[Reader-list] Shadow lands: Pakistan - a nation under attack

[Pawan Durani]

"American drones overhead, Taliban troops on the offensive, and the
horrifying rise of child kidnapping – Pakistan is in pieces, writes
Robert Fisk, in a devastating portrait of a country thwarted by
violence and corruption"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/shadow-lands-pakistan--a-nation-under-attack-1936507.html

Pakistan ambushes you. The midday heat is also beginning to ambush all
who live in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province.
Canyons of fumes grey out the vast ramparts of the Bala Hisar fort.
"Headquarters Frontier Force" is written on the ancient gateway. I
notice the old British cannon on the heights – and the spanking new
anti-aircraft gun beside it, barrels deflected to point at us, at all
who enter this vast metropolis of pain. There are troops at every
intersection, bullets draped in belts over their shoulders, machine
guns on tripods erected behind piles of sandbags, the sights of AK-47s
brushing impersonally across rickshaws, and rubbish trucks and buses
with men clinging to the sides. There are beards that reach to the
waist. The soldiers have beards, too, sometimes just as long.

I am sitting in a modest downstairs apartment in the old British
cantonment. A young Peshawar journalist sits beside me, talking in a
subdued but angry way, as if someone is listening to us, about the
pilotless American aircraft which now slaughter by the score – or the
four score – along the Afghanistan border. "I was in Damadola when the
drones came. They killed more than 80 teenagers – all students – and,
yes they were learning the Koran, and the madrasah, the Islamic
school, was run by a Taliban commander. But 80! Many of them came from
Bajaur, which would be attacked later. Their parents came afterwards,
all their mothers were there, but the bodies were in pieces. There
were so many children, some as young as 12. We didn't know how to fit
them together."

The reporter – no name, of course, because he still has to work in
Peshawar – was in part of the Bajaur tribal area, to cover
negotiations between the government and the Taliban. "The drones
stayed around for about half an hour, watching," he says. "Then two
Pakistani helicopter gunships came over. Later, the government said
the helicopters did the attack. But it was the drones."

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An Islamabad garden now, light with bright oak trees and big birds
that bark at us from the branches, beneath which sit two humanitarian
workers, both Europeans who have spent weeks in the Swat valley during
and after the Pakistani army's offensive against the Taliban. "There
were dozens – perhaps hundreds – executed by the army. They were
revenge killings by the soldiers, no doubt about it. A number of
people we had reported to us as arrested – they were later found dead.
What does that mean? The Americans and the Brits were aware of this,
of course they were, and they intervened with the government. But what
does this say about the army? In one village, two bodies lay in the
street for two days – it was a way of showing the local people what
would happen to them if they supported the Taliban. What does this say
about the army? Can they control Pakistan like this?"

Some 70 per cent of the Pakistani army come from Punjab, and 80 per
cent of retired army officers come from Punjab. In a few days, Punjab
will pay for this.

But lest the Taliban appear in freedom-fighter mode, here is a
different account of the Swat valley by one of Pakistan's most
eloquent journalists, Owais Tohid, reporting from the city of Mingora.
Read, as they say, and inwardly digest. "Splotches of red blood still
stain Ziarat Gul's memory: his sister was gunned down by the Taliban
and her body placed at the chowk [square] where I stand... A year ago,
Gul's sister, Shabana, was shot three times by the bearded and
turbaned men." Shabana was a singing and dancing girl, of whom there
are many in the tribal areas; they perform at weddings, while the men
play harmoniums and the stringed rabab.

Back to Owais Tohid. "Her body was then strewn with currency notes,
CDs of her performances, and her photographs. Pooled in blood, nobody
was allowed to her body until the next day. Gul, his father and two
cousins were the only ones to offer funeral prayers and bury her the
next morning..." Shabana's friend Shehnaz, a famous dancing girl, was
a witness to the murder: "I switched off the light and peeped through
a hole; I could see the door was broken. Shabana sat on the floor and
Taliban carrying Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers stood around her.
Some carried swords. I heard Shabana beg them to spare her life. She
was pleading, 'Don't kill me, don't kill me.' But then one of the
Taliban said, 'We warned you ... we even offered you our mujahid to
marry, but you continued to dance...' Shabana continued pleading..."
Shehnaz heard the gunshots.

