Look Out: Explosive Country!

by Sara Daniel, Le Nouvel Observateur

One refugee from the tribal regions told Sara Daniel, "Everything you see here is a performance for the benefit of the Americans: me and the UN tents, we're part of the décor!" (Photo: Paul Jeffrey / ACT International)

Pakistan: "Al-Qaeda is in the process of succeeding beyond its dreams ..."

    At Washington's request, the Pakistani army has grudgingly undertaken to reestablish its authority in the tribal regions where Afghan Taliban and bin Laden's fighters move around freely. But the multiple blunders of American bombing are not helping Islamabad to fight against jihadists' growing influence ...

    It's a dying world that is afraid. An aristocracy living on borrowed time that knows nothing will ever be the same again as before. In the Punjab governor's sumptuous palace, visitors are escorted from anterooms to reception rooms by servants wearing violet tunics and complicated turbans reminiscent of the Indian Empire era. Sideboards groan under spiced sweets and cardamom puddings. Governor Salman Taseer, a PPP member clothed entirely in white, is delighted with the new functions he enjoys since his friend Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, became Pakistan's president. Is not Punjab (with 60 percent of the country's population) Pakistan's most important province, and, most particularly, the army's fiefdom? Salman Taseer listens to himself speak on television, tries on his Astrakhan hat for indulgent friends. He'd like to see his portrait on the wood-paneled walls of this boardroom where two British governors are already on display. But nobody is taken in. Not even his wife, who has undertaken the palace's restoration to its imperial splendor: "What's the use? And for how long?" she sighs, one does not know whether over the difficulty of removing the ocher dust from the recesses of this immense house or over the political situation of her husband, whom opposition party head Nawaz Sharif's minions dream of supplanting, or over the repercussions of the economic crisis, which has brought the Pakistani government to the verge of bankruptcy ... or over Islamic terrorism forewarning civil war.

http://www.truthout.org/120108E