The bomber ran into the graveyard from a nearby field and detonated in a crowd of some 200 mourners. Many of the slain are believed to have been members of his lashkar, a tribal militia set up to fight against the Taliban.

So far no group has claimed credit for the attack, but it will likely be the Swat Valley Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or the Tehreeek-e Nafaz-e Shariat-e Muhammadi (TNSM), which are the two major active groups in the region, and were the target of the last Pakistani invasion of the valley.

Today’s attack comes just one day after another attack in Lower Dir District which killed the local leader of the Awami National Party (ANP), a key ally of the ruling PPP. The TTP claimed credit for that attack.

Two days of fighting saw the militants overrun a police checkpoint, destroy a pair of schools and left at least 72 people dead, including 27 Pakistanis. The vast majority of the slain were militants and security forces, with four civilians also killed.

The Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan auxiliary in Malakand took credit for the attack. The group had been involved in the massive Swat Valley offensive in 2009, but had been claimed destroyed by the military. The faction’s leadership had been hiding in Kunar, and said they carried out the attack “with Afghan friends.”

Pakistan’s government issued “strong concern” about the attack and in particular the inability of the 150,000-strong NATO occupation force to retain control over the border provinces. NATO insisted that cross-border ties would not be affected by the attack.

Yet diplomatic cables from summer of 2009 clearly contradict this, with former US Ambassador Anne Patterson reporting on the successful embeds to the State Department. As of May 2009, they were not allowed on deployments, but only to help in coordination.

But this soon changed, as later cables show that by September,  the US was embedding across the Frontier Corps, including at their headquarters, and had also set up operations in Balochistan. Other cables showed US troops providing “assistance” in the Malakand invasion of early 2009, but did not specify how deeply this went.

Still, the revelations that Pakistan’s military has been allowing growing integration with the US military for years is untimely for them, as Pakistan’s armed forces are still reeling from a number of recent failures. The denial is predictable, though as with many official denials in recent months, will likely not change much in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.

According to officials, the attacker was a teenager dressed in a school uniform. The site had long been considered a prime target for an attack and was heavily secured, but the attack managed to pass through at least six checkpoints to get to there.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yusef Raza Gilani shrugged off the seriousness of the security lapse as a threat to recruitment, saying the attack was so cowardly that it “cannoy affect the morale of the security agencies.”

But the apparent ease with which the attack was carried out will likely spark further concerns across the Swat Valley that, despite multiple military offensives, the situation is far from secure and attacks can, despite all efforts to the contrary, happen anywhere.

Muhammad was behind the negotiation of the controversial Malakand peace deal, which sparked US condemnation as a “surrender to terrorism” and allowed the expansion of Sharia courts in the Malakand region in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).

After US complaints the Pakistani government quickly abandoned the Malakand deal, ostensibly because of the “threat” posed by the much smaller Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Swat Valley wing. Once the fighting began, however, troops soon began arresting TNSM leaders as well as the TTP.

The TNSM was able to garner support in the NWFP in no small part because the government’s court systems were so slow and inefficient. Ironically having Muhammad held for 18 months in prison before seeing trial will likely strengthen that view amongst the locals.

The video is said to particularly be causing tension with the US military, though that tension was obviously already on the rise after NATO helicopters attacked a Pakistani base earlier in the day, killing three soldiers.

US officials say that the video appeared to be authentic, and that there are “things you can’t fake” in the video, which was released by a group called Pashtuns International Association.

Pakistan’s military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, insisted that the video was part of a “propaganda campaign” against the nation’s army, but it is hardly the first time the military’s dicey human rights record has come into question. It is just the first time the video evidence has been staring everyone in the face.

Though the JuD itself is strictly a humanitarian organization it has close ties to the Lashkar-e Taiba, a Kashmiri separatist group that has been blamed for a number of major terrorist attacks, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Though officially banned, the JuD operates more or less with impunity in the Punjab Province, where it is based, and the group is also operating across the nation under the name Falah-e Insaniyat (FeI), which is the name it was using in the camp in question.

But FeI’s origins are a poorly kept secret, and the group has been operating since late 2008 under this name, including helping displaced Swatis during the Pakistani government’s last military invasion.

The Pakistani government’s own relief efforts have been embarrassingly slow, but as concerns grow about Islamist groups using their own aid to build support Pakistan’s government is threatening to shut down such charities and arrest their aid workers as “terrorists.” Though the move seems to have some popular support among the areas of the nation not yet devastated by the flood, the prospect of shutting down aid camps will likely not sit well with the millions of Pakistanis desperate for such aid.

“This is the basic reason for militancy: anger at the government,” one Swati resident, Obaid ur-Rehman, told the Washington Post. “If we had a place to live, if we had food, if we had schools, there would be no militancy in Pakistan.”

Their homes destroyed, locals reported the only aid they have seen from the government was a helicopter dropping food parcels to them. The food turned out to have rotten and was inedible, leading the residents to throw the food at the helicopter.

Though Pakistan’s military has made some friends with rescue operations in the most heavily effected areas, the government’s aid has been sorely lacking, leaving Islamist factions one of the few groups on the ground providing meaningful support.

But even this aid is likely to be temporary, and in the long run the reality is that residents of the hardest hit areas could face years of rebuilding before even basic services are available again. In areas like Swat, torn by military offensives and lacking in services in the first place, the flood seems to have given the Swat Valley Taliban a recruiting tool that will be very difficult to overcome.

“We never closed the dialogue,” Zardari insisted, saying that “we had an agreement, which they broke.” He appears to have been referring to the Malakand peace deal, which ended in a massive military invasion that displaced millions of civilians.

The reality of the Malakand case however is somewhat unclear however, as the government made its deal not with the Taliban but with the Tehreek-e Nifaz-e Shariat-e Muhammadi (TNSM) while the groups that “broke” the deal were said to be affiliated with the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which never had more than a secondary presence in the region. Once the fighting broke out, however, the government used it as an excuse to arrest the TNSM’s leadership en masse.

Zardari is facing growing questions about his government’s ability to tackle terrorism, as well as the evidence that the largely independent Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) has been backing the Afghan Taliban all the while, even as the Pakistani civilian government’s attempts to combat them (at US behest) has turned most of the tribal areas into constant warzones.

The Swat Valley offensive was always sort of an unusual case, as it focused on the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which never had a particularly large presence in the region. The “Taliban” group of choice for most residents was rather the Tehreek-e Nifaz-e Shariat-e Muhammadi (TNSM), a much larger but less violent group, and it was the TNSM-brokered peace deal which so enraged the US and led to the offensive.

The offensive lasted much of the summer, driving millions of Swatis from their homes into refugee camps, and the region is only now getting back to some degree of normalcy. A normalcy which, irksomely enough after the military claimed the offensive was so successful, seems to be including the same old violent killings.

Pakistan’s Army doesn’t seem particularly concerned though, claiming that the killings of several anti-Taliban leaders “do not mean that the Taliban can return to any organized form to the Swat Valley.”

It wasn’t so many years ago that the Swat Valley was a lush tourist attraction. Despite the military’s confidence that the targeted killings are no big deal, it seems unlikely the tourism industry will return any time soon.