I wonder if all these tales are true. Alas, they are. Not far from
Peshawar last month, a dancing troupe was returning from a party in
Hindko Damaan, when armed men surrounded their vehicle at 3am. Afsana,
one of the girls, had her two sisters, Salma and Sana, alongside her
in the car, and her stepfather, Azizur Rahman. Her brother, in a
following car, argued with the gunmen, who were demanding money. So
they shot Afsana dead. She had just divorced, and danced to earn money
for her family. Three other girls have been murdered outside Peshawar
in the past fortnight.

But the drones dominate the tribal lands. They killed 14 men in just
one night last month, at Datta Khel in north Waziristan. The drones
come in flocks, and five of them settled over the village, firing a
missile each at a pick-up truck, splitting it in two and dismembering
six men aboard. When local residents as well as Taliban arrived to
help the wounded, the drones attacked again, killing all eight of
them. The drones usually return to shoot at the rescuers. It's a
policy started by the Israeli air force over Beirut during the 1982
siege: bomb now, come back 12 minutes later for a second shot. Now
Waziristan villagers wait up to half an hour – listening to the
shrieks and howls of the dying – before they try to help the wounded.

The drones – Predators and Reapers, or "Shadows", as the Americans
call them when they follow US troops into battle – have acquired
mythical proportions in the minds of Pakistanis, a form of spaceship
colonialism, imperialism from the sky, caught with literary brilliance
by A H Khayal in the daily newspaper The Nation, when he asked where
the drones come from: "The masses are piteously ignorant. They just
don't know that the drones are not material creatures. Actually, they
are spiritual beings. They don't need earthly runways for taking
off... They live in outer space, beyond the international boundaries
of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"When they feel hungry, they swoop down and kill innocent Afghani
women and children. They eat the corpses and fly back to their spacial
residences for a siesta. When they again feel hungry, they again swoop
down and kill another lot of innocent women and children. Having
devoured the dead bodies, they fly back to their bedrooms in space. It
has been going on and on like this for years."

Indeed it has. But where do the drones come from? When President Hamid
Karzai flew into Islamabad last month, the entire Pakistani cabinet
turned up to welcome this fraudulently elected satrap of the United
States. Many are the Pakistanis who found this a natural circumstance.
Was not their own President, Asif Ali Zardari, another of Washington's
corrupt satraps, his minions heading to Washington only two weeks
later to plead for a vast increase in the $7.8bn (£5.1bn) of aid which
Congress voted Pakistan last year? "There was a time when America did
not trust you," Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousuf Gilani, lectured the
upper house of his federal parliament. "You were their ally, but they
did not trust you. Now they are trusting you and holding a strategic
dialogue."

It was enough to make the average Pakistani squirm. After Hillary
Clinton arrived last November to berate the students of Pakistan on
their anti-Americanism – and to hint that their government must surely
know the location of al-Qa'ida's top men in the tribal lands – the
Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, set off to Washington last
week with his chain-smoking army commander, General Ashfaq Kayani,
with the biggest begging bowl in Pakistani history. President Barack
Obama wants an exit strategy in Afghanistan and realises – at last –
that only Pakistan can provide this. But he also wants to support
India as a bulwark against China, and the Pakistanis know that Delhi's
agents are trying to control Afghanistan.

But what struck Pakistanis about Karzai's visit was not his cloying
remarks about the fraternal love of the Afghan and Pakistani people –
"India is our close friend but Pakistan is like a twin brother," he
piously observed – but his astonishing statement that the devastating
missile attacks against Pakistan by pilotless US drone aircraft were
not being launched from inside Afghanistan.

