It is all too real.

There has been no let-up in attacks in a country still reeling from the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in a gun and suicide bomb attack last month.

"Nothing can stop suicide bombers," said Kamran Khan, a money-changer in the northwest city of Peshawar on Friday, the morning after a teenaged suicide bomber killed 11 people in a crowded Shi'ite Muslim prayer hall.

It was the third serious blast in a week, two of them suicide attacks. The other attacks were in Lahore and Karachi.

At least 40 people died in total, and 2008 is shaping up to be as bloody as last year, when Islamist militants began a campaign of suicide bombings that has mostly targeted police and the security forces.

Militancy cascading out of the tribal lands on the border with Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al Qaeda have taken refuge, is to blame, according to the government.

Pakistanis speak of their confusion and helplessness as they watch spiralling violence envelope the country, and they inevitably blame President Pervez Musharraf and the authorities.

"The government has totally failed to provide law and order and security of the people," Chaudhry Muhammad Amin, secretary of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Lahore, which has been at the fore of an anti-Musharraf lawyers' movement to defend the independence of the judiciary.

There is no argument that al Qaeda wants to destabilise the Pakistani state. Its leaders have said they want to bring down US ally Musharraf, who came to power in a 1999 coup and is now going through his most unpopular phase.

RIFE WITH CYNICISM

Yet, so great is the distrust of Pakistan's security agencies, that many people suspect the bombs are part of ploy to justify postponing an election on Feb. 18 that Musharraf's allies are expected to fare badly in, though Musharraf is not contesting himself having secured a second term as president last November.

"The government wants this instability so it can remain in power," Zahoor Ahmed said during a funeral procession for two of the victims of the Thursday evening blast in Peshawar.

"They know who is behind this," he said, as hundreds of mourners chanted slogans and guards armed with automatic rifles stood outside the prayer hall where the bomber struck.

The blast bore the hallmarks of the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'ite sects which flares every year during the Muslim month of Moharram, that marks a period of mourning for Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet.

Killed after a battle in AD 680 in Kerbala, a city in modern day Iraq, Imam Hussein is revered by Shi'ites, who make up about 15 percent of Pakistan's 160 million people.

Police will be on high alert for more violence on Sunday, the 10th day of Moharram, known as Ashura, when Shi'ites beat themselves into a frenzy of grief during processions.

Barricades and checkpoints have been set up around main Shi'ite prayer halls, called imambargahs, and along procession routes in Peshawar, while 4,000 police and hundreds of paramilitary troops have been deployed in the city.

Ordinary people and police agree that sectarianism is being used as a cover by shadowy groups intent on creating chaos.

"The colour of it is sectarian, but this is terrorism," Azhar Ali Farooqi, police chief of southern Sindh province, where 10 people were killed by a bomb in a poor part of Karachi on Monday.