As the Taliban, its Afghan detachments swelling with local jihadists, penetrates deeper into an apparently-collapsing Pakistan, politicians and media around the world, amid visible paralysis, are "rediscovering" the brutality of which the South Asian radical Islamists are capable. As with other varieties of the same fanatical ideology, many foreigners appear shocked at the bloody atrocities wreaked by the zealots; yet we hear from the Obama administration confused claims that Taliban "moderates" may somehow be separated from the diehards and rallied to the side of the U.S.-allied regime in Islamabad.
But like their predecessors in the global Islamist upheaval--the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979, the Saudi Wahhabi milieu from which al Qaeda emerged, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood--the Taliban mainly elicits Western guesswork and groping at a strategic response, rather than historical reflection and hard analysis. This failure is aggravated by presentiments of the horrors that may come if Pakistan falls. Terror terrorizes, after all.
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