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The bomb was far from the biggest seen on the North-West Frontier but it did its job well.
Placed in a water cooler, it ripped through the Nishtar Abad music market, sending shards of glass and splintered CDs in all directions.
"Miraculously, no one was killed," said Mohammed Azam, who was shopping for presents for the Muslim holiday of Eid this weekend. Twenty people were injured, three seriously, and a dozen shops gutted.
For the police chief of Peshawar, the dusty Pakistan city 65km from the Afghan border, it was clear who planted last week's bomb.
"We suspect the involvement of those people who in recent months had sent letters to the CD and video shops, warning them to shut their businesses, saying it is against Islam," Abdul Majid Marwat said.
The "Pakistan Taleban" - or one of the various groups claiming the name - had struck again. Within hours the debris was being cleared away and the blood wiped off the walls.
"This is the life we lead," said Azam. "We have no choice but to continue."
The Pakistan Taleban's campaigns go way beyond bombing music shops.
Just 80km south of Peshawar last week, a full-scale pitched battle, complete with air strikes and artillery barrages, raged between the Pakistani Army and local and international militants dug into fortified positions in remote tribal villages.
By the time a fragile calm had settled on the rocky hills and desiccated fields of Mir Ali, 50 soldiers, a 100 or so militants and around 100 civilians had died.
Given the inaccessibility of the battlefield and conflicting claims of the military and their opponents, accurate casualty figures are not available.
What is not in doubt is the scale of the fighting. It was a bloody week for everyone as half a dozen ragged conflicts raged across a stretch of land from the Indus River to the central highlands of Pakistan.
The number of Afghan civilians who have died in the fighting this year is already higher than that for any year since the vicious civil war that tore the country apart in the early'90s.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, analysts talk of an explosion of violence. Tensions were so high last week that when a gas cylinder exploded in an affluent suburb of Islamabad, already hit by a bloody series of suicide bombings, it was first thought to be yet another terrorist blast.
For some, the ongoing violence in southwest Asia is simple to explain: the Taleban, reconstituted after the defeat of 2001, and with the help of al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi, are battling their way back to power in Afghanistan and, perhaps worse, fast making progress towards seizing power in nuclear-capable Pakistan.
But the reality is far more complicated. It is hard to make sense of one of the most confusing conflicts of modern times, a war with no defined fronts, waged with tactics that range from those of the dynamite-throwing anarchists of the late 19th century to those of the Western Front trench stalemate in 1916, and sometimes to state-of-the-art "fourth generation" 21st-century warfare.
Across an area that stretches through Pakistani cities such as Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi, through Kabul and Kandahar, to remote villages and Nato bases in southern Afghanistan, it is possible to unpick the intricate detail of the battle for the strategic centre of the "War on Terror".
What emerges is a picture not of a single movement or insurgency called "the Taleban", but of a new state without formal borders or even a name, a state that is nothing more than a chaotic confederation of warlords' fiefdoms spanning one of the most critical parts of the world and with the potential to escalate into a very real presence - with devastating consequences for global security.
And this weekend, the "centre of the centre", as one Western official called it, was the small, scruffy town of Mir Ali.
In the lulls between fighting last week, soldiers and militants retrieved their dead. Among the corpses buried within hours according to Islamic custom were a couple of Arabs and several Uzbeks.
The find confirmed the worst fears of Western intelligence services. It has become increasingly obvious that bin Laden's al Qaeda group has been able to rebuild a version of the terrorist infrastructure that existed in Afghanistan in the late'90s.
Volunteers have travelled in a steady stream to training camps. They have included key members of the July 7 London bombing plot.
A new "high command", including a high proportion of Egyptians and Saudis, has taken on the task of directing strikes around the globe, and into Pakistan (where President Pervez Musharraf remains a key target), and providing technical and financial help to chosen allies in Afghanistan.
The training camps are "rudimentary", say Pakistani Government and Western intelligence sources, but despite steady losses - a missile fired from a Predator drone killed Abu Hamza Rabia, the al Qaeda number three, in a house in Mir Ali last November - there is no shortage of militants to fill the gaps.
"The number three position in al Qaeda, 'director of external operations', is one of the jobs with the shortest life expectancies in the world,' said a UK intelligence source. "But that does not stop people volunteering for it."
