By imposing Islam at its harshest, Pakistan may just be trying to keep up with the neighbors. Next door are two profoundly fundamentalist Muslim countries, Iran and Afghanistan. Common faith doesn't make them friendly, though. Iran and the Taliban militia who rule most of Afghanistan are playing out an ancient schism in Islam between followers of the Sunni and Shia paths.

Most Iranians are Shia, and they've watched with growing disquiet over the past four years as the puritanical Sunnis of the Taliban blazed across Afghanistan like a fierce sandstorm. Iran has given shelter and logistical support to various ethnic Afghan forces confronting the Taliban, but so far this has failed to halt the advance. When Taliban warriors, using the traditional Afghan method of bribes and bullets, conquered Mazar-e-Sharif, the last city still held by the rebels, they also overran the Iranian consulate. It was only last week, a month after Mazar-e-Sharif fell, that the Taliban's leaders admitted that nine Iranian diplomats and a journalist holed up inside the consulate were massacred by the invaders. The Iranians, along with human-rights organizations, are also alarmed over stories by refugees that the Taliban went on a rampage against the city's Shias. This was ostensibly to pay back equally vicious behavior last year by Shia militiamen who executed thousands of captured Taliban, either by firing squad or by tossing them blindfolded down a well and throwing a hand grenade in afterward.

The latest round of hostilities began with Iran's ayatullahs and the Taliban flinging insults. The Taliban fighters, sneered the Iranians, were "uneducated idiots." Soon after, the Taliban's Commander of the Faithful, a charismatic, one-eyed village clergyman named Mullah Mohammed Omar, responded that Shia were ranked somewhere "between infidels and true Muslims." That remark enraged the Iranians. In the largest show of force since the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, 70,000 Revolutionary Guards staged a showy series of war games along the Afghan border. That was followed by an even bigger armed build-up: 200,000 men, backed by tanks, artillery and warplanes. "I have so far prevented the lighting of a fire in this region which would be hard to extinguish," declared Iran's supreme leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. "But all should know that a very great and wide danger is quite near."

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FAITH HEALING With his country on the verge of collapse, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attempts to impose strict Islamic law