Day before yesterday, there were heart-rending scenes in Kohistan district of Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. Gunmen stopped a convoy of buses, ordered selected passengers to get off and then killed 16 of them. The victims were from the minority Shia community .

Days earlier, there was another sectarian attack , in Kurram agency of Fata , that killed 26 Shias. Days before that, there was another . In fact, hardly a month passes in Pakistan without sectarian massacres. Sane people in Pakistan say the real threat to the country's social fabric does not come from India, Afghanistan, the US or the army's grip over the country's affairs.

It comes from the ideology of hate propagated freely by religious extremists. After successfully banishing Hindus, Christians and Ahmadis from mainstream society, it is now the turn of the Shias. Sectarian clashes have killed thousands of Pakistanis since 1979, as the theological differences between Shias and Sunnis have been transformed into a full-blown war.

In the 1980s, the Pakistani state had essentially allowed Wahabbi Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran to fight a proxy war on its territory. But from 1990, the tide turned against the Shias as Sunni radical thugs got tacit state support to expand their reach and resources.

The first organised sectarian agitation that engulfed the country was the movement against the Ahmadi community in 1953 led by the Jamaat-e-Islami and Majlis Khatm-e-Nabuwwat , a Sunni vigilante group. The Ahmadi issue remained dormant until 1974, when the 'progressive-minded socialist' Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's government declared the Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority.

Bhutto's appeasement of the religious right was a dud in political terms. The same religious forces rallied against Bhutto's 'anti-Islamic' rule in 1977 amidst cries of 'Nizam-e-Mustafa' . Enter Gen Zia ul Haq's military dictatorship, and the country fell into a benighted era of an ideological warrior state.

Some say Gen Zia, the selfproclaimed 'Soldier of Islam' , even encouraged the bloodshed by allowing the proliferation of madrasas, which preach a narrow and violent strand of Islam, with little government oversight. Two events that shook the world in 1979 - the Islamic revolution in Iran and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - had profound implications for Pakistan .

The clergy coup in Iran catalysed Shia activism in Pakistan, thanks to Ayatollah Khomeini's enthusiasm to export the revolution. Pakistan's support, as a frontline ally of the US, of the mujahideen and foreign Wahhabi elements fighting the Red Army strengthened the Sunni extremist demand for declaring Shias non-Muslims .

Sectarian strife is the price Pakistan had to pay for its strategic follies of attempting to proxyrule Afghanistan and bleeding India in Kashmir. In the 1980s, the Shia-Sunni violence became endemic in tribal areas.

In Parachinar and Hangu, areas bordering Afghanistan, sectarian strife assumed the form of a virtual tribal civil war over time, with "free use of missiles, mortars and rocket launchers" (according a report in Newsline, August 2001).