on 28th June 2009 (Click here)
(NSI News Source Info) ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - June 28, 2009: Outside homes and businesses on the sweltering streets of Pakistan's capital Islamabad, the past few weeks have brought an unfamiliar sight: the green state flag, adorned with the crescent and star of Islam picked out in white.
The cause has nothing to do with the national side's unexpected victory over Sri Lanka in the World Twenty20 cricket final at Lord's last weekend.
Ever since 9/11, British and American policymakers have been complaining that as an ally in the struggle against Muslim jihadist terrorism, nuclear-armed Pakistan has been at best unreliable, and at worst, deeply compromised.
Death valley: David Rose interviews a militiaman in Dhok Darra where his group are fighting the Taliban
But as I saw during a fortnight in Islamabad and the North-West Frontier Province, many ordinary Pakistanis now believe their country is fighting for survival against the Taliban and its offshoots, and if they once had sympathies for the extremists, these have now evaporated.
Like Winston Churchill, the parallels with whose 1897 campaign I described in The Mail on Sunday last week, they have no doubt whose side they are on.
'I am very worried about the future of Pakistan,' Talat Masood, a senior retired general told me. 'We have not faced a challenge on this scale before.
'But to say everything is negative and leading to the disintegration of the state is wrong, and the military leadership is not playing the double game that is sometimes claimed. How can they secretly support the Taliban when they have killed more than 2,000 people?'
At one level, the immediate prospect of a takeover by the Taliban, whose organised strongholds are confined to the wild mountain valleys of Pakistan's North-West Frontier, is remote.
Pakistan, a vast, disparate and in places highly-developed country of 173million people, is not some banana republic, whose capital could be seized by a few hundred truckloads of rebels. 
A house teeters on the brink of collapse after heavy shelling by the Pakistani army began in Kumbar Bazaar
It has a large, educated - though, too often, unemployed - middle class, excellent newspapers, proudly independent TV news channels, and distinguished literary, scientific and musical traditions. In Karachi, there are not only slums but the hippest of art, design, fashion and movie scenes.
Meanwhile, with 700,000 men on active duty, Pakistan's army is among the largest in the world.
Yet the scale of the country's crisis, and the extent to which its origins make it difficult to counter, should not be underestimated. Pakistan's war is being fought on at least five fronts - and in none is victory certain.
The first two, in different sections of the Afghan frontier, have been reported extensively in recent weeks: in the Swat, Buner and Dir valleys, to the north and east of Islamabad; and, with increasing ferocity, in Waziristan, 400 miles to the south, the first tribal area of Pakistan to give shelter to Al Qaeda when the Taliban regime in Kabul was toppled in 2001.
Less familiar is Baluchistan, further to the south again. Its provincial capital, Quetta, has long been a crucial refuge for the Taliban in Afghanistan, including those fighting the British in nearby Helmand. A Baluchi separatist movement seeking independence from Pakistan has become toxically mixed with Islamic extremism.
Even in Kashmir, long the focus of Pakistan's bloody 62-year rivalry with India, anti-government jihadist violence has begun to rear its head: two days ago, a Taliban suicide bomber there killed at least two soldiers. 
Fighter Taj Muhammad, 35, heads with his Kalashnikov for the front line where his militia is fighting the Taliban
Finally, and most insidious, is the upsurge in urban terrorist violence - thought to be a direct consequence of the army's early successes in Dir, Swat and Waziristan.
In Islamabad, frequent road blocks and checkpoints do little to stem the prevalent mood of unease. After the bombing last September that virtually destroyed the city's five-star Marriott hotel - since rebuilt with new 'impregnable' security - the jihadists have continued to strike, mainly at police and army posts.
Other big cities, including Pakistan's intellectual centre, Lahore, have also seen frequent outrages, culminating earlier this month in the assassination of Sarfraz Naeemi, the country's most revered moderate religious leader.
As for Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, even before the deadly bombing two weeks ago of its biggest hotel, the Pearl Continental, it had become what one diplomat described as 'the red zone' - a place considered too dangerous for foreigners without a large armed escort. The city is not only the scene of regular bombings but also shoot-outs, often triggered when bystanders point out extremists to the police.
However, the very scale of the threat appears to be responsible for the stiffening of resistance and the change of mood. The Taliban, it seems, have overreached - and perhaps brought about their downfall. 
A suspected member of the Swat Taliban is led away for questioning by a soldier from the Dir Scouts
'This is not Islam,' a young, religious woman told me in one of the frontier's teeming refugee camps, describing the murders the Taliban perpetrated in Swat, including that of a young captured soldier who was dragged to his death along a rocky track by a Taliban Jeep.
Several times in Islamabad, I heard people voice disgust that having agreed a peace deal for Swat, the Taliban almost immediately reneged on it by trying to invade the neighbouring district of Buner.
