The vast majority of Pakistanis may be united in grief for the school children murdered in Peshawar - but many say they still don’t know who carried out the attacks.
For the media – both in Pakistan and abroad – the issue is clear enough: the Pakistani Taliban did it.
Not only has the organisation claimed the attacks. but the intelligence service ISI also recorded real time messages from handlers to the gunmen in the school.
Those messages, the ISI has told journalists, came from the phones of Afghan-based, Pakistani Taliban organisers.
But in Peshawar even people who witnessed the attack hesitate to blame the Taliban by name.
They not only fear reprisals but are also following the hesitancy of a political elite that remains largely unwilling to name and condemn the Pakistani Taliban in unequivocal terms.
Even on the day of the Peshawar school massacre, the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, failed to condemn the Taliban by name. He referred only to “terrorists.”
An alternative narrative relating the school attacks is already emerging: rumours are circulating on social media and on the streets that it was the work of Indian or Afghan intelligence agencies.
The fact that some of the attackers appear to have come from Central Asia lends weight to suggestions that there was a foreign hand in the attacks.
The emerging analysis of the school massacre echoes that which occurred after the shooting of Malala Yousafzai.
Initial shock eventually transformed to the almost mainstream view in Pakistan today that Malala is a western stooge.
That’s not to say the school massacre has had no impact on public opinion.
When a radical cleric attempted to justify the attack this week, protestors gathered outside his mosque in Islamabad chanting anti Taliban slogans.
That’s new. But there is still no big name politician prepared openly to lead people with that point of view.
Distrust and division
That is in part because the Pakistan’s civil and military elites are so divided and dysfunctional.
The politicians have a number of reasons for leaving the fight against the Pakistan Taliban (TTP) to the army.
Privately, government ministers argue that the army’s total control of security policy means it is unreasonable for the generals to expect the civilians to take responsibility for what the army decides to do.
The politicians are anyway deeply suspicious of an army that has frequently mounted coups to overthrow elected governments.
The current Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was kicked out of power, put in a dungeon and then exiled by the last military ruler Pervez Musharraf.
Sharif believes that despite his overwhelming popular mandate the army has never accepted his political comeback in 2013 and is once again plotting to remove him from power.
In addition many politicians fear the Taliban.
The one party to attempt a political challenge to the Taliban in recent years, the Pashtun nationalist ANP, has faced relentless attacks on senior party cadres.
The ANP’s stand was also politically disastrous.
Far from perceiving the party as a valiant defender of liberal values, the electorate concluded the ANP was weak and unable to defend itself. The party now has just one member of the National Assembly.
Mutual feelings
But if the politicians loathe the generals, the feeling its entirely mutual.
Many officers view Pakistani ministers and parliamentarians as corrupt and depraved, unwilling to put aside their lust for money and to focus instead on the plight of the country.
There is deep resentment in the army that when soldiers die in the fight against the Taliban, ministers do not make public speeches appreciating their sacrifices.
Ministers rarely go to military hospitals to comfort soldiers injured in the fight against the Taliban.
It’s estimated as many as 50,000 Pakistanis have been killed in political violence since September 11.
Members of the security forces including both the army and the police account for around 10,000 of those deaths.
Successive army chiefs have said that if they are to win the war against the TTP they need the politicians to lead Pakistani public opinion to support their military’s campaign.
Militant spectrum
But while the army complains about the politician’s failure to take clear line against the Taliban, others wonder how clear cut army policy is.
There are now well over 30 significant militant groups with a presence in Pakistan, each with different leadership structures, funding arrangements, ideological foundations and political goals.
The three most powerful are the Afghan Taliban, the TTP and the Punjab-based Lashkar-e-Taiba which concentrates its efforts on Kashmir and India.