As the debate in the United States' foreign-policy community rages over how long the war in Afghanistan should last, one inescapable question baffles both sides of the argument: What to do about Pakistan? Long derided as the "true epicenter" of global terror, Pakistan is discussed mostly in the realm of rumor and stereotype, and very little fact, history, or knowledge.

Understanding how Pakistan became the incubator for so many terror groups -- an exciting alphabet soup of acronyms like the QST, the TNSM, LeT, JeM, HN, TTP, and many others -- requires understanding Pakistan's evolution not just as an Islamic society, but as a fractured state determined to use Islam to secure and protect its own legitimacy. This is a phenomenon that seems to emerge regardless of who runs the government -- military or civilian, male or female, liberal or conservative, all the leaders of Pakistan have felt they could only rule through differing interpretations of Islam.

In The Scorpion's Tail: The Relentless Rise of Islamic Militants in Pakistan-And How It Threatens America, the Wall Street Journal correspondent Zahid Hussain charts a sobering history of the Pakistani state's relationship to Islam, Islamism, and Islamic radicalism. While the radicalist form of Islam -- the kind America really cares about -- didn't take root in Pakistan until the 1980s during the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, it was, Hussain argues, the result of decades of Pakistan's elites politicizing Islam to shore up their rule of the country. Starting with the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and moving through the tumultuous history of coups, countercoups, and new constitutions, Hussain walks the reader through Pakistan's steady Islamization.

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Worries about geopolitical bogeymen can overwhelm good sense. Case in point: today's melee over the discovery that Iran has been regularly handing Afghan President Hamid Karzai fistfuls of cash. Just who is Tehran endangering by keeping Karzai lubricated with pocket change? For one, the fellows U.S. troops are fighting: the Taliban. Karzai calls the payments "normal," and he is right. In the case of Afghanistan, Iran is in effect a U.S. ally.

It's useful to keep in mind that Iranian influence in Afghanistan is traditional. The two countries share a language, after all -- making it easy for the Iranians, for instance, to be particularly close to the leaders of the populous Herat and Balkh provinces, in the west and north of the country. Since the mid-1990s, the Iranians have served a useful balancing purpose to the Pashtun Taliban.

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Today, the Taliban set 22 NATO fuel tankers ablaze in the southern Pakistani border city of Quetta. That's a day after a fuel tanker was blown up at Torkham, the border post leading into Afghanistan. On Monday, the Taliban set 20 NATO oil tankers afire in Rawalpindi, outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

In all, the Taliban's oil war has gone on for a week straight. This is a page straight out of the histories of the two world wars, in which access to -- and the absence of -- oil was the deciding factor in both making and breaking enemies.

Until now, the attacks have been explained as the Taliban capitalizing on a standoff between the United States and Pakistan over Pakistani casualties in drone attacks, to which Pakistan has responded by closing the border at Torkham, and leaving the fuel trucks exposed. But that doesn't explain today's attack in Quetta.

In fact, as the U.S. military has clearly documented, long  fuel convoys have been among the main sources of American casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Taliban are Exhibit No. 1 as to why the military is working to untether itself from fossil fuels.