"We are not responsible for these attacks," he said. "They are being
carried out by a powerful sovereign country, namely the United States,
which is also a close ally of Pakistan. They [the drones] don't fly
from our territory but in our airspace, and it is beyond our capacity
to stop them." Karzai looked subdued, apologetic, meekly sympathising
with Gilani over the growing number of civilian casualties.

Karzai was (for once) telling the truth. The drones launched from the
Kandahar airbase are attacking the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban inside
the international frontier. The drones attacking Pakistan come from –
Pakistan.

In fact, the Americans launch them from a Pakistan Air Force base at
Terbile, 50 miles west of Islamabad. US officers were also interested
in using the Peshawar airfield – the same runways employed by the old
U-2 spy planes, from which Gary Powers took off over the Soviet Union
during the Cold War – and the Taliban spent weeks trying to discover
the headquarters from which the Americans were directing the drones.
They eventually decided that the US drone control centre was on the
highest floor of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.

They were wrong. US officers did stay at the Marriott, but they were
not air force personnel. This, however, was the reason the Marriott
was attacked by a suicide bomber in 2007, and then again with a
truckload of explosives on 20 September 2008 – not because President
Zardari had just given his first speech to parliament a few hundred
metres away, but because the Taliban were trying to destroy the
"brain" behind the drones. At least 54 civilians were killed – most of
them Pakistanis – and 266 wounded. The drone attacks continued, more
than ever after Barack Obama became US President.

The war, however, is now directed at the Pakistani army – although the
authorities try to portray the Taliban's targets as purely civilian.
The assault on the police torture centre in Lahore on 8 March was
merely a warning. Nine policemen were among the 18 dead at a building
known for its night-time torture sessions – local inhabitants had
complained many times about screams from the basement, not because of
the abuse taking place there but because it made their homes a target
for bombers. They were right. The worst suicide bombing of the year
had already occurred at a volleyball field in Lakki Marwat, when the
killer murdered 105 people – many of them policemen and Frontier Corps
personnel. On 4 February, another suicide bomber – after a long
surveillance operation by the Pakistani Taliban – struck a military
convoy in the Koto area of the Lower Dir district. He killed three
schoolgirls, a Frontier Corps policeman – and three US soldiers. Since
11 September 2001, more than 5,700 men and women have been killed in
insurgent attacks in Pakistan. This is revenge for the army's
offensives in Swat and Waziristan.

The double suicide attack on two army vehicles in Lahore, the Punjabi
capital, on 12 March was thus merely the most brazen assault on the
Pakistani military. Both killers destroyed themselves next to two army
trucks – killing 14 soldiers – in the garrison city, shaming the
security authorities and provoking the local chief minister, Shahbaz
Sharif, to plead shamefully with the Taliban to spare his capital in
future. Attack another city, was the implication. Sixty-one men and
women were killed – most of them, of course, civilians – and hundreds
wounded. Within 24 hours, another suicide bomber attacked an army
checkpoint in the North West Frontier Province at Saidu Sharif,
killing 14 people, most of them soldiers and policemen.

Even the military were surprised by the determination of the Pakistani
Taliban to assault them. Four days after the attack in Lahore, the
police found 1,500 kilos of explosives and two suicide vests in Iqbal
Town in the Punjabi capital, along with Russian-made hand grenades and
rifle ammunition. The next day, they discovered another 3,000 kilos of
explosives in the same area. Amir Mir, the most accurate of Pakistani
journalists amid the chaos of what is in fact a war, has calculated
that 321 Pakistanis have been killed and more than 500 wounded in 15
suicide bombings across Pakistan in the first 70 days of 2010. This is
up from 'only' 11 suicide bombings in the same period last year.

