Maurice: I'm a trainee potenex For quite some time I’ve been saying in various places that in Pakistan there are several centres of power – the civilian government, the army, the intelligence, and the terrorist outfits (for whom Zardari invented the phrase ‘non-state actors’). Surely I am not revealing a state secret if I say, as Manmohan Singh has just said too, that Pakistan remains the epicentre of terrorism. For about 25 years post-Zia governments in Pakistan have been using terrorism as an instrument of state policy through the army and the intelligence. In short, the foursome have been all pulling in the same direction, whether it was Afghanistan, Kashmir, or the rest of India. It is possible to concede that lately some of the terrorists are not quite under the control of their handlers (the army and the intelligence). But still quite a large number of terrorists remain within the control of the army and the intelligence. It is hopeless for Nawaz Sharif to pretend, then, that 40,000 Pakistani lives have been lost to terrorism. If that many lives have been lost, then most of them would have been targets of Pakistan’s home-grown terrorists. Terrorism has been a tiger that Pakistan has been riding for 25 years and now when Pakistan perhaps wants to dismount the tiger is turning on its erstwhile rider. Lots of people, including yours truly, have been saying for an age that in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy Pakistan was riding a tige