The war against terror is an everyday affair

Peshawar: A decade ago, Peshawar's bomb squad had it pretty easy. Occasionally, one of its 20 members would be dispatched to a cornfield to defuse a mine planted by a villager who was feuding with his neighbour. Bombs were small and crude; the only tools an officer needed were pliers and a roll of electrical tape. Because their budget was minuscule, the officers travelled by taxi.

Today, the squad careens through week after week of carnage and peril in this volatile city near the Afghan border. Its strength has grown to 113 members. Nine have died in the line of duty. At least five others have been maimed.

"Everything changed drastically after 9/11," said Khan Zada, a veteran of 17 years. "Now we're on the go all of the time."

Neither the men who carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States nor any of Al Qaida's top leaders were from Pakistan. But much as 9/11 changed the way America viewed the world, it also cut deeply into Pakistan's collective psyche.

Pakistanis sum it up with a simple maxim: In Pakistan, they say, every day is 9/11. Relations with the US have for decades been tainted by mutual mistrust.

In the days after the September 11 attacks, then-president Pervez Musharraf faced an ultimatum from Washington to cooperate in the drive to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden and oust the Al Qaida leader's Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. As Pakistan began helping Washington's campaign against the militants, it became a target itself.

In cooperation with the US, Pakistan captured Ramzi Binalshibh, a planner of the 9/11 attacks, in September 2002. Six months later, Inter-Services Intelligence arrested mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad.

Meanwhile, Bin Laden disappeared in Pakistan, limiting himself to increasingly rare pronouncements until May, when Navy SEALs landed in his Abbottabad compound and killed him. And Pakistan started paying a heavy price.

Before 9/11, Pakistan had suffered just one suicide bombing — a 1995 attack on the Egyptian Embassy in the capital, Islamabad, that killed 15 people. In the last decade, suicide bombers have struck Pakistani targets more than 290 times, killing at least 4,600 people and injuring 10,000.

The country averaged nearly six terrorist attacks of various kinds each day in 2010, according to a report by the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. A country that had regarded suicide bombs as a faraway problem suddenly found itself in the market for bomb disposal armour, bomb-sniffing dogs and blast walls.

Resentment toward the US has grown. Pakistanis blame the United States for much of what has gone wrong in their country: the rise in terrorist attacks, the deaths of soldiers battling militants in the tribal areas, the country's economic tailspin.

Many are incensed by Washington's campaign of drone strikes against militants in the tribal areas.

Anger boiled over this year with the arrest and subsequent release of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistani men he believed were trying to rob him. The case reinforced long-held beliefs that the country was crawling with American intelligence agents aiming to destabilise it.

For Pakistanis, said Cyril Almeida, a leading Pakistani columnist, "it was easy to connect the dots. 9/11 happened, America invaded Afghanistan, and Pakistan went to hell. That's the most common narrative that's offered."

Although it was Al Qaida and its allies that nurtured the use of suicide bombing here, the military's policy of clamping down on some militant groups while coddling others stoked the proliferation of violence.

The government's inability to establish the rule of law in the tribal areas ensures they remain a breeding ground for militancy.