The Institute for Peace Studies in Pakistan has been recording every
act of violence in the country since the 2001 attack on America, and
concludes that just in 2009 12,632 men and women – civilians,
soldiers, Taliban militants, even victims of inter- tribal battles –
were killed. Of the dead, 3,021 were killed by insurgents, 6,329 in
Pakistan army operations, 1,163 in army-Taliban battles, 700 in border
violence, and 1,419 in other violence, including drone missiles.

The scorecard for death over the past four years – I'm afraid that
death in Pakistan is today much like a tally – is truly awful. In
2005, a mere 216 Pakistanis were reported killed. In 2006, 907
Pakistanis died; in 2007, 3,448; in 2008, 7,997. By 2009, the total
number of victims in just five years came to more than 25,000. When I
twice visited Lahore, it felt like a city under martial law, thronged
with troops and checkpoints, its bridges and ancient British
ministries and schools laced with soldiers in steel helmets.

In just two weeks in March – far from Lahore – lawlessness reached
epic proportions. On 14 March, four men were killed in the Khyber
tribal area. In Quetta on 17 March, a retired policeman, a member of a
"sectarian organisation", and two construction workers were shot dead
or blown up. A day later, 10 men of the Mehsud tribe – quite possibly
militants – were killed in a five-missile US drone attack. In a suburb
of Peshawar on the same day, three Frontier Force soldiers and two
policemen were shot dead. In Karachi that day, two political leaders,
their lawyer and a taxi driver were shot. Within 24 hours, a prominent
Quetta lawyer was kidnapped. By the end of the same week, the
Pakistani Taliban publicly announced that it intended to murder the
Pakistani Interior Minister, Rehman Malik. And there would be more
attacks across the country, the Taliban said, in revenge for the
American drone attacks. "Just wait for our reaction," the Taliban's
spokesman, Azam Tariq, said.

The Pakistani military responded in the time-honoured way. The
Taliban's attacks were "a clear sign of frustration and desperation"
on the part of the militants. The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta,
declared from the safety of Washington that the drone assaults – and
other attacks, unspecified – were "the most aggressive operation that
the CIA has been involved in in our history. The CIA's offensive in
the Pakistan tribal region had driven Osama bin Laden and his
colleagues into hiding – where they have presumably been since 2001 –
leaving al-Qa'ida "rudderless and incapable of planning sophisticated
operations".

Pakistan surely deserves better than this nonsense. Embedded with the
Pakistani military, writers such as Michael O'Hanlon in The New York
Times remind their readers that America's $17bn in aid since 2001
comes to only half Pakistan's costs in the "war on terror", a battle
to which the Pakistani army is now fully committed (or so he
believes). This, however, does not explain the scores of soldiers who
have surrendered to the insurgents over the past 12 months, nor the
weird double-game being played by the Pakistani security services, who
captured senior members of the Afghan Taliban only to find themselves
condemned by Hamid Karzai's corrupt government for breaking up the
secret communications between the Afghan government and its enemies.
The US was "extremely gratified" by Pakistan's arrests, President
Obama's envoy, Richard Holbrooke, says. In other words, the Americans
would control contacts with the Afghan Taliban – not their local
ruler, Hamid Karzai.

And all the while, the 'security' experts who dominate the American
press have been sowing their suspicions through the dumbed-down
intelligence world of the West. For while we bomb the tribal regions
with our drones, we are told to fear the imminent theft of Pakistan's
nuclear weapons. Terrorists, we are told in a West Point journal, may
take the country's atomic arms for use against us – note how this
threat never seems to apply to our trusted ally, India – and mythical
accounts are told of three separate attacks by "terrorists" (unnamed,
of course) on Pakistan's nuclear facilities in the last three years.
In the past we were told that Muslim "nationalists" might hijack
Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Now the danger is supposed to come from
"Islamists". In fact, the real danger is much closer to home.

