The daunting, dusty road that winds up and over the Khyber Pass is only marginally more hospitable than it was a century-and-a-half ago when British troops first penetrated the gateway to Afghanistan.

The surface has certainly improved. Local people call the route from Peshawar, in Pakistan’s northwestern borderlands, to Torkham on the Afghan frontier, the metal road. And some of the narrowest gullies and ravines, notorious in the past for ambushes, have been bridged and widened.

The Khyber Pass roadway now represents a vital commercial link between newly democratic Afghanistan and the outside world. Lumbering, gaudily decorated trucks slowly negotiating the gradients towards Jalalabad are the ungainly symbols of this new era. The plaques set in the stonewalls of the Khyber canyons, commemorating the passing of British regiments such as the Leicestershires and the Cheshires, are the eloquent, remaindered tokens of long-buried empire.

But if times have changed, military thinking and military caution have not. The Khyber is still heavily guarded. Pakistani army camps and positions are ubiquitous and unmissable. At Michni Post, at the head of the Pass, soldiers of the Khyber Rifles, a regiment first raised by the British in 1878 and now supporting Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, survey the Afghan border from numerous fixed, elevated positions. With the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan now a distant memory, and nearly five years after the US-led invasion to rid the country of Al Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban comforters, the threat confronting the Pakistani guardians of the Khyber no longer emanates solely from the sunlit valleys beyond the border. Instead, it is increasingly to be found inside Pakistan itself, in the tribal districts and agencies running along the border north and south of the Pass.

These wild, unruly lands are known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The British never conquered them. They have never formed a fully integrated part of Pakistan. But in 2003, spurred on by American pressure to end their use as safe havens by Al Qaeda and Taliban elements, the Pakistani government of General Pervez Musharraf sent in the troops.

An estimated 80,000 soldiers are now attempting to bring law and order to lands where such a concept is an alien and deeply objectionable idea. Violent resistance to their presence and their mission has become an everyday occurrence. And the struggle has given rise to a new phenomenon — what Musharraf described last week as the “Talibanisation” of the tribal areas.

The fundamental Islamist ideas and value systems of the Afghan Talibs are taking root inside Pakistan and are showing signs of spreading beyond the FATA to the so-called settled areas. Meanwhile, Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked attacks on British and US forces inside Afghanistan but propelled from the Pakistan side are on the increase. Western Pakistan, it appears, has become home to an unholy alliance of holy warriors fighting on two fronts.

In an interview published at the end of April, Haji Omar, a self-described Pakistani Taliban leader in Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal region, said he and his followers would not rest until Western soldiers had been driven out from Afghanistan. But Pakistani army efforts to halt cross-border operations have been criticised by the Americans and Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai as inadequate. At the same time, they have aroused strong domestic opposition inside Pakistan, where leading religious figures have accused General Musharraf of waging war on his own people. Anger was particularly acute following a US Predator drone attack on a supposed Al Qaeda target inside Pakistan in January, in which more than a dozen villagers were killed.

With the Pakistan military buffeted on all sides, the violence has appeared to intensify of late, particularly in North Waziristan where the militants for alleged collaboration have killed more than 100 civilians. Pakistani troops and police are regularly targeted. An estimated 324 militants and 56 soldiers have died there since last July, most in the past two months.

General Shaukat Sultan, spokesman for Pakistan’s military, said the hierarchy of Al Qaeda had been broken and predicted that local Taliban would be subdued, too. But Pakistani sources conceded that as long as the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri were at large in or around the conflict zones on either side of the frontier, and as long as Iraq, Palestine and other issues continued to stoke the fires of jihadism, it would be difficult to staunch the spread of extremist and fundamentalist ideas.

In sum, this battle may yet have years to run, and has the potential to destabilise Pakistan as a whole. As so often in the past, keeping a firm grip on the forbidding Khyber Pass, a key element in this ungovernable battlefield, may once again prove crucial to the final outcome on both sides of the border. — The Guardian