Other Voices on AfPak….

Things were tough enough during my stay.  On my way in from the airport in Karachi, traffic was unusually light.  Roving gangs of armed thugs were roaming through the city, pillaging gas stations.  The police force was laughably overwhelmed; the only gas stations that stayed open had battalions of private security.  Meanwhile, up to 100 people died there in violence between the organized gangs of criminals known in that unhappy city as political parties, schools and businesses are closed in fear, and tens of thousands of families already living at the margins of existence are losing their daily wages until peace returns. One night during my visit a vicious goon threw a hand grenade into a group of worshipers performing their evening prayers in a Karachi mosque; nothing in this city is sacred anymore.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, formerly known as the Northwest Frontier Province, and currently on the front line of the COFKATGWOT (the currently nameless Conflict Formerly Known As The Global War On Terror) assassins  killed the son of a prominent official and Safwat Ghayyur, the Commandant of the Frontier Constabulary.  Three million people became homeless in the early stages of the flood; since then monsoon rains continue to inundate the highlands, and successive flood crests is move inexorably down river, spreading devastation through the Punjab and overspreading the country’s most valuable and productive agricultural land across both Punjab and Sindh.

 Hat tip to Eddie!

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