Seventy per cent of NATO's ammunition, vehicles and food in
Afghanistan still transits through Pakistan, along with 40 per cent of
its fuel. The Taliban's attacks on these convoys – both the Pakistani
and Afghan versions of the movement (for they are not the same) – have
over the past two years netted some incredible dividends, which NATO
has not seen fit to disclose. Gunmen have managed to steal three
separate – disassembled but complete – military helicopters and a
clutch of American Humvee armoured vehicles, one of which was used by
the Pakistani Taliban's leader, Hakimullah Mehsud. At least 62 Humvees
were burned out in just one raid near Peshawar in 2008.

And all this, you have to remember, takes place against the profound
corruption of Pakistani society, from the shoe-shine boy to the
president, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, whose own
venality is so legendary that only rarely does it cause discussion.
Only once in the last month has it been mentioned – when Zardari,
addressing a conference on Sufism and peace, announced that he was not
afraid of death, that he represented "nothing more than a speck in the
universe" and would donate his body organs on his death. Within hours,
five people – including my taxi driver, a hotel waiter, the owner of
an Islamabad bookshop, a Pakistani humanitarian worker and a lawyer –
made precisely the same comment to me: "Zardari will donate his body
organs to the people – but not his dollars!"

Thank God, I suppose, for the Pakistani press, as brave, as
disillusioned and as tough as any media folk in the West. The 'oil
mafia' which siphoned off billions of rupees during Musharraf's rule,
the four cabinet ministers living in government houses but claiming
rent (shades of Westminster's very own), the massive financial
irregularities in the Punjab education department, all have been
exposed in Pakistan's newspapers. "The government," reported The News
International on 11 March, "has removed yet another officer of
impeccable integrity, the chief Commissioner, Islamabad, Shahid
Mehmood, within 90 days of his posting, after he allegedly refused to
accommodate the 'wishes' of certain political masters." Now that's
what I call reporting. The luckless Mehmood, it turned out, had rashly
frozen a land deal which involved a certain Asif Ali Zardari, the
President of Pakistan.

Pakistanis – in other words, most of the 150 million men and women who
live in penury in this nuclear state – simply no longer believe in the
authorities who claim to govern them. When an increase in bus fares
brought hundreds – and then thousands – of young people onto the
streets of Islamabad's suburbs last month, the police opened live fire
on the demonstrators. Western embassy personnel were confined to their
bunkers – US diplomats are not even allowed to go grocery shopping at
the best of times – and Zardari's government then announced that the
protesters had been "imported", brought into the capital from
"surrounding areas".

Where does a foreigner – a real one, like me – go to understand this
beautiful, ferociously angry, ripped-up, intelligent, hopelessly
overcrowded, war-smitten country?

Raza Kazim admits only to being in his eighties, but he has a
perfunctory, almost irritatingly child-like way of twining his thin
fingers together while trying to define his love of country, his
belief in the worth of Pakistan. His is speaking over the throb of the
air-conditioners, as an unprecedented spring heat warms up the Lahore
trees outside his home. He brings in two frozen cans of Murree beer
and is vexed that I won't join him. I can see why he led the first
strike in his Indian school's history.

"I benefited vastly from the Raj," he says. "It wasn't a love-hate
relationship – it was a love-adversarial relationship. My heart went
out to the 'Quit India' movement, and I was coming from the peasantry.
It was a time when peasants could be flogged for two rupees. I had a
belief in freedom and in 1946, I took a leap of faith and feeling."

Some faith. Some feeling. Kazim is a kind of 'guru' – in the original
meaning of the word, an elderly advisor/oracle for generations of
Pakistani politicians – and his involvement in the Indian National
Congress of British India, then in the Muslim League and later in the
Pakistan People's Party, have turned him into the Malcolm Muggeridge –
or perhaps Tony Benn – of Pakistan. A lawyer and ex-Communist whose
philanthropy has produced the Sanjan Nagar School Institute of
Philosophy and Arts, and the inventor of a stringed musical instrument
intended to preserve South Asian classical music as a modern art form,
he has two qualifications for Pakistani sainthood: he was kidnapped by
military intelligence in 1984, and has been jailed five times between
1950 and 1985. His other quality is historical; he still thinks the
date is 1947 and he smiles when he realises that I agree with him.

