THERE are four major actors on the political stage of Pakistan as far as the war against terror is concerned Washington, the Pakistan Army, the Taliban and proto-Taliban groups, and the civilian ruling set-up including the PPP-led government in Islamabad and the ANP-led government in Peshawar.

Washington is the ultimate guardian of the status quo in terms of the nation-state system and the global economic structure. After 9/11, Washington adopted a two-pronged strategy. In Afghanistan — a state without a credible institutional apparatus at the national level to guarantee its own writ beyond Kabul — the US relied on Nato forces. In Pakistan, which has a meaningful strategic and diplomatic presence in the region and a viable state structure, the US has operated indirectly via the national security apparatus.

What is the American agenda in the region? The US considers Afghanistan, which nurtured Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as its first line of defence against challenges to its national security. It has shown full commitment to exercising substantive input in the war against terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its diplomatic vision has shifted from an Pakistan-India to an Af-Pak framework for the purposes of the current war.

The American agenda is shared by regional powers China and India. Both are apprehensive about the destabilising potential of the Taliban. Both would like Pakistan to rein in the terrorists on its soil. Further away, countries as different as the Central Asian Republics, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey support the war against terror. The regional agenda and the global agenda have merged.

Secondly, there was a sudden shift in the role of the Pakistan Army as the sponsor and patron of the Taliban in Afghanistan to one as an adversary in 2001-2002. This left pockets of support for the Taliban in the security apparatus, ranging from some retired generals to those military personnel who were involved in attacks on Gen Musharraf.

The army under Musharraf fought the Taliban in Fata and lost men and material. But Washington remained unconvinced about the whole-hearted commitment of the army to the anti-terror agenda. It continued to ask Pakistan to do more. The credibility and integrity of the intelligence community of Pakistan was questioned within and outside the country.

The Taliban found a fertile ground in Fata, which is not ruled through a modern state system operative elsewhere in the country. The area has had no civil bureaucracy, district courts or constitutional framework providing for human rights, civil liberties and monopoly of the state over the process of adjudication. A hundred years of modernisation of the state system in this part of South Asia has bypassed Fata whose political vision is based on the denial of history.

The February agreement with the Swat Taliban was condemned far and wide as a policy of appeasing the terrorists. Swat and its adjoining areas represent soft spots in the state system. Their merger in national life some four decades back was patchy and incomplete. Together with Fata, the ex-princedoms did not fully internalise and operationalise the legal-institutional framework of authority based on the Westminster model. The Taliban mobilised the Islamic revivalist instinct here.

Is the Taliban's support in society eroding? Politicians such as Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Imran Khan find themselves cornered for upholding the cause of the Taliban. Attacks on military and police installations, girls' schools, hotels and convoys of security personnel and the target killing of Maulana Naeemi by militants are weakening support for the latter.

Islamic parties including the Jamaat-i-Islami and others show a sense of bewilderment and cluelessness. They praise the Taliban agenda of establishing the Sharia. But, they find their stance vis-à-vis the institutional-constitutional edifice of the state, and morals and manners in general, including hostility against female education, embarrassing. Their voice against state policy on the Taliban has been dampened in recent days.

However, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan and Barelvi ulema in general have come out against the Taliban. They condemn what they see as the Taliban's projection of Islam as war. The desecration of holy shrines and the killing of a pir allegedly at the hands of the Taliban have alienated the ulema and their followers in the country.

With Washington as a strategic ally, the army as the strongest force in the country and the Taliban out to destroy the existing political order, the government is constrained to tightrope-walking. It has to wade through rampant anti-Americanism in society, persistent Bonapartism and both hard and soft Islamism.

The army operation in Swat has revealed the enormous strength, not weakness, of the Taliban. One wonders how the state allowed the amassing of arms, militant training, the mobilisation of raw youth for violent purposes and the infiltration of proto-Taliban elements into urban areas during the Musharraf years. The two sectors of education and media have spread insularity of vision and a mission-mantled worldview.

Will the government be able to give a civilian face to the operation in non-combat zones through the police by establishing a surveillance-investigation-regulation regime? Will it be able to transform the Islamic discourse from one of exclusion to inclusion, from war to peace and from community to humanity? Can it stop state sovereignty from being chipped away by the militants?

What the civilian ruling set-up needs is a profile of stability, determination, flexibility, broad coalition-building, good governance, good neighbourliness in the regional context and the goodwill of the public at home. It needs to undertake serious intellectual exercise and policy research to support its effort to overcome various crises. These are the challenges before civil society, the army, bureaucracy, political leadership, intelligentsia and the media.