Yeah, right, and the Iraqi and Afghan armies have been so brilliant on the field. The truth is that the terrorist strategy is natural to the Muslim because (though they will never admit it) bitter experience has taught them that they cannot cope with regular troops. Pakistan is a peculiar case: the army is the central institution of the country, in a way that it is in no other Muslim country - not even Turkey or Egypt - and this for two interconnected reasons. First, Pakistan is part of the former Indian Empire, and shares with India the basic historical experience of watching immense Indian armies torn apart again and again by British armies one-tenth their size. This historical shock, whose force never abated down the centuries, has shaped the minds of both countries, in different ways; it was especially significant since most of the time the victorious British armies were only officered by native Britons, and most of their soldiery was Indian. The lesson was burned into local memories, and meant that when two new states coalesced out of the abandoned Empire, they both adopted wholesale Western instintutions. IN India, it was the whole structure of a Western country, with federal democratic institutions, and - much against Hindu traditions - equality before the law. In Pakistan, it was the Army, with army and staff colleges, barracks, iron discipline, and all the peculiar features of western military life. And, second point, this army found itself facing a similar but vastly stronger army on the Indian side, against which it lost a number of wars. Purely in order to survive, the Pakistani army had to preserve its basically Western traditions. The trainees of the staff colleges at Islamabad and Rawalpindi know too much to presume that mere popular anger of the kind that makes mujaheddeen could stand a chance against disciplined and prepared Indian troops. However, beneath the army is an immense, undereducated populace, whose natural leadership is not the Army but the mullahs. It is for their own survival as much as to make trouble for opponents, that the Army has allowed thousands of mujaheddeen down the years to cross over into Kashmir and Afghanistan: this relieves the pressure against the Army from below, which would otherwise lead to civil war and even possibly to the collapse of Pakistan. It is typical of the absolutely peculiar position of Pakistan in the Muslim world that it has been the only country capable of successfully producing an atom bomb (we are still to see whether Iran will be able to, even with massive Russian help).