"August 1947 was a kind of competition between Hindus and Muslims," he
recalls, the fingers beginning to twist around each other, the
lamp-light reflecting his baldness as dusk brings out the big birds in
the garden. "Who would give a better account of freedom? I never had a
sense of India being divided. It was like the people were split into
two teams. Who would score more runs off freedom?"

Freedom at midnight, I murmured. At what cost? "Yes, there was
bloodshed in Bihar. There was bloodshed in Delhi, a lot of bloodshed
in the Punjab – but that was action and reaction. Then it spread into
the Deccan area. They (the new Indian state) took soldiers from the
Punjab whose children had been murdered here and whose women had been
abducted here, and sent them to the Deccan area where they bashed the
heads of [Muslim] children against pillars. Yes, I know what happened
in those trains.

"The political capital made out of these killings is another story – a
bad story, but a different story. The events were capitalised. But
bloodshed didn't begin with Pakistan. The first genocide of Indian
history took place in the Punjab in 3,000 BC – it was a conflict
between feudal and pastoral

Kazim had it easy. "On 13 September, 1947, I came on a plane to
Pakistan as guest of the Indian communications minister. I came with
my gramophone records, books and poetry, and two sets of clothes." It
is a very post-colonial story. While the masses tore each other to
pieces below, Kazim's plane soared above the bloodbath to drop him as
a witness to the mass looting of the new Pakistan's most beautiful
city, Lahore.

"People think of the properties taken from the Hindus and Sikhs, but
the most important things were the jobs, the business, the vacancies,
and grabbing those properties. The educated people looted and took
things away in trucks – these were the people who were going to run
the country. It became a sign of patriotism that you forged property
papers to homes in India that you never had – this was thought to be a
patriotic duty because the Indians had three times as many claims
against us. The bureaucracy had been civil servants under the British
system – they were middle-level bureaucrats in India, who had suddenly
become senior bureaucrats in Pakistan." Mohammad Jinnah, the founder
of the state, who died in 1948 – Kazim went to his funeral – "had a
weakness for flattery. He didn't keep good company."

I've heard this story before, albeit less eloquently told. Pakistan
existed, but there was no sign of a developing society or the creation
of a nation. "We have still not made a society," Kazim says. "People
have to take something out of their personal lives and invest it in
our society." There is a pause here, then Kazim's voice rises. "WE ARE
STILL IN 1947!" Pakistan obtained its freedom under the Indian
Independence Act – but there is nothing called the Pakistan
Independence Act."

Another room now, in what Pakistani reporters still call a "posh" area
of Islamabad. (When they bring themselves into their own stories, by
the way, Pakistani journalists call themselves "scribes", rather than
our self-denigrating "hacks"). But the air conditioner is just as
noisy. Now it is another lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, hero of the 'Long
March' of spring 2009 which eventually secured the reinstatement of
Iftikhar Chaudhry as Chief Justice after the abdication of America's
favourite dictator, the president-general Pervez Musharraf. Ahsan's
new book, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan suggests that
there were two culturally different regions of the land which the
British called India, that there was a continuous social and political
order in the Indus region – the bit that became Pakistan – that was
quite different from that of the rest of India.

On Pakistani independence, the structure of state-Raj versus the
citizen-native did not change. As Ahsan puts it bleakly, "the military
officers who on 14 August, 1947, saluted the raising of the green
standard with crescent and star had on the 13 August been saluting the
Union Jack. They couldn't change in a day. Somebody else had fought
for independence. The 'natives' remained and continued to be denied
democratic rights until 1970."

