Too bad it had to come to this in Pakistan. More than a million civilians displaced, in the largest internal refugee crisis since the country’s founding. Hundreds killed in the fighting, including a yet unknown number of civilians. A breathtakingly beautiful area, the Swat Valley, in tatters.

But was this the only way to stop the Taliban from taking control of the entire country? A significant portion of the Pakistani elite—and the United States—certainly thinks so. And the Taliban’s advance, till they were literally 60 miles from Islamabad, the nation’s capital, was quite unsettling. Residents of the capital were so stressed that schools started barricading themselves, and all of them closed for a day. The Indian Hindu newspaper reports on a prominent architect in Islamabad who bought a rifle and a silencer in anticipation of a Taliban takeover.

“If [the Taliban] walk into this city, at least I will be able to take out some of them before they get me and my family,” he told the paper’s Pakistan correspondent.

In retrospect, the Pakistani government’s deal with the Taliban that effectively ceded control of the Swat region—with the accompanied imposition of extremely harsh Islamic law—seems to have been a big mistake. Rather than disarming the Taliban, it only emboldened them and made them attempt to expand their area of influence.

But at the time when the provincial government of the region (led, incredibly, by the family of the remarkable pacifist Abdul Ghaffar Khan) signed the agreement, it seemed a way of preventing a bloodbath.

“The ANP [the ruling Awami National Party] may have calculated that in the long run it could keep its nationalist credentials alive by working toward a ceasefire and bringing peace to the region, albeit not entirely on its own terms, ensuring that no more Pashtun blood would be spilled,” writes Pakistani Professor Kamran Asdar Ali for Middle East Report Online.

The Pakistani army was ambivalent about taking on the Taliban because it did not want to open up a third front, in addition to its borders with India and Afghanistan. In the mindset of the Pakistani army, India, with its manifold population and its principal role in the secession of the country’s eastern wing as Bangladesh, is still seen as the major threat to a country that came into existence by splitting off from India in 1947.

“The tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan,” writes Graham Usher in the London Review of Books. “The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even Al Qaeda: The main enemy is India.”

Finally, the army was prodded into action partly due to a public outcry caused by the Internet distribution of a video showing a young woman being flogged by the Taliban in the Swat Valley due to alleged immoral behavior. (An official probe team conveniently dismissed the video as fake).

The Obama Administration, with the carrot of a multibillion dollar aid package dangling before the Pakistanis, played a strong role in pushing the Pakistani government to act, too. Top administration officials expressed repeated concern, and President Obama himself jointly hosted Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in an attempt to get them to coordinate a joint strategy to fight Islamic fundamentalism.

At the same time, though, the United States has helped undermine the popularity of the Pakistani government because of the civilian casualties incurred by its repeated use of drones to target Al Qaeda leaders holed up in the frontier region.

“Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted Al Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians,” reports the Pakistani newspaper The News.

David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency expert who fashioned strategy in Iraq, recently told Congress that the drones were doing more harm than good.

“The drone strikes are highly unpopular,” he said in his testimony. “They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. ... The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population.”

A better way to counter the extremists would be to help Pakistani citizens attain a decent quality of life, as the Obama Administration professes to be committed to doing. As Professor Ali points out, much of the turmoil in the Swat Valley can be traced back to the underdevelopment of the area.

“The patchwork remedies for periodic economic crisis in Swat have failed to date to provide opportunities for upward mobility to the region’s poor,” writes Ali. “It would be a fallacy to say that all present-day militancy in the region stems from class anger. It is no coincidence, however, that the Taliban has targeted large landholders, levying taxes on gemstone mines and forcing lumber contractors to offer job opportunities to locals.”

A little development would go a long way toward getting rid of the attraction of Islamic fundamentalism in the region.