It is no secret that in the early Nineties, the Taliban were sponsored by Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI - a fact that fatally hampered Pakistan's efforts to curb them until recently.
But this, said General Masood, had nothing to do with any inherent desire by the ISI to create an extremist Islamic state - it was simply a product of the chaos in Afghanistan.
'They wanted a sympathetic group in power in Afghanistan,' Masood told me. 'They did it for expedient, not ideological reasons.'
Meanwhile, Pakistan continued to succour anti-Indian groups in both Kashmir and the Punjab, effectively giving them carte blanche to mount terrorist attacks such as those against the Indian parliament in 2001, and in Mumbai last year.
Some Western diplomats say that even now, Pakistan has not fully woken up to the dangers this brings.
'These groups are strategically linked with the Taliban,' said one. 'The Pakistanis won't have a fully developed strategy against extremism until they figure out they can't discriminate between jihadists.' 
A militiaman takes a break on the road to the front line in the Sharingal Valley
Others are more optimistic. 'After years of dithering about terrorism, Pakistan has finally crossed the Rubicon,' one US official told me. 'Who knows how it's going to turn out. But there really is no going back.'
Of course, the importance of the events in Pakistan extend beyond its borders.
In the remote Dhok Darra valley of upper Dir, a local villager named Taj Mohammed directed my gaze upriver.
'You see the snowy mountains? Now look to the left. That is the way to Lowari Top, the pass that leads to Afghanistan. Sometimes the militants come from there, and that is where they get their weapons.'
And sometimes, he added, Afghan militants from Kunar, the fiercely contested province on the other side of that pass, fled across it, running from American attacks to a place where they knew that ground pursuit by US forces was impossible and refuge from their Pakistani allies guaranteed.
Americans have started to call the sprawling battlefields of the war in central Asia 'Af-Pak', and there is now a widespread sense that 2009 will be the make-or-break campaigning season - the year that the incoming Taliban tide on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border is either stemmed or becomes unstoppable.
Yet the struggle, seen from the Pakistan side, does not look hopeless.
There are pitfalls - for example, as Masood said, the danger that the millions now displaced in the camps 'may develop their own dynamic' and become breeding grounds for jihadism.
The army cannot merely hold the valleys: for a sustained counter-insurgency to work, they have to stop attacks launched from the hills, and then to bring the refugees back and rebuild their homes and livelihoods.
If only for the sake of the British soldiers engaged in the umbilically connected conflict across the border in Afghanistan, one has to hope they prevail.
Pakistan's war isn't merely for its own survival, but for the whole counter-terrorist project pursued by the West since 2001, and the consequences of defeat are unthinkable.
Death valley: David Rose interviews a militiaman in Dhok Darra where his group are fighting the Taliban
But as I saw during a fortnight in Islamabad and the North-West Frontier Province, many ordinary Pakistanis now believe their country is fighting for survival against the Taliban and its offshoots, and if they once had sympathies for the extremists, these have now evaporated.
Like Winston Churchill, the parallels with whose 1897 campaign I described in The Mail on Sunday last week, they have no doubt whose side they are on.
'I am very worried about the future of Pakistan,' Talat Masood, a senior retired general told me. 'We have not faced a challenge on this scale before.
'But to say everything is negative and leading to the disintegration of the state is wrong, and the military leadership is not playing the double game that is sometimes claimed. How can they secretly support the Taliban when they have killed more than 2,000 people?'
At one level, the immediate prospect of a takeover by the Taliban, whose organised strongholds are confined to the wild mountain valleys of Pakistan's North-West Frontier, is remote.
Pakistan, a vast, disparate and in places highly-developed country of 173million people, is not some banana republic, whose capital could be seized by a few hundred truckloads of rebels. A house teeters on the brink of collapse after heavy shelling by the Pakistani army began in Kumbar Bazaar
It has a large, educated - though, too often, unemployed - middle class, excellent newspapers, proudly independent TV news channels, and distinguished literary, scientific and musical traditions. In Karachi, there are not only slums but the hippest of art, design, fashion and movie scenes.
Meanwhile, with 700,000 men on active duty, Pakistan's army is among the largest in the world.
Yet the scale of the country's crisis, and the extent to which its origins make it difficult to counter, should not be underestimated. Pakistan's war is being fought on at least five fronts - and in none is victory certain.
The first two, in different sections of the Afghan frontier, have been reported extensively in recent weeks: in the Swat, Buner and Dir valleys, to the north and east of Islamabad; and, with increasing ferocity, in Waziristan, 400 miles to the south, the first tribal area of Pakistan to give shelter to Al Qaeda when the Taliban regime in Kabul was toppled in 2001.