Thus – and Kazim would not agree with this – Pakistanis loved their
judges rather than their soldiers, and admired them with a fair degree
of cynicism. Rightly so. In 1954, the Governor General dissolved
parliament – an act unsustainable in law – but the judges upheld the
dissolution. In 1958, the military commander dissolved the assembly,
abrogating the constitution. And the country's Supreme Court endorsed
the imposition of martial law on the grounds that "a successful coup
d'état is an internationally-recognised, legal method of changing a
government." Judges reversed this opinion in 1972, ruling that there
was no place for a military regime in Pakistan – but it did so only
after the military regime had fallen.

Now the army – guardian of the nation of Pakistan, and America's
second-best friend in the region (after the Indian army) – is under
constant military attack, while obligingly allowing the totally
corrupted (and corrupting) politicians to run the vehicle of state
under the banner of 'democracy'. Everyone knows that the Inter-
Services Intelligence – their leaders appear to be interchangeable
with the regular army – continue to succour and guard and lead the
Afghan Taliban. They will do so as long as America ignores Pakistan's
conflict with India over Kashmir. American soldiers die because of
Muslim anger at Washington's support for Israel, as US Commander
General David Petraeus suggested last month. But American soldiers
also die because of Kashmir. Pakistanis – and here is something which
truly unites all of them – believe that America supports India, and
that Kashmir is thus ultimately lost to them. So why should they allow
America – and Indian money and political influence – to control
Afghanistan?

It's sometimes difficult to find the line between aggression and fear
in Pakistan. We in the West fear its nuclear weapons without even
looking at a map of the country about which we obsess with such
devotion.

Every major city – Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar,
Quetta – is close to the borders of India or Afghanistan. It is a both
sump of poverty and a nuclear power, an intelligent nation – its
people desire education with the same craving as the Palestinians –
with a history that began and ended at the moment of partition, its
datelines framed by military coups and imperial hand-outs and, now, by
drone attacks and suicide bombers. The latter arrived with a peculiar
shock in Pakistan. They started in Lebanon, moved to 'Palestine', then
to Iraq and then to Afghanistan – and then to Pakistan. From the
Mediterranean to the old Raj, this black-magic rite travelled with
incredible speed. And now it has merged with the dirt and corruption
and nuclear power of Pakistan.

I tried, in Pakistan, to define the sorrow which so constantly
afflicts this country. The massive loss of life, the poverty, the
corruption, the internal and external threats to its survival, the
existentialism of Islam and the power of the army; perhaps Pakistan's
story can only be told in a novel. It requires, I suspect, a Tolstoy
or a Dostoyevsky.

But perhaps it is Pakistan's ability to do harm to itself that most
struck me – symbolised, I fear, by the latest and most terrible
affliction to strike it: child-kidnapping. Steal a little boy or a
little girl, ask the parents for money, and kill the infant if they
don't pay. When Sahil Saeed, the British-Pakistani boy, was taken, the
police and the British embassy helped to bring him home. But
journalists covering the story found that the family home was
sometimes overwhelmed with other parents, like those of six-year-old
Mahnoor Fatima, who was stolen from his family in October of last year
and never seen again. "This shows the difference between rich and
poor," Mahnoor's mother said. "No one even came to my house to console
me... Everything is done here for the rich and the British, but
nothing for Pakistanis and the poor."

Near Peshawar, a three-year old girl called Fariha was taken from a
wedding party last month, her kidnappers demanding Sterling pounds
8,000 for her life. The parents couldn't pay. So Fariha was killed and
thrown into a canal. Her father, a worker at a brick-kiln, later came
to the Peshawar Press Club with the body of his daughter to demand
punishment for her killers. In Faisalabad two days later, another
kidnapped child, seven-year-old Samina Ali, was found dead in a drain
after her parents failed to pay a ransom for her. They complained that
the police later demanded £120 for handing over her body. A kidnapped
boy, a six-year-old identified only as Sharjeel, was also found dead
in a drain a few hours earlier.

In the first two months of this year, 240 people – almost all of them
children – have been kidnapped in Pakistan. Only 74 have been
recovered alive. There – not in the suicide attacks and the venality
of politicians– lies the worst statistic in Pakistan.