ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the changing terms of the conflict for the Pakistani state as it became caught in a vice, one side of which being the suicide bombings and the other side the increasingly unilateral US. Although each of these methods of distributing violence sought to kill and destroy as their immediate aim, their second-order impacts were intended to intensify pressure on their respective targets. So relentless would the suicide bombing become that the armed groups sought to punish the Pakistani state for operating against them at US behest. And so frequent would the drone strikes become that, even if decapitation of the armed groups through the elimination of leadership figures of the Taliban and al-Qaeda were their principal aim, the coercive pressure exerted on limiting armed group freedom of action – and on cajoling the Pakistani state into action – were also noteworthy outcomes. And as the armed groups retaliated against US drone strikes by deploying suicide bombings against Pakistani targets, it was the Pakistani state and Pakistani people who were caught in the middle of the vice.
