In this blog posting, Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist and indispensable expert on the Taliban, reports on a branch of the Islamist extremist movement that even Westerners who’ve been paying attention probably don’t know about. The Taliban we vaguely understand is the Pashtun movement in Pakistan’s Northwestern tribal areas and, of course, neighbouring Afghanistan. But Rashid now draws our attention to the Punjabi Taliban, perpetrators of the massacre of more than 80 worshippers in two mosques in his hometown, Lahore, on May 28. The half-hearted response has exposed, Rashid writes, the failure of Pakistan’s government to recognize the seriousness of the threat posed in the country’s Punjab province.