Pakistan has been playing us all for suckers
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Majnun
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F-16_Falcon
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We should not do what US want. Letting them in and taking money was the greatest mistake. Mush did this.
Hijab is always a part of Pakistani girls.
Omar1984
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I agree. Compare Pakistani television channels today to Pakistani television shows of the 1980's and 1990's, you will see how beghairit Pakistani channels have become today.
The secularists of Pakistan are playing with fire. Islam is the only main principle that binds Pakistan. We should not forget our Muslim values and ideology.
- Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
- We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
- You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Omar1984
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Pakistanis should not mock the Sunnah of Muhammad Sallallaho Alaihi Wassallam.
Not only is it sinful, but the only reason why Pakistan is on the world map is because of Islam. If no Islam in South Asia then no Muslims, and then no Pakistan. If no Pakistan, then no Pakistanis.
Dont be like Indian Muslims and try to impress the kuffar, they are not worth it.
Not only is it sinful, but the only reason why Pakistan is on the world map is because of Islam. If no Islam in South Asia then no Muslims, and then no Pakistan. If no Pakistan, then no Pakistanis.
Dont be like Indian Muslims and try to impress the kuffar, they are not worth it.
Seriously, now the foreigners want to voice disapproval or dictate what kind of clothes Pakistani women/people wear. 
If the prof wants to look non-burqa clad womens, then perhaps he should start work in Pak Fashion Industry.
If the prof wants to look non-burqa clad womens, then perhaps he should start work in Pak Fashion Industry.
Learn and understand to play geopolitics without involving religion as this is what all others do, including most Muslim countries - including Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nobody can snatch our Muslim identity if we don't want to throw it away ourselves. Learn the ways of the world and remain Muslims as well.
Zeeshan360
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This wasnt needed here
And stop living in denial that Pakistani muslims are superior than Indian muslims
Its TRAGIC that people have become so disillusioned that it seems difficult to redeem them.
There is nothing called "IDEOLOGY of Pakistan" or " Islam is the foundation of Pakistan".
Its just a lie that had been percolated by Zia and Mullahs to systematically use Islam to their benefit. There is no mention of Islam as foundation of Pakistan in any of Jinnah's lecture. Infact , before Zia , no one said " Pakistan ka matlab kya... There is only one God and that's Bhagwan/Allah/Jesus/Void"
The sad truth is today if I say " Pakistan ka matlab kya ... aatank ,bhrastachar aur beafkoofi" in Pakistan then I may well be murdered .
Guys wake up... Pakistan's formation is as true as existence of warmth in sunshine , but formation of Pakistan with Islam as an ideology is an illusion akin to a mirage in the desert.
kugga
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Thank God you corrected otherwise I was gonna visit LUMS to see thoes burqa wearing women coz LUMS is full of jeans tea-shirt wearing women the house of elites of Pakistan...
FaujHistorian
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Perhaps Islam allows us to go beyond our ethnicity. However the same religion is a two edged sword. Why?
Islam-Ism that mixes religion in politics have torn apart our society along Salafi, Shia, Brailvi, and Ahmadiya groups.
Thanks to Islamism, we now have 10s of more and deadlier dividing lines that further add to the ethnic divisions and thus rob us the citizens of Pakistan of the mutual harmony and respect.
Please not that not only that Islam-ism has broken up Pakistan along the inter-Islam sectarian lines, it also has jeopardized the future of non-Muslims who would be as good of citizen as any Muslim Pakistani.
The same Islamism has also destroyed justice or whatever was left of it by using vigilantism against the accused, mind you not proven guilty, just accused of blasted blasphemy laws.
So just be fair in your assessment, otherwise people can see through your simpleton-ism.
Thanks.
FaujHistorian
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I agree with the main emphasis of your post Sir.
However the Islamism was first introduced by Liaqat Ali Khan, and not Zia. Thus a civilian leader LAK started it, and Bhutto implemented and made it into law. Zia's crime is only to hit our country with Hadood.
But the blame really goes to ex-Congressi Mullah Maader-Pider Azad Mawdoodi. He is the one who started street riots and other illegal stuff and used the terror wing IJT and brought down the hell of religious hatred on to Pakistan.
It is true that Jinnah never wanted Islamism i.e. Mixing politics in the religion.
MAJ knew that anyone who brings politics inside the religion, destroys first the religion and then politics. And thus destroying the country.
nirreich
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An excellent article of Christina Lamb about the current situation in Pakistan and its relations with the West.
The article speaks for itself and clearly present the conflicting definition of Pakistan as a US ally, in light of its support in terror organisations which operates against NATO forces in Afghanistan and against India. It is obvious that Pakistan is conducting a 'blackmail policy' towards the US: "give us economic and military assistance if you want us to keep our nukes safe and let you retreat from Afganistan without so many casulties (and of course without any achievements)"
Food for thought.
=========================
The Sunday Times, April 10, 2011
By: Christina Lamb
Britain is spending millions bolstering Pakistan, but after touring the country, Christina Lamb finds it is a nation in thrall to radical Islam and is using its nuclear arsenal and instability to blackmail the West
========
When David Cameron announced £650m in education aid for Pakistan last week, I guess the same thought occurred to many British people as it did to me: why are we doing this?
While we are slashing our social services and making our children pay hefty university fees, why should we be giving all this money to a country that has reduced its education budget to 1.5% of GDP while spending several times as much on defence? A country where only 1.7m of a population of 180m pay tax? A country that is stepping up its production of nuclear weapons so much that its arsenal will soon outnumber Britain's? A country so corrupt that when its embassy in Washington held an auction to raise money for flood victims, and a phone rang, one Pakistani said loudly: "That's the president calling for his cut"? A country which has so alienated powerful friends in America that they now want to abandon it?
As someone who has spent almost as much time in Pakistan as in Britain over the past 24 years, I feel particularly conflicted, as I have long argued we should be investing more in education there.
That there is a crisis in Pakistan's education system is beyond doubt. A report out last month by the Pakistan education taskforce, a non-partisan body, shows that at least 7m children are not in school. Indeed, one-tenth of the world's children not in school are in Pakistan. The first time I went to Pakistan in 1987 I was astonished to see that while billions of pounds' worth of weapons from the West were going to Pakistan's intelligence service to distribute to the Afghan mujaheddin, there was nothing for schools.
The Saudis filled the gap by opening religious schools, some of which became breeding grounds for militants and trained the Taliban. Cameron hopes that investing in secular education will provide Pakistan's children with an alternative to radicalism and reduce the flow of young men who want to come and bomb the West.
"I would struggle to find a country that it is more in Britain's interests to see progress and succeed than Pakistan," he said. "If Pakistan is a success, we will have a good friend to trade with and deal with in the future ... If we fail, we will have all the problems of migration and extremism that we don't want to see."
As the sixth most populous country, with an arsenal of between 100 and 120 nuclear weapons, as the