Hidden hands in Pakistan

Last week a car packed with explosives detonated outside a police station in Mardan, a rustic town in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP). A police officer and two civilians were killed and homes, stalls, shops and streets were blitzed with shrapnel. Tehrik-i-Taliban, or the Taliban Movement of Pakistan (PT), claimed the attack: revenge, said spokesman Maulvi Umar, for a Taliban fighter killed by the police in Mardan some weeks before.

Superficially, there was nothing unusual about the hit. Two hundred and fifty people have been killed in attacks in Pakistan in 2008, many of them bearing the signature of the PT. In Mardan alone 10 police stations have been rocketed. Yet the car bomb sent a shiver throughout the NWFP. It was the first act of violence in nearly a month. And it was the first since the formation of a new civilian government committed to dialogue with Pakistan's Islamic militants rather than repression.

More