US's Foundering War in Pakistan (AUSTRALIA)

The armed assault on Sri Lanka's cricket team in Lahore has been a brutal demonstration, if any more were needed, that the war on terrorism is devouring itself and the states that have been sucked into its slipstream.

Pakistan is both victim and protagonist of the conflict in Afghanistan, its western and northern fringes devastated by a US-driven counter-insurgency campaign, its heartlands wracked by growing violence and deepening poverty. The country shows every sign of slipping out of the control of its dysfunctional civilian government - and even the military that has held it together for 60 years.

Presumably, that was part of the intended message of the group that carried out Tuesday's attacks. But the outrage also fits a well-established pattern of attacks carried out in revenge for the army's devastation of the tribal areas on the Afghan border, where thousands have been killed and up to half a million people forced to flee from the fighting with the Pakistani Taliban.

Hostility to this onslaught has been inflamed by the recent revelation that US aerial drone attacks on supposed terrorist hideouts have been launched from a base in Pakistan itself, with the secret connivance of President Asif Zardari, as well as across the border from occupied Afghanistan.

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