Less familiar is Baluchistan, further to the south again. Its provincial capital, Quetta, has long been a crucial refuge for the Taliban in Afghanistan, including those fighting the British in nearby Helmand. A Baluchi separatist movement seeking independence from Pakistan has become toxically mixed with Islamic extremism.
Even in Kashmir, long the focus of Pakistan's bloody 62-year rivalry with India, anti-government jihadist violence has begun to rear its head: two days ago, a Taliban suicide bomber there killed at least two soldiers. Fighter Taj Muhammad, 35, heads with his Kalashnikov for the front line where his militia is fighting the Taliban
Finally, and most insidious, is the upsurge in urban terrorist violence - thought to be a direct consequence of the army's early successes in Dir, Swat and Waziristan.
In Islamabad, frequent road blocks and checkpoints do little to stem the prevalent mood of unease. After the bombing last September that virtually destroyed the city's five-star Marriott hotel - since rebuilt with new 'impregnable' security - the jihadists have continued to strike, mainly at police and army posts.
Other big cities, including Pakistan's intellectual centre, Lahore, have also seen frequent outrages, culminating earlier this month in the assassination of Sarfraz Naeemi, the country's most revered moderate religious leader.
As for Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, even before the deadly bombing two weeks ago of its biggest hotel, the Pearl Continental, it had become what one diplomat described as 'the red zone' - a place considered too dangerous for foreigners without a large armed escort. The city is not only the scene of regular bombings but also shoot-outs, often triggered when bystanders point out extremists to the police.
However, the very scale of the threat appears to be responsible for the stiffening of resistance and the change of mood. The Taliban, it seems, have overreached - and perhaps brought about their downfall. A suspected member of the Swat Taliban is led away for questioning by a soldier from the Dir Scouts
'This is not Islam,' a young, religious woman told me in one of the frontier's teeming refugee camps, describing the murders the Taliban perpetrated in Swat, including that of a young captured soldier who was dragged to his death along a rocky track by a Taliban Jeep.
Several times in Islamabad, I heard people voice disgust that having agreed a peace deal for Swat, the Taliban almost immediately reneged on it by trying to invade the neighbouring district of Buner.
It is no secret that in the early Nineties, the Taliban were sponsored by Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI - a fact that fatally hampered Pakistan's efforts to curb them until recently.
But this, said General Masood, had nothing to do with any inherent desire by the ISI to create an extremist Islamic state - it was simply a product of the chaos in Afghanistan.
'They wanted a sympathetic group in power in Afghanistan,' Masood told me. 'They did it for expedient, not ideological reasons.'
Meanwhile, Pakistan continued to succour anti-Indian groups in both Kashmir and the Punjab, effectively giving them carte blanche to mount terrorist attacks such as those against the Indian parliament in 2001, and in Mumbai last year.
Some Western diplomats say that even now, Pakistan has not fully woken up to the dangers this brings.
'These groups are strategically linked with the Taliban,' said one. 'The Pakistanis won't have a fully developed strategy against extremism until they figure out they can't discriminate between jihadists.' A militiaman takes a break on the road to the front line in the Sharingal Valley
Others are more optimistic. 'After years of dithering about terrorism, Pakistan has finally crossed the Rubicon,' one US official told me. 'Who knows how it's going to turn out. But there really is no going back.'
Of course, the importance of the events in Pakistan extend beyond its borders.
In the remote Dhok Darra valley of upper Dir, a local villager named Taj Mohammed directed my gaze upriver.
'You see the snowy mountains? Now look to the left. That is the way to Lowari Top, the pass that leads to Afghanistan. Sometimes the militants come from there, and that is where they get their weapons.'
And sometimes, he added, Afghan militants from Kunar, the fiercely contested province on the other side of that pass, fled across it, running from American attacks to a place where they knew that ground pursuit by US forces was impossible and refuge from their Pakistani allies guaranteed.
Americans have started to call the sprawling battlefields of the war in central Asia 'Af-Pak', and there is now a widespread sense that 2009 will be the make-or-break campaigning season - the year that the incoming Taliban tide on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border is either stemmed or becomes unstoppable.
Yet the struggle, seen from the Pakistan side, does not look hopeless.
There are pitfalls - for example, as Masood said, the danger that the millions now displaced in the camps 'may develop their own dynamic' and become breeding grounds for jihadism.
The army cannot merely hold the valleys: for a sustained counter-insurgency to work, they have to stop attacks launched from the hills, and then to bring the refugees back and rebuild their homes and livelihoods.
If only for the sake of the British soldiers engaged in the umbilically connected conflict across the border in Afghanistan, one has to hope they prevail.
Pakistan's war isn't merely for its own survival, but for the whole counter-terrorist project pursued by the West since 2001, and the consequences of defeat are unthinkable.
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