What for many - both within and without Pakistan - has long been feared as the nightmare scenario, appears to be coming to pass. The tail is wagging the dog, as Islamists once patronised by the state are coming back to challenge it.
Never far from the forefront of global concern, Pakistan was recently thrust back into the spotlight when Taliban militants took control of a region barely an hour's drive from the country's capital. The government tried mollifying them with a peace deal, enabling the Taliban to impose religious law in return for laying down arms. Religious law came, the Taliban kept their weapons, and the advance continued.
The pressures had been building for some time. After all, the Taliban movement, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, was born in Pakistan. Emerging from Afghan refugee camps - the word 'Taliban' is Pashto for 'students', reflecting the movement's origins in the schools set up in the camps housing Afghan refugees - the militant fighters were originally patronised by Pakistan. The latter saw them as a useful counterweight in its ongoing stand-off with India, since they could be used to apply leverage in Kabul.
However, after the Taliban provided shelter to Osama bin Laden, and after Osama in turn helped bring down the twin towers, Islamabad was forced to turn its back on the Taliban. Once North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces assisted northern Afghan rebels to oust the Taliban, the latter were pushed back to the south and west of Afghanistan.
Resumed battle with nato
They never disappeared, though. Nor did elements in the Pakistani security establishment stop patronising them. Equally, the then Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, in an apparent bid to shore up his regime by neutralising the secular opposition, chose not to oppose the Taliban's further retreat into Pakistan's borderlands with much vigour. The Islamist army were thus able to regroup, and to resume their battle against NATO, and the NATO-backed government of Hamid Karzai.
The election of US President Barack Obama appears to have altered the region's geopolitics. With the White House now reallocating armed forces from Iraq in order to concentrate on the fight in Afghanistan, some elements of the Taliban apparently decided to shore up their Pakistani bases. There are reports in the Pakistani press that Taliban commanders have taken refuge in southern cities, where their gangs have begun harassing women into observing their brand of law - the subtle Talibanisation so feared by secular and moderate Pakistanis.
Less subtle have been the overt challenges to the authority of the state in some parts of the north. A recent video of the Taliban flogging a woman in an area they control has alarmed many Pakistanis. This has provided a fillip to those elements in the military which are determined to reimpose the state's control.
Military resources divided
The problem faced by the military is that its resources are divided. Its troops are heavily committed to the Indian border, moreso since the recent Mumbai bombings (which some analysts suspect were orchestrated by Islamists precisely to take pressure off the Taliban). The US, meanwhile, watches the Taliban advance with trepidation: Pakistan, after all, has a nuclear arsenal, and the ultimate nightmare in the West is that it should fall into the hands of the Taliban's ally, al Qaeda.
Such a development is still a long way off, given the provisions in place to safeguard Pakistan's nuclear bombs. A more immediate risk is that the country's political and administrative establishment will continue to fragment, possibly leading to a military coup. This could give the Taliban more space in which to entrench itself.
Unquestionably, it is a nervous time for Pakistan.
John Rapley is president of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI), an independent think tank affiliated to the UWI, Mona. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.