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As the Pakistani Taliban steps up its retaliation against its erstwhile benefactor, the Pakistani state, Wednesday's suicide bombing in Lahore and Thursday's in Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan in the embattled Northwest, are harbingers of what promises to be a long and bloody summer.

Under the circumstances--an increasingly violent insurgency in a nuclear-armed nation--it's natural to fret about a weapon falling into fundamentalist hands. But Pakistan's significance goes beyond its (admittedly scary) status as a safe haven for al-Qaida and potential exporter of Armageddon. The world's second most populous Muslim nation is also a symbolic battleground in the broader war of ideas against radical Islam, the ideology that seeks to impose the medieval precepts of sharia law on every...