Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

The grainy CCTV footage showing the escape of the Lahore killers has none of the drama of an action movie getaway, yet all the atmosphere of a Hitchcock film. Less than four minutes after blasting a tour by the Sri Lanka cricket team into carnage, the perpetrators are seen strolling calmly through the narrow back streets of Liberty market.

It is their nonchalance that is most chilling. One sequence shows a man arriving on a motorbike in a deserted street. Two others with guns slung over their shoulders mount the bike, which drives off. They look like men confident of not being caught.

Six policemen and a driver were killed while six players and two assistant coaches were wounded.

Even in a country increasingly inured to violence…there was outrage at both the audacity of the onslaught and its targeting of a cherished sport…

The slow reaction of the police, combined with the coolness of the assassins, led many to suspect an inside job. In previous terrorist attacks in Pakistan, the perpetrators appeared to have considerable intelligence about their targets. Car bombers have struck at army and police headquarters without hindrance…

“Zardari may wish to be rid of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, the LeT and other affiliated terrorist groups, but he cannot afford to be seen to cave in to western and Indian pressure”, said MJ Gohel, director of the Asia Pacific Foundation. “The terrorist infrastructure is being allowed to continue functioning with only cosmetic restrictions, whose main function is to impress the US. Yet until firm action is taken and training camps are closed down, the slow collapse of the Pakistani state will continue.”

In less than a year Zardari has lost control of much of the North West Frontier Province to the Pakistani Taliban. Militant groups have been openly fundraising, advertising in newspapers and collecting funds at government mosques.

All of this is being watched with dismay by the administration of President Barack Obama, which is starting to see Pakistan as even more dangerous than Afghanistan.

Three days after his inauguration in January, Obama held a national security council meeting on the region. According to Time magazine, his political aides were stunned by the deteriorating situation: “The general feeling was expressed by one person at the end who said, ‘Holy shit’.”

RTFA. There is much, much more.

Essentially, this article and analysis could have been written at the beginning of the neocon War on Terror. The situation in Pakistan was not this bad – then. Tens of billions of dollars later under the direction of the Bush-Cheney dangerous duo, the New American Century and all the other claptrap founded on bankrupt ideology – and this is what we have come to.