The Pakistan Test

Islamabad, Pakistan

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

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Children in a school near Islamabad funded by Developments in Literacy, a U.S.-based aid group.

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Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

A government-run school in southern Punjab meets under a tree, with the only teacher who showed up that day.

Barack Obama�s most difficult international test in the next year will very likely be here in Pakistan. A country with 170 million people and up to 60 nuclear weapons may be collapsing.

Reporting in Pakistan is scarier than it has ever been. The major city of Peshawar is now controlled in part by the Taliban, and this month alone in the area an American aid worker was shot dead, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped, a Japanese journalist shot and American humvees stolen from a NATO convoy to Afghanistan.

I�ve been coming to Pakistan for 26 years, ever since I hid on the tops of buses to sneak into tribal areas as a backpacking university student, and I�ve never found Pakistanis so gloomy. Some worry that militants, nurtured by illiteracy and a failed education system, will overrun the country or that the nation will break apart. I�m not quite that pessimistic, but it�s very likely that the next major terror attack in the West is being planned by extremists here in Pakistan.

�There is real fear about the future,� notes Ahmed Rashid, whose excellent new book on Pakistan and Afghanistan is appropriately titled �Descent Into Chaos.�

The United States has squandered more than $10 billion on Pakistan since 9/11, and Pakistani intelligence agencies seem to have rerouted some of that to Taliban extremists. American forces periodically strike militants in the tribal areas, but people from those areas overwhelmingly tell me that these strikes just antagonize tribal leaders and make them more supportive of the Taliban.