ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - In a country rife with extremism and anti-American rage, officials here not only fear new terrorist acts - they expect them.
After a suicide assault on May 8 in Karachi that killed 11 French workers and three others, Pakistani intelligence officials told President Pervez Musharraf that the country's most militant Islamic groups, including the remnants of al-Qaida, had agreed to join forces to launch fresh attacks against American targets.
The intelligence officials told Musharraf, the military leader who has waged an uncertain campaign to neutralize the country's Islamic extremists, that the survivors planned to stage another suicide bombing as an encore to the attack on May 8.
With yesterday's deadly strike against the American Consulate in Karachi, the prediction of Pakistani intelligence appears to have been confirmed. Pakistani officials said they suspect that the attack was carried out by a coalition of militants from extremist groups.
The new coalition is called Lashkar-e-Omar, formed by guerrilla fighters in January after leaders of several extremist groups had been arrested. Officials said the members of the coalition share a doctrinaire vision of Islam, a hatred of the West, and often the common bond of having trained and fought in Afghanistan.
There is near consensus among intelligence officials that yesterday's attack is the work of a loose coalition of extremists, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said yesterday.
"They want to frighten and drive out the foreigners from Pakistan, and they want to scare the government into reversing its course," he said.
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Musharraf has sided strongly with the United States, abandoning support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and announcing a clampdown on radical Islamic groups active in Kashmir.
"There are so many forces that have been unleashed in the past months," said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani army general known for his moderate views. "We are under pressure from all sides, and from within."
Hence Musharraf's dilemma: To appease the West and India, he must infuriate the radicals at home.
By many accounts, Musharraf embarked on a campaign fierce enough to enrage the extremist groups, but not determined enough to break them. The effort appears to have left him vulnerable.
A Western diplomat interviewed earlier this week said elements of al-Qaida appear to have played a role in the three terrorist attacks in Pakistan since the beginning of the year: the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the grenade attack on a Protestant church in Islamabad that killed five people, and the suicide attack on French engineers in Karachi last month.
Al-Qaida fighters appear to have mixed with Pakistani militants dedicated to ending the Indian presence in Kashmir, the diplomat said. "The trail goes back to Kashmir."