The Central Front

ENLARGE PHOTO+

On Sept. 6, a pickup truck exploded at a checkpoint, killing 35.

Teru Kuwayama for TIME

• Share

Pakistan is in crisis. Islamic extremism has metastasized from the lawless tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan to Pakistan's cities. Terrorists tried, and failed, to assassinate the Prime Minister in the capital, Islamabad, on Sept. 3. The nation's economy is a shambles. And Asif Ali Zardari, the man who has just taken the helm of this nuclear-armed country, is a onetime playboy who has spent more time in prison than in government and who wriggled out of a 2006 corruption trial in Britain by pleading mental instability.

The assassination last December of Benazir Bhutto, a former Prime Minister who was likely to win parliamentary elections in February, capped a year of devastating bloodshed. Some 3,600 people died in terrorism-related violence in 2007, according to the organization South Asia Terrorism Portal, and this year will be worse, as militant groups have joined together to wage war on the central government. The February elections brought Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, headed by her widower, Zardari, to power and a brief hiatus in the violence. But the new governing coalition collapsed over petty power struggles, and the militancy resumed. Twenty-nine suicide bombings have claimed more than 400 lives so far this year.

Yet though Pakistan has been a victim of terrorism, it has also been its enabler. As the focus of the U.S.'s war on terrorism has moved from Afghanistan to Iraq and back again, there is a widely dawning realization that its central front is actually Pakistan. Here in the mountainous northwestern fringes of the nation, where a fierce tribal code values honor and the protection of guests, that Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants are thought to be hiding. From these tribal areas, al-Qaeda and remnants of the Afghan Taliban, protected by their Pakistani friends, have launched attacks into Afghanistan, dragging the U.S. and its allies into a shadow war on some of the least hospitable terrain on earth. On Sept. 3, U.S.-led helicopter and ground troops made a raid into Pakistan from across the border. At least 17 Pakistanis were killed, and so far there has been no concrete explanation of what happened and why. U.S. forces have previously fired from Afghanistan in pursuit of militants crossing the border, and Predator drones have launched Hellfire missiles on suspected al-Qaeda targets within Pakistani borders (as they did again on Sept. 8), but this was the first reported ground incursion. The raid inflamed anti-American sentiment across the nation, and in retaliation, a vital fuel-supply route to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan was temporarily blocked.

Pakistan, a country of 173 million people that encompasses dusty plains, sublime mountain peaks and some of the world's most densely populated cities, has rarely been a placid place since it became an independent nation in 1947. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Islamabad, with U.S. and Saudi funding, sent thousands of men across the border to join Afghans in fighting the Soviets. The Pakistani military used religious schools in the borderland to train and equip Afghan mujahedin and to heal them when they returned. More than 3 million Afghan refugees took shelter in Pakistan's cities and in makeshift camps. But after the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the U.S. lost interest in the region. Afghanistan's war of liberation turned into a civil war, and the Pakistani government--led by Bhutto and her political rival Nawaz Sharif, who alternated in power--backed the Taliban, student warriors committed to a fundamentalist Islamic state.

When it ran Afghanistan, the Taliban provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda--which had its origins among those who had gone to the region to fight Soviet forces. Pakistani government support for the Taliban officially ended after 9/11, when Pervez Musharraf, an army general who had seized power in a 1999 coup, pledged to assist the U.S. war on terrorism. But not everyone was on board. Some in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency (ISI) played a double game, turning a blind eye when members of the Taliban leadership and al-Qaeda escaped to Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the border with Afghanistan. FATA's ungoverned spaces provided the ideal sanctuary for militant groups on the run. Musharraf made a halfhearted attempt, at Washington's behest, to stop the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda from waging insurgency across the border. But that only inflamed tensions; the Afghan militants turned their rage on his government, winning to their cause local Pakistanis with whom they have close ties. (The Pashtun ethnic group straddles the border.)

All this has combined to make the governability of Pakistan and the character of its latest leader matters of intense concern far from the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Al-Qaeda has "hundreds of training camps" scattered throughout the region, says a Western official in Pakistan. CIA director Michael Hayden has called FATA an al-Qaeda "safe haven" that presents a "clear and present danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan and to the West in general, and to the United States in particular." So the question becomes: How dangerous is Pakistan now--and does Zardari have what it takes to make it safer?

Playboy to President

Zardari's rise to Pakistan's Presidency reads like a Cinderella tale turned Mafia thriller. The son of a feudal landlord and cinema-house owner, Zardari married Bhutto, Pakistan's political princess, in 1987, when she was about to launch her political career. In time, Zardari became Bhutto's political partner, taking posts in her Cabinet and smoothing the ruffled egos the sometimes haughty Prime Minister left in her wake. "He was the fence mender," says Aftab Khan Sherpao, a veteran politician. "If someone [in parliament] had grievances, she sent Zardari in. He was the back channel. He knew how to build relationships."

Zardari always had a reputation for wheeling and dealing. When he was Investment Minister during Bhutto's second term, his alleged involvement in kickback scandals earned him the sobriquet "Mr. 10%." He spent 11 years in prison on charges of corruption, extortion and the murder of Bhutto's brother (a political rival), although he has never been convicted. In April he was finally acquitted of the murder charge. Pakistani governments led by both Bhutto's rival, Sharif, and Musharraf pursued money-laundering and corruption cases against Zardari in Britain, Spain and Switzerland. All charges were dropped last fall after a controversial amnesty deal brokered by Musharraf. Zardari maintains that the charges were politically motivated. Yet unease over his credibility lingers. A text-message joke making the rounds in Pakistan says there is no fear that as President, he will be on the take: "He has already stolen everything."