Even though Pakistan boasts a fast-growing middle class and many second- and even first-world accoutrements, there are huge parts of the country where local chiefs run things, generally along medieval lines. The government in Islamabad gets to claim the area for the purposes of map-making, and that’s about all; its armed forces enter the region, a mass of high mountains, deep valleys and caves, at their peril. It’s a bad political situation that’s largely the consequence of a bad geographical situation, especially in that the area borders southern and eastern Afghanistan.

This, naturally, is the part of Pakistan where the Taliban and al-Qaida holed up when the United States and a NATO coalition kicked them out of Afghanistan in 2002. It’s probably where Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have been hunkered down since, launching attacks on American, other NATO forces and Afghan troops and probably planning terror atrocities in the United States and Europe and wherever else satanic forces are at large.

But now, with the weak democratically elected government that came into power in Pakistan earlier this year following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, in December, things are coming to a head. Pakistan’s army and security services, which are strongly influenced by the Islamists, are more restive than they were before Pakistan’s president, former army commander Pervez Musharraf, had his power dramatically reduced, and increasingly balk at deploying troops in the tribal regions, much less cooperating with American forces. Last month, Pakistan’s army accused U.S. forces of killing 11 Pakistani troops. The Pentagon released aerial footage showing that the Americans were under attack by small arms and rocket-propelled grenades from Pakistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, fed up by the attacks into his country from Pakistan, has threatened to send troops across the border.

The financially strapped government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is trying to lower the heat along the border with Afghanistan by offering the latter economic-development aid, but with the recent surge in fuel prices, that is unlikely to produce a quick turn-around. Indeed, a deteriorating economic situation will probably put Pakistan’s fragile coalition under increasing strain, in which case it could return to military rule.

So the battle seems to ineluctably turn toward nuclear-armed Pakistan, or the part of it that Pakistan can’t control.