As Pakistani military intelligence chief General Mahmood Ahmed left his first long session with Taleban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar empty-handed, the Pakistan Army close to the Afghanistan border reported up to 25,000 Taleban forces mustering there. Their weapons - including, it was claimed, Soviet-era Scud missiles - are trained on Pakistan.
Last weekend, the Taleban's ambassador to Pakistan told reporters that "if any neighbouring country gave territorial or air space to the US against our land, it would draw us into an imposed war ... The Mujahideen would have to enter the territory of such a country".
Last night, Pakistan was bracing itself for the first war in its 54-year history against a foe other than India.
It is incorrect to say that Pakistan is not ready for this. Peshawar, the city at the head of the Khyber Pass, is dominated by a hulking Raj-era fortress, built as a bulwark against marauding Afghans.
The pass bristles with military installations, and the military cantonment in the city itself sprawls for kilometres. "Ever since independence," a Pakistani commentator wrote at the weekend, "Pakistan has had an Afghan headache."
The Army has been standing by in such numbers to make sure the headache never turns into something more life-threatening.
But if it comes, this will be an appallingly difficult war for Pakistan to fight. With India, the game has always been clear: the loyalties of the combatants sharply etched, the borders clearly marked.
Going into a war against the Taleban, by contrast, means opening several fronts at the same time. And only one of them could be drawn on a map. The obvious front consists of the rocky hills around the Torkham border crossing at the foot of the Khyber Pass, and the other passes, easier or more arduous, up and down the 2500km length of the Afghan border, which is porous and impossible to fence.
A second, impalpable front consists of the lawless tribal lands near this border, ruled by autonomous Pushtun tribes such as the Affridis, who share much in the way of language and culture with the Taleban, and who have never accepted the authority of the Pakistan state.
In the forbidding canyons of Pakistan's Wild East, artisans working in primitive workshops turn out thousands of meticulously crafted firearms every year, including copies of Kalashnikov assault rifles, Berretta shotguns and Chinese pistols.
Tribes here, as in the Wild West, equate freedom with the right to carry arms, and have fought off Pakistan Government attempts to strip them of their weapons. Their home terrain is ideal for guerrilla warfare.
These are the conventional enemies that Pakistan must now prepare itself to fight. But far more likely to keep President Pervez Musharraf awake at night is the third front which is about to open up, which exists not in a particular stretch of land but in the hearts and minds of the large and growing number of Pakistanis who can be characterised as Islamic militants.
This hidden, numberless force is Pakistan's real problem, just as it is America's. It is the deep source of the hatred and contempt spent so murderously in America last week.
In trying to combat it, Musharraf is up against just as challenging a conundrum as President George W. Bush. The Taleban will be invading or defending territory and can be confronted like any conventional enemy.
If Pushtuns up and down the border start waging guerrilla war, that, too, can be addressed in ways that are familiar. But the difficulty with Musharraf's third enemy is that the Islamic warriors are everywhere and nowhere at once.
The Islamists of Jamaat-i-Islami, Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the numerous other jihadi (holy war) groups based in Pakistan are not interested in soil as such.
Their thoughts, like those of all the most frightening and formidable enemies (such as the Japanese in the Second World War, for example) are exclusively on higher things: on doing the will of Allah, on going to heaven, on doing what is in their power to destroy the power of Satan, on martyrdom.
And in the name of these noble goals they are capable of wreaking terrorist mayhem in Pakistan.
Yesterday in Lahore the newly formed Afghan Defence Council, consisting of 50 jihadi organisations and politicians and generals who share their convictions, met for several hours to discuss their strategy in the current crisis.
They lack mass, active popular support; this is not an Iranian-type revolution in the making.
Usually they are divided against each other, and none possesses a charismatic leader to pose a serious challenge to the leaders of the established political parties.
But numbers, as we learned last Wednesday, are not of the essence. What is essential is righteous conviction and a desire for martyrdom in the cause. This is the enemy in Pakistan's midst, just as it is the enemy in America's midst.
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