Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the growing convergence of Punjabi and tribal area-based militant groups in Pakistan. The relationship between these two geographically distinct militant groups is more than ideological — tribal militants and al Qaeda have money, training sites and sanctuaries, and suicide bombs, while Punjabi militants have logistical networks in major cities like Lahore to survey possible targets and safe-house bombers. As Bruce Reidel, a former CIA analyst and the head of President Obama’s Pakistan and Afghanistan policy review, put it, “You are seeing more of a coalescence of these militant groups… Connections that have always existed are becoming tighter and more public than they have in the past.”

As CAP Senior Fellow Brian Katulis and I noted at the end of March, Pakistani militants were more likely to penetrate deeper into a weak Pakistan than they were to conduct their own “surge” against additional American forces in Afghanistan. Using existing links, militants (some still sponsored by elements of the Pakistani security establishment) have mounted increasing attacks deep in Pakistan’s “settled” areas -– especially Punjab -– even before President Obama announced his new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

This more public alliance between militant groups has been driven not by a build-up of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or increased U.S. drone strikes in the tribal region but by former President Pervez Musharraf’s military assault on the vigilante Red Mosque compound in Islamabad in July 2007. It’s also a consequence of the myriad dysfunctions of the Pakistani state –- which include double games with militant groups, politicians concerned more with intrigue than national interests, and the overall inability to govern the country.

Most people in the upper echelons of the Pakistani state seem to prefer to look the other way as militants gobble up sections of the country outside the tribal areas -– President Asif Ali Zardari recently assented to imposing Islamic law in the Swat region, effectively turning that area over to militants. As a Punjab landlord told the Times, “The government is useless… They live happy, secure lives in Lahore. Their children study abroad. They only come here to contest elections.”

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Via Tom Ricks, a very interesting Dar al-Hayat interview with Ahmad Chalabi, in which Chalabi shares his views of President Bush and the strategic consequences of the Iraq invasion for Iran:

[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?

[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.

[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?

[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn’t mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam’s fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.

[Al-Hayat]: This happened?

[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.

[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?

[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani.

The idea that Iran has been the main beneficiary of the Iraq war isn’t particularly controversial any more — except, of course, among the war’s neoconservative advocates, who continue to insist that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and empowering Iraqi factions with longstanding close ties to Iran was a huge defeat for Iran. Incidentally, many of these people — Sen. John McCain and his adviser Randy Scheunemann among them — were also Chalabi’s biggest boosters.

Like Ricks, I’d be very interested to hear more about the “implicit agreement” that Chalabi asserts between the U.S. and Iran. Given what’s known now about Chalabi’s cooperation with Iran’s intelligence services, though, it’s pretty chilling to consider how close some of Chalabi’s marks came to taking the White House last November. Unfortunately, as shown by the continuing prominence of McCain, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocon fantasists, inadvertently aiding America’s enemies is no barrier to influence in American foreign policy, as long as one is always careful to err on the side of war, and meticulous about dressing one’s belligerent strategic stupidity in patriotic drag.