Security personnel carry their injured colleague to a hospital after the suicide blast in Islamabad on Saturday. (AFP)

There are few places in Pakistan as secure as Islamabad; that became history last September courtesy the truck bomber that blazed into the magnificient Marriott and left close to a hundred dead in its cinders.

There are few places in Islamabad as secure as Jinnah Super and the Blue Area in which that posh shopping district lies islanded; that became history tonight on the back of the fidayeen (suicide bomber) who gave frightening truth to a raving dare his boss, the Pakistani Taliban chief Baitulla Mehsud, had held out only last week to the shaky Pakistani establishment: the response to continued American drone attacks in Waziristan will tremor through Islamabad.

Any coincidence that the September 20 attack on the Marriott was also on a Saturday night?

This is the enactment of two Talibani threats in less than 24 hours — they laid claim to last night’s strike at sleepy Binghampton in New York state, tonight they have bled Islamabad’s beauteous, and critical, vein, leaving India’s troubled neighbour wracked afresh.

But equally, there’s an insistent message New Delhi needs not to miss here. Islamabad is not ‘next door’ unlike last week’s Manawan police academy attack near Lahore; that was near earshot of Amritsar, a mere 12km away, this one is several hundred kilometres afield. But physical distance is incapable of containing terror’s leapfrog. New York state yesterday, Islamabad today, could India be beyond reach?

If Mumbai and 26/11 were not lesson enough, today’s widely-broadcast alarm emerging from Kashmir should be: the J&K police chief Kuldeep Khoda has gone public warning of an enhanced threat in the light of accelerated cross-border infiltration over the last fortnight. The snows are melting fast across the unmanned passes, and the US-led drone attacks in West Pakistan and Afghanistan are spurring on new warriors of “faith”.

Terror, as Mumbai demonstrated, has a way of taunting geography, and the Taliban, as the last couple of days have demonstrated to us, are intent on making their taunt ring true. As a rattled old friend in Islamabad told me over a tenuous phone-line tonight, “We should have seen it coming, we should have seen it coming in Jinnah Super, nowhere is safe, the safest places the least so. (Baitulla) Mehsud told us in as many words, they are here now, among us in Jinnah Super, and there is nowhere to run.”

In a nation that clings desperately to the Qaid-e-Azam as a talisman not only of birth but also of survival, that’s an exalted nomenclature — it’s invested with the grandest a nation can showcase. Jinnah Super is not merely an extended shopping block, post-colonial in architecture and pre-market in snob-quotient — row upon rectangular low-roofed row of understated commercial establishments that offer you the best of East and West, from ornate Afghani carpets and lapis lazuli trinkets to some of the most stylishly served cuisine, American, Italian, Spanish, Korean and, of course, Chinese, not to speak of Frontier fare.

And most of the shop-owners here come from what you’d call ‘Taliban country’ — displaced Pushtuns from Afghanistan and secessionist Balochis from Quetta, who lend no emotional quarter to the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani establishment.

On any night, Jinnah Super would hold Islamabad’s crème de la crème dining — or purchasing — in its expansive laid-back lap.

Big-ticket politicians and businessmen, retired generals and dilettante landlords, diplomats, foreign correspondents, multi-national NGO ranks uncoiling themselves from the hard tasks of a crisis-ridden country.

Pakistan could be burning, but Jinnah Super was an insulated realm, a serene island floating securely above leprous mess proliferating all around.

And surrounding Jinnah Super’s commerce are layers of plush habitation — the lavish, and high-walled, homes of those who can afford Islamabad’s best. Perhaps because they thought it was so well-sheltered in the grand lee of the Margalla Hills, the authorities decided to locate the headquarters of the Frontier Corps — a unit that has been specialising in fighting off the Taliban — close to Jinnah Super in Islamabad’s Blue Area.

No more. As analyst and acclaimed author of The Taliban, Ahmed Rashid, told The Telegraph following last September’s devastation of The Marriott, “This is the Taliban telling all of us: Here we are, let us see what you do to us. This is an assertion of their ability and their capacity to strike right in the heart of Islamabad, very close to the nerve-centres of the Pakistani establishment. There is a strong message for all of us in this. I do not mean merely Pakistan. I mean the whole region. I mean Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. Nowhere is safe.”