The Moment

For seemingly forever, Pakistan has been a state failing in myriad ways. Yet even by its ever treacherous standards, what has occurred over a very bloody recent week is depressing. Bombs in bazaars, assaults on the army — whether you are protected (soldiers) or not (shoppers), the militants are declaring, We can get at you. It's as if the country is becoming the hell Iraq was at its worst. The devil is not in the details — al-Qaeda's involvement, where the extremists are, how to retaliate. It's in Islamabad's broad, historical abdication of any government's most essential responsibility: taking care of its own people. A good — nay, great — start would be to strengthen secular schools, so that education is not hijacked by those madrasahs valuing reckless faith over studied reason and mutating misguided youths into mindless fanatics. Many of those leaders were created by a military establishment to harass India. But today, the real enemy is within, a radicalism that, like Frankenstein's monster, has turned on its former patron. What they once sowed, Pakistanis are now — tragically and shamefully — having to reap.

Read "Peshawar: More and More, A City Under Siege."

See TIME's photo essay "Bomb Blast Hits Peshawar Hotel."