Pakistan's capital Islamabad presents a disconcerting contrast: a planned city with trees and blocks of comfy one story houses, while underneath fear grows of the spreading power of Islamists who, in this past week, took strides towards creating an Islamist state in a country with nuclear weapons.

In the tourist valley of Swat, around 100 miles from the capital, a Muslim cleric, empowered by a supine Pakistani parliament, declared that the whole democratic system had to go to be replaced by Islamic law. Meantime, as legislators and political leaders here fiddle, civil society activists sit in their homes and talk fearfully, many afraid to be quoted, of how they believe  country's intelligence agencies are linked to themilitants.

Attempting to meet a political figure in the Serena Hotel, the main upscale refuge for foreigners (and too pricey and posh for an Inqy writer), one has to go through an astonishing series of car checks and body checks. That's because the other expat watering hole, the Marriott, was blown up by a truck bomb last year. Sitting in the SErena's garden one could pretend that all was well, until the political figure, again remaining nameless, said Pakistan was facing a threat that was a matter "of life and death."