Analysts fear Pakistan could fall to extremists

More than any other terrorist attack in this volatile country, the devastating truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel over the weekend has presented government and military leaders here with a stark choice: Go all out against extremists or risk the nation’s collapse into chaos.

That is the growing consensus among many Pakistani analysts and commentators, who fear that without rapid, determined and ironfisted action by officials and security forces, this nuclear-armed land is in danger of becoming a failed state, with Islamic radicals in control.

On Monday, the government described just how close those militants may have come to dealing Pakistan an almost fatal blow. A senior official said that President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani and top Cabinet members were supposed to dine together at the Marriott on Saturday night -- but switched venues just before the bombing.

“At the eleventh hour, the president and prime minister decided that the venue would be the prime minister’s house,” Rehman Malik, the Interior Ministry’s top official, told reporters. “It saved the entire leadership.”

Malik did not explain what inspired the change in plans. A representative of the hotel later cast doubt on the statement, telling the Associated Press that there were no plans for a government dinner at the Marriott on Saturday.

Malik’s disclosure, if true, betrayed the alarming extent to which militants have beefed up their intelligence capabilities and upgraded their planning and operations accordingly. Local media reported that Gilani would hold an emergency meeting today to discuss tightening security to prevent more attacks like Saturday’s.

The suicide bombing of the Marriott, an icon of social and political wheeling and dealing here in the Pakistani capital, killed 53 people, including at least two Americans, and wounded more than 250.

The U.S. Central Command on Monday identified one of the slain Americans as Air Force Maj. Rodolfo I. Rodriguez, 34, of El Paso. The name of the other had not yet been released.

Robert S. Prucha, deputy director of public affairs for the Central Command, said a number of other members of the U.S. military were at the hotel and suffered minor scrapes and cuts. None required hospitalization, he said.

No verifiable claim of responsibility has surfaced, although a shadowy group called Fedayeen Islam told Al Arabiya television that it was behind the attack. From the ferocity and size of the bombing, suspicion has fallen on Al Qaeda and a movement known as the Pakistani Taliban.

The descent into violence and fear here has been sharp.

In a country where suicide bombings were relatively rare five years ago, more than 300 people have been killed in such attacks this year. What seemed at first to be a threat confined to the nation’s fringes, in the rugged and uncontrollable border and tribal areas, has now penetrated urban centers, including the very heart of this leafy, broad-avenued capital.

The violence gripping the nation continued Monday with the kidnapping of a top foreign diplomat in the city of Peshawar, in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

Abdul Khaliq Farahi, the Afghan consul general there, who was to become Kabul’s ambassador to Islamabad in the next few days, was abducted on his way home from the consulate Monday afternoon by gunmen who shot and killed his driver. No word has been received from the kidnappers, said Majnoon Gulab, the deputy Afghan ambassador.

In recent weeks, the Pakistani army has stepped up its campaign against militancy in mountainous areas near the border with Afghanistan, such as in the Bajaur region, and in the Swat valley. The military says it has inflicted severe losses on the extremists, including a dozen who were killed in Swat on Monday. At the same time, a suicide bombing killed eight people in the area.

The bombing of the Marriott may have been in retaliation for the military campaign, as well as a general strike against the government of Zardari, the newly elected president and widower of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Zardari had delivered his maiden address to lawmakers just hours before.

But he and his predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, have also shown a willingness to negotiate and declare truces with insurgents, perhaps in a nod to the many Pakistanis who denounce the government for targeting its own people and who view the crackdown as America’s proxy war.

The attack on the Marriott, most of whose victims were Pakistanis, and the fact that it may have been a mass assassination attempt ought to remove any doubt in the minds of the public and dissenting officials that the country is facing an existential threat, said analyst Mahmood Shah, a retired general who was head of security in the militant-ridden tribal areas.

“There is no more room for any wavering. There is no more time left,” Shah said. “These extremists want to capture power in Pakistan. . . . There shouldn’t be any soft-pedaling of this whole issue.”

Analysts say the government must create a comprehensive strategy for pacifying Pakistan’s tribal belt -- not just militarily, but with economic incentives and measures for installing a government in what is a largely lawless place.

“The military operation is not an end in itself. You seize territory, but you have to make sure you know what you want to achieve there,” said analyst Talat Masood, also a retired general. “As of now, there seems to be a lot of ambiguity as to what they want to achieve.

“Naturally, you want a political engagement with those who are prepared to work with the government, and you need to reestablish the writ of the state. Like in Bajaur, where we are fighting now: Are you genuinely doing that, or is it just talk?” Masood said. “It has to be sustained over a period of not days, months, but years.”

He and others acknowledge that opponents of striking hard against extremism have succeeded in portraying the fight as one of Washington’s making, carried out by an all-too-pliant Pakistani government. That sentiment can be heard not just in tea shops and living rooms, but also in the barracks, among Pakistan’s junior officers and troops.

“Their thinking is that this is an American war, at least some of them,” Masood said. “For the military, it’s a very difficult task to fight your own people. And for the military to fight counterinsurgency is the worst, because they’re not trained for that.”

The News, one of Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspapers, said in an editorial Monday: “We must wake up to the fact that these people come from amongst us; they target venues within the country and they kill their own countrymen.

“It is time we accepted this war is our own. . . . There must be a consensus across society about the need to act with unity and determination to save what still remains of our wounded country,” it said.

Just days into his presidency, Zardari is under pressure from all sides to try to make Pakistan more secure. Some voices still blame the government for working so closely with the United States and provoking a backlash from Islamic radicals; others accuse the government of dithering and not cracking down hard enough.

“The great fear is that Pakistan is past the point of no return when it comes to being able to cope with these threats from within,” said Stephen Cohen, an expert on South Asia at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “When you look at other countries with these kinds of movements, it’s a long battle, a 10- to 15-year battle.”

Zardari is to meet with President Bush in New York today for a previously scheduled talk on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

They are expected to discuss recent incursions by U.S. troops into Pakistan from Afghanistan, which Zardari and other officials say violate Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The bombing of the Marriott has cast a shadow over the meeting, and over all of Pakistan, which now must fully commit to stamping out extremism within its borders, said analyst Masood.

“It was a wake-up call for the [entire] country,” he said. “It was an extraordinary explosion, in the sense that it was so severe, and I have a feeling that if they haven’t even woken up after this, then God alone knows when they will.”

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henry.chu@latimes.com

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Times staff writer Julian E. Barnes in Washington contributed to this report.