Tehreek-e-Taliban, the umbrella organization for Pakistan's multiple Taliban movements, seeks to spread its strict Deobandi interpretation of Islam to all of Pakistan. "They don't just want to control FATA [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where they are based], but want to control the entire country," says Ayesha Jalal, one of the foremost historians of Pakistan who recently wrote a book on the history of jihad in South Asia. The Taliban claims it fights in the name of Islam.

But if the Taliban is judged by actions and not words, their primary targets are ordinary Muslims. A Taliban suicide attack on the Wah army munitions facility in August killed 70 and injured over a hundred more. All those killed were ordinary, working Muslims, as were the people killed by a Taliban suicide bomber when he blew himself up at the casualty ward of a hospital in the city of Dera Ismail Khan on August 19. The Taliban said the attack was justified because the hospital was administering polio vaccinations, something it considers prohibited by Islam. The nearly weekly attacks on girls' schools — such as the more than 100 destroyed in Pakistan's northwestern and mountainous Swat district in the past 10 months — are justified in the same way.

Such acts against fellow Muslims seem unconscionable even to conservative Muslims not affiliated with the Taliban. "The people who planned the assassination attack on me are not Muslim," declared former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto after she survived the first attempt on her life in October last year. "No Muslim can attack a woman. No Muslim can attack innocent people." After the Wah blasts, Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani told parliament that "we cannot allow terrorists to challenge the writ of the government."

Yet the Taliban manages to retain the sympathy of many Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A major reason for this is the presence of foreign troops that do not appear to understand the dynamics of local tribal politics. Another is the insecurity that most civilians exposed to the conflict face. When foreign forces kill civilians, the Taliban is able to avoid responsibility for the atrocities it commits.

Long Line of Occupiers

Pakistan's political and religious leadership, while routinely condemning its violence, has generally avoided challenging the Taliban's credentials as a Muslim movement. Many leaders, like Jamiat-Ulema-Islami's Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, prefer to focus on deaths caused by Western forces in Pakistan's North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) and Afghanistan. The inescapable message is that the Taliban may not be loved, but the real criminals are foreign interlopers.

This double standard is partially explained by popular antipathy toward the involvement of Western armies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States and NATO follow in a long line of foreign armies that have claimed to bring order to the region but have instead killed many civilians while serving their own interests and failing to respect local mores.

U.S. and NATO attacks have increased in 2008, as have civilian casualties, and U.S. officials recently admitted that their forces conducted what may have been the first U.S. ground assault against the Taliban in Pakistan in early September. NATO forces also stand accused of taking part in the operation in which up to 20 civilians, including women and children, were killed.

Some Pakistanis believe the Taliban insurgency is the latest in a long line of anti-colonial militancy stretching back to the mid-19th-century uprisings against British rule. The Pakistan Army, in contrast, is seen as an agent of the United States. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf exacerbated this perception with his unquestioning support for U.S. intervention in the region. Under Musharraf, the United States established a massive air base near Quetta, just south of the NWFP, from which it launches airstrikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan with impunity.

Nor have people forgotten that Pakistan was the conduit for America's proxy war with the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. That war developed the infrastructure that the Taliban now uses to prosecute its war. Moreover, Pakistan's war with the Taliban in the NWFP has displaced up to 300,000 citizens. United States and NATO missile strikes have also displaced tens of thousands of people. This has helped nurture sympathy for the Taliban at a time when many Pakistanis feel besieged by the United States and India, an old rival that's developing greater regional power.

Another factor is that the conflict isn't merely between the Taliban and the armies of Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United States, and NATO. That conflict is but one strand of a complex web of conflicts that includes militant groups either supported or opposed by Pakistan's military establishment, and rival tribes involved in regional disputes that have been coopted into the wider conflict, such as the inter-tribal and sectarian clashes currently occurring in the Kurram Agency region of the NWFP.

The lack of clearly distinguishable friends and foes has made it difficult for both Pakistan's politicians and the general population to single out the Taliban for the atrocities it has committed. As a result, many in Pakistan live in denial of the existence and motives of Tehreek-e-Taliban. "There is no Tehreek-e-Taliban," says Asif, a musician from Lahore. "This is a civil war [but] they don't want to tell people that."

Others like Mahmoud, a Karachi rickshaw driver, are openly supportive of the Taliban. "They are holy warriors, true Muslims," he told me. To people like Mahmoud, the Wah suicide attacks were justified. The people killed or injured "deserved their fate for serving the interests of America and the Jews. The [Pakistan] Army has killed so many in [the NWFP] and in the Red Mosque [during a Pakistan Army siege that killed many hundreds including women and children]... according to our faith those who do not obey Islam are no longer Muslim and it is lawful to kill them."

Growing Understanding

But such sentiments don't go unchallenged. Many understand the Taliban as a violent, extremist organization whose targeting of girls' schools and civilians is inimical to the subcontinent's traditionally moderate Muslim traditions. "Islamic faith spread [in the subcontinent] through the Sufi tradition [of] inclusiveness, embracing local traditions and religious concepts," notes Ayesha Jalal, a respected Pakistani historian who recently wrote a book on the history of jihad in South Asia.

A large demonstration took place in Wah after the suicide attacks and shops closed the next day, also in protest. In several parts of the NWFP, people are forming armed squads to take on the Taliban. The tide may be starting to turn against the Taliban, much as it did for Islamic militants in Algeria during the 1990s.

Without adequate political leadership, eradicating sympathy for the Taliban may prove more difficult than eradicating their hideouts in frontier Pakistan. But so long as NATO and the United States continue unilateral strikes in Pakistan that kill civilians, the real battle — for hearts and minds — will be lost.