The first thing you notice about your wanly furnished room at Karachi's Sheraton hotel--one of the two where Westerners dare to stay in this port city--is the floor to ceiling fencing of the balcony. "It's to prevent people from throwing grenades", says the hotel security chief. Right. Colorful Karachi.

Washington opinion-makers, laboring hard in the past few weeks try to convince us that al-Qaida is now simply a label or ideology, would be tempted to give the man a corrective shake. But in Karachi--as in Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Chitral or Miranshah--one thing remains venomously clear: l-Qaida is alive. It breathes and even thrives in Pakistan, not as a "label" but as a coherent entity--albeit in the form of a complex conglomerate of networks.

Worse, it has laid deep roots in Pakistani society through which it has been able to expand, raise funds, plot and communicate. And while it does not operate with complete freedom, it has developed an extraordinary capability to maneuver from within the society, either by "hiding in plain sight" or using local networks, political parties and militant groups, with which it has built strong links since the 1980s.

According to extensive interviews with officials from the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) and other government sources, al-Qaida's commanders operate largely from within Pakistan. Even if both Pakistani and U.S. intelligence sources still admit that Osama bin Laden's trail has gone almost "completely cold" since the CIA last spotted him in South Waziristan in 2003, senior ISI sources confirm that he continues to hide between the Chitral area in Pakistan and Nuristan in Afghanistan and that, according to information developed recently, he "does not move around much."

A lot more has been gleaned about the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who narrowly escaped a U.S. strike in the village of Damadola, in Pakistan's Bajaur tribal agency, last January. al-Qaida's number two travels within forty square kilometers of the same remote border area, and moves between Pakistan and Afghanistan's Kunar province. In Pakistan, Zawahiri enjoys the protection of several hundred members of Bajaur's Mamoond tribe, in which he has married, as well as the followers and recruits of two senior local clerics: Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and Maulvi Liaqat, both on Pakistan's "most wanted list."

On the run in Pakistan, Bin Laden and Zawahiri increasingly rely on a large, informal infrastructure of tens of thousands of Pakistani militants--from sectarian and Kashmiri organizations (such as Lashkar e Jhangvi, Harakat ul Mujahideen, Harakat ul Jihad ul Islami, and Jaish e Muhammad)--to survive, travel, communicate, operate. First forged during the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, these relationships were institutionalized in the late 1990s when al-Qaida welcomed, trained and catalogued tens of thousands of Pakistani militants in Afghanistan. This Pakistani muscle helped defend the Taliban regime against the Northern Alliance offensive in the Fall of 2001, but, like al-Qaida, was forced out of the country.

From the Daniel Pearl assassination in 2002 to the 2005 attacks in London to the bombing near the U.S. consulate in Pakistan last March (which killed one American diplomat), al-Qaida extensively capitalizes on its Pakistani networks. Abu Zubeydah, one of Osama bin Laden's most senior lieutenants, was arrested in 2002 in Faisalabad in the house of a local representative of Lashkar e Taiba, Pakistan's most powerful Kashmiri jihad organization. Ramzi Binalshibh, who coordinated the 9/11 attacks, was arrested in Karachi in a safe house of Jaish e Muhammad, an even more violent Kashmiri organization, believed responsible for Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and execution.

This nexus is a strong as ever. After jihad-veteran Amjad Farooqi was killed by Pakistani police in September 2004, his deputy Matiur Rehman rose to become a senior al-Qaida leader. Still believed to be on the run (despite Western media reports), sources say Rehman personally oversaw not only the Pearl kidnapping, but also the multiple assassination attempts on President Musharraf from 2003 to 2006 (the latest in early July). He is at the helm of a vast, stealthy and extremely dangerous network, which still ferries volunteers to be trained in al-Qaida facilities in North and South Waziristan, and is actively plotting attacks against the West.

This "Pakistanization" of al-Qaida comes on top of strong indications that Osama bin Laden's organizations are enjoying the covert support of some extremely powerful, Islamic political parties and a few hundred of low-level "sympathizers" within the Pakistani military and intelligence establishments. In the face of such an encroachment on Pakistani society, the United States needs Pakistan--and President Musharraf--now more than ever.

The security of the United States and its allies depends on Musharraf's ability to pull out al-Qaida's roots. Such a Herculean, destabilizing task can only be accomplished by the Pakistani government--and at an extraordinary cost. And despite the Bush Administration's kabuki dance of democracy--a concept which in South Asia entails picking the candidate who offers the largest pay-back--it is very unlikely that such "legitimate" political figures as Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif would have the mandate or stamina to inflict such trauma on their society.

In short, America needs Musharraf and the weakened, unpopular and embattled Musharraf needs America.

(Alexis Debat is a senior fellow at The Nixon Center, a terrorism consultant for ABC News and a contributing editor to The National Interest.)

(This article was reprinted with permission from The National Interest Online http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=12078.)

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