Welcome to the Pattani revolt: one of the world's longest-running insurgencies, and certainly among its most bizarre. The ravaged provinces of Thailand's Deep South lie less than 400 miles from the holiday-makers' utopia of Phuket, but for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, the world of the bombs and the world of the beaches might as well be on different continents.

The violence had simmered for decades before flaring into full blaze at Krue Se. Over 5,300 people have been killed since 2004: for a population of only 1.8 million, a rate of carnage nearly double that of Afghanistan. The insurgents, Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation, use the fiery rhetoric of jihad. But the rebels are motivated by identity rather than theology, and even this motivation is hazy: they're driven less by what they are than by what they are not. They use Islamist language, but they're mystical Sufis rather than by-the-book Salafists; they're united by Malay language and culture, but they have no desire for unification with their cousins right across the border in Malaysia; they don't see themselves as belonging to Thai society, but they have no clear picture of where-- or even in which era-- they might want to belong.

They have been courted by terrorist groups ranging from Al Qaeda to Hezbollah to Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah. The rebels have sent them all packing. This leaves intelligence officials of several countries baffled, because the day that the Pattani militants link up with a transnational outfit, "we're all" (as one Western operative says bluntly) "in a world of hurt."

I have looked at this issue through a variety of lenses. I am an anthropologist by background, but have also worked as a journalist and a government official. Over the past five years I have made eight reporting trips to Thailand and Malaysia, visiting each of the core provinces (Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala), as well as the affected districts of Songkhla and the Malaysian border state of Kelantan. I have interviewed militants in the field, security officials, exiled rebel leaders, and ordinary citizens just trying to get by. If the conflict can be summed up in three letters, they would be "WTF?"

The story of the Pattani uprising is one of blood and magic, of outrageous characters living in the 21th century but simultaneously in the 16th. It is a tale of a revolutionary movement with an impenetrable cell structure seeking the restoration of a long-dead sultanate, in the name of an ethnic identity that none of its champions can convincingly describe. It reveals a great deal about radical Islam -- or perhaps nothing whatsoever. Most of all, it is a cautionary lesson for anyone claiming to understand such grand notions as "Islamist terrorism" or "globalized jihad," whether in Palestine, Dagestan, or Boston: If all politics is local, perhaps all insurgency is as well.