A mosque in Peshawar

When I met two JuD officials in a walled rose garden in Peshawar last October, I expected to get a glib resumé of the humanitarian work which it indisputably conducts, famously having aided survivors of Pakistan's massive 2005 earthquake long before government agencies arrived on the scene.

So I was surprised when Atiq ur-Rahman, a Pakistani who admitted to having joined a militant group in Afghanistan in 1989 before transferring to JuD, launched into a diatribe against the West. He went on to expand the vision of a global Islamic Caliphate as an ultimate utopia for world peace.

"We don't like democracy. Our struggle is to establish an Islamic Caliphate throughout the world. Whichever force tries to resist it shall be shattered," he told me, before handing me a copy of Why We Are Performing Jihad, JuD's militant manifesto, to further his case. During a follow-up visit to Friday prayers at the group's madrassa (religious school) in Peshawar, the mullah there eulogised Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, invited worshippers to "carry on beating America in the language they understand", before calling for a collection to fund the jihad. It was so flagrant it was almost embarrassing.

Yet despite international pressure to close down JuD offices in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan has so far side-stepped the issue, unwilling to antagonise JuD's powerful domestic following or lose its strategic value in the struggle with the old enemy, India.

When America's military golden boy, General David Petraeus, took over the US Central Command - responsible for US operations in the Middle East and Central Asia - last autumn he was already speaking of his intention to ask Pakistan to reassess its threat prioritisation. Arguing that war between Pakistan and India served neither country's interests, he was keen to have Pakistan shift the focus of its security efforts to Fata so as to unify the divided American and Pakistani aims. Barack Obama was singing from the same hymn sheet.