Armageddon in Islamabad.

• Author: Riedel, Bruce
• Position: Islamabad, Pakistan

In December 2007 Benazir Bhutto said, "I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years." Before this interview could even be published she was murdered, most likely by the Pakistani Taliban, an al-Qaeda ally. Benazir's words now look all too accurate. A jihadist victory in Pakistan, meaning the takeover of the nation by a militant Sunni movement led by the Taliban, would have devastating consequences. It would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror. Pakistan as an Islamic-extremist safe haven would bolster al-Qaeda's capabilities tenfold. The jihadist threat bred in Afghanistan would be a cakewalk in comparison. The old Afghan sanctuary was remote, landlocked and weak; a new one in Pakistan would be in the Islamic mainstream with a modern communications and transportation infrastructure linking it to the world. The threat would be almost unfathomable. The implications would be literally felt around the globe. American options for dealing with such a state would be limited and costly.

The growing strength of the Taliban in Pakistan has raised the serious possibility of a jihadist takeover of the country. Even with the army's reluctant efforts in areas like the Swat Valley and sporadic popular revulsion with Taliban violence, at heart the country is unstable. A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable, but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future. This essay presumes (though does not predict) an Islamic-militant victory in Pakistan, examining how the country's creation of and collusion with extremist groups has left Islamabad vulnerable to an Islamist coup.

The origins of today's crisis of course lie in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The modern global jihad began in the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan's frontier lands along the one-thousand-five-hundred-mile border between the two countries. Volunteers from across the Islamic world came to fight with the Afghans. According to a senior Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) commander at the time, the ISI trained eighty thousand fighters from forty-three countries.

Yet, this is not just about the fighters recruited, trained and radicalized by that battle. It is also a story of the "Islamization" of Pakistan's society--an Islamization that was supported by Pakistan's own president, Zia ul-Haq, and was used not only to fight the Red Army but also to create a warring corps that could violently enforce Islamabad's interests. And those interests lie more with defeating India than with controlling Kabul.

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Zia predictably saw the Soviet invasion as part of a plot between Moscow and New Delhi to destroy Pakistan. He quietly began working with the CIA to help the mujahideen; while at home, Zia began the transition of the country from the soft-Muslim, even almost-secular, state of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of modern-day Pakistan, to a more fundamentalist Islam. The country became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the army became an instrument of jihad and the politics of Pakistan became Islamized. Zia, the hit of Washington, was feted in the White House. His repressive policies inside Pakistan, including harsh Islamic punishments; his immense expansion of the role of the ISI into domestic spying; and his systematic Islamization of Pakistani life went ignored. So too did the growth of a Kalashnikov culture in the western badlands and the breakdown of traditional order as millions of Afghan refugees poured into the country.

Over the objections of the more cautious professionals in the CIA, the United States provided Zia and the Pakistani intelligence service vast amounts of money and weapons. The Saudis became equal partners in the project, bringing even-more money, their Wahhabi Islamic faith and young volunteers like Osama bin Laden to the war effort. Thus was the groundwork laid for a radicalized and well-armed Pakistani state.

Once the Soviets were defeated, Pakistan's army and its ISI focused their sights back on their primary enemy--India. Employing the terror tactics and weaponry they acquired on the battlefields of Afghanistan, they went on to support an insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, returning to help the Taliban take over most of Afghanistan a few years later. Finally, in the late 1990s they created terror groups based in the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab, like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JEM), to take the war against their mortal enemy deep into India itself. Supporting asymmetric warfare is a tool to fight New Delhi. With an officer corps increasingly sympathetic to jihad, alliances with extremists were and are a natural fit.

And so Zia had helped create a fighting force that would become increasingly hard to control, let alone roll back. His successors found this out quickly enough. After Zia's death, Pakistani politics came to revolve around a struggle between Ms. Bhutto and her archrival Nawaz Sharif. Neither was competent as a manager of the nation. Both were mired in corruption. Neither controlled the army or the ISI, which went on to build a state within the state and engage in creating a host of private terrorist armies to fight India and gain control of Afghanistan.

Because of this the Pakistani jihadists were inside Afghanistan and part and parcel of the Taliban problem at the time of 9/11. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf, an enthusiastic supporter of the struggle against India, had come to power in a military coup that overthrew Sharif. As a member of the army, he could in theory better control the rogue elements of the state, but in...