Equally troubling is the renewed activity of al Qaeda-affiliated groups such as the Uzbeks under Tahir Yuldashev, brutal commander of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and Pakistani militant groups that have moved into the hills after losing Islamabad's backing.
According to Brigadier Mehmud Shah, there are several hundred Uzbek fighters in and around Mir Ali, all set on killing as many Pakistani soldiers as possible. "In 2003, there were around 600 Uzbek fighters, now there are more than three times that figure," said Shah, a retired Pakistani officer who oversaw security on the frontier until last year. The influx has been fuelled by fierce repression in Uzbekistan itself, ruled by Stalinist dictator Islam Karimov.
Last month, a terrorist plot was uncovered in Germany after American intelligence intercepted emails from a breakaway faction of the IMU to German converts who had travelled to the North-West Frontier to be trained.
The increasing internationalisation of the militant presence in the Pakistani tribal areas recalls the worst days of the late '90s, when scores of different groups were based in Afghanistan, all plotting violence in the Middle East or the West.
Already, British intelligence experts are describing the Pakistani tribal areas as "the Grand Central Station" of modern Islamic militancy.
But again the situation is complex. In many parts of the border country, the Uzbeks are not welcome and have fought pitched battles with local tribes. An estimated 200 were killed in fighting between Pashtuns and "foreigners" in the south Waziristan agency this year.
But few doubt that the Uzbeks - and al Qaeda - have enough allies, enough respect and enough money to ensure a welcome in the hills around Miram Shah and Mir Ali.
Mir Ali is a ragged settlement of half a dozen villages grouped around a scruffy bazaar. Last week, Pakistani soldiers took heavy casualties as they tried to battle their way in.
Despite air strikes reducing dozens of the mud houses to dust and fierce fighting, they had made little progress by this weekend despite talk of a "major push" before the Eid festival. Refugees fleeing the area spoke of a "rain" of missiles and shells.
"We don't have any place to live," said Mohamed Anwar. "We have sent our children to other areas because we are scared that the bombing could start again."
WITH the fragile truce barely holding, renewed fighting is almost certain in the days that come.
Few observers were surprised at the lack of progress. Pakistan now has 101,000 troops in the semi-autonomous badlands along the frontier, but they face daunting obstacles.
Mir Ali is in the North Waziristan tribal agency, one of seven agencies stretching along the strategically crucial frontier area where the authority of the Pakistani Government is, under an agreement concluded by British imperial administrators anxious to pacify the truculent Pashtun tribes, constitutionally limited to the roads and a narrow strip either side just 9m wide. There is no tax collection, justice system or police force.
A second difficulty is the terrain. On both sides of the highly porous border, there are very few roads, high ridges provide vantage points and frequent gorges are perfect for ambushes.
As in the restive south and east of Afghanistan, the agencies are populated by Pashtun tribes for whom war has been a way of life for centuries.
"A Pashtun takes his Kalashnikov out with him like a Westerner takes his mobile phone," said Latif Afridi, a local tribal leader. "They learn to shoot when they learn to walk."
Inter-tribal violence is a continual backdrop to life on the frontier.
Last week, tribes west of Peshawar battled over rights to grazing, water and other scarce resources with mortars and machineguns, oblivious to the global conflict around them.
Finally, there is Islam. The radical new ideology of Middle Eastern militants such as bin Laden has spread among the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing a new language and justification for age-old resentments against central authority, buttressed by new ideas about "the global attack on Islam by the West" and a powerful call to "jihad".
One powerful factor has been the huge growth of the hardline Deobandi traditionalist school of Islam.
With tribal leaders losing their authority in the new radicalised environment, the clerics are more influential than ever.
"At the moment it is the mullah and the talib [religious student] who are in charge," said Professor Zia Ullah, of Peshawar University.
It is these mullahs, whose religious education is often minimal, who are forming the private militias labelled "the Pakistan Taleban".
In fact, they are little more than a fractious confederation of mini-states run by warlords. Together they have succeeded in expelling almost all representatives of any government authority from their territory.
It was this fragmented, chaotic, embryonic state's soldiers that were fighting so hard at Mir Ali last week.
-Observer
