Who Do The Pakistani Taliban Threaten?

Via Juan Cole, Tony Karon has an article explaining that the Pakistan military doesn’t agree with the US political leadership about the extent of the Taliban threat. I thought this passage was interesting:

The military may also be more sanguine about the Taliban than Washington has been because the generals tend to view the country’s political establishment, most directly challenged by the militants’ gains, as corrupt and self-serving. The army, rather than the relatively weak political institutions, is the spine of the Pakistani state, and democracy has never been seen as a precondition to its survival. If the turmoil in civil society reaches a boiling point, the military, however reluctant its current leadership may be to seize power, can be reliably expected to take the political reins.

I have to say that I’m a bit skeptical of the “however reluctant its current leadership may be to seize power” bit of this. I can’t shake the feeling that part of the dynamic here is that the military knows that if it does an effective job of squashing the Taliban insurgency, the impact will be to strengthen the civilian government, whereas if the insurgency continues to gain ground the impact will be to make the United States more sympathetic to the idea of a new coup. For the past ten years, the pattern has been for the American government’s warmness to military rule in Pakistan to be proportional to its degree of alarm about Pakistani alarmism.