Like the Wild, Wild West. Plus Al-Qaeda.

But as politicians seek some rapprochement with the Taliban, could the public be getting fed up? Just a week after the elections, another wave of bombings linked to the Taliban hit the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, including an attack in Lahore that killed more than 40. The victims weren't policemen or soldiers in South Waziristan, just ordinary people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"The crescendo of local violence has been a bad tactic on the part of the extremists," says Bob Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad and former head of the agency's counterterrorism center. "The counterinsurgency is now being aided by the cruelty of the enemy; they are their own worst enemy." According to a recent poll by the anti-terrorism organization Terror Free Tomorrow, Pakistani support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda has fallen to all-time lows of 18 and 19 percent, respectively -- half what it was in a similar survey taken last summer.

The United States may already be exploiting these sentiments. Recent missile strikes in the FATA killed a number of high-ranking foreign militants and caused little collateral damage. Such a marked improvement in accuracy is the result of better intelligence, gathered by capitalizing on inter-tribal dissent to lure informers.

And the Pentagon hopes to re-create an "Anbar Awakening" in the FATA. Anbar is the Sunni-dominated province in western Iraq where tribal leaders ditched al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with the U.S. military in 2006. The day after the bombing of the tribal meeting in Darra, I e-mailed a senior U.S. Army officer who's intimately familiar with the Anbar Awakening. I suggested that the tribal chiefs, under attack from all sides, would be hard-pressed to unite against the militants anytime soon. Based on his time in Iraq, he replied, "I would argue that attacks like yesterday's will only make the desire to organize against [al-Qaeda] and the Taliban more intense. Believe me, the murder of tribal leaders in Anbar was the impetus to the Awakening."

But for now, few elders dare to speak publicly against the militants, and even fewer would risk relying on the Pakistani army to guarantee their security if they did "turn." (Last fall, when a pro-Taliban cleric used his weekly sermons to merely criticize suicide attacks, he was shot and killed.)

And Pashtuns themselves admit that they can make for fickle strategic partners. The hashish dealers in Darra who were earlier driven out of business by the Taliban could just as easily be bankrolling them as fighting them tomorrow.

Last year, a man in Peshawar explained to me why the United States' efforts to subdue Afghanistan were faltering. "You thought Pashtuns were for sale, but you misjudged," he said, smiling. "We are only for rent."

nickschmidle@yahoo.com

Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is writing a book about Pakistan, where he lived from 2006 to January 2008.