David et al:
Pakistan since 1947 has been on again, off again in efforts to subdue and rule the northern areas of Pakistan, which is heavily Pakhtun peoples, predominently Sunni.
While non-Pakhtuns are also majority Sunni elsewhere in Pakistan, what I get off line in direct one on one e-mails are hopes that the Pak Army will stay the course,which it has never, ever done in all it's flip flop history, always bailing out on pretext of India threats, or Kashmir mess, or both, sheer stupidity which the people of Pakistan even today tend to swallow as if it were true...which it is not.
One historial footnote: It was in about 1964/65 when the more radical mullahs started to push into the NWFP their efforts to push out all other faith systems except a more radical version of Sunni Islam....even though there were and still are pockets of ####es in the northern areas, too.
The allegations of "terrorists" having been created by the 1980s Afghanistan war with the old USSR has some validity in that refugee camps of over 7 million Afghans did open up inside Northern Pakistan starting in the 1980s during that war and now a couple of generations of hopeless, poorly educated, desperate for work or a vocation refugees inside Pakistan make a good recruiting ground for both the Taliban and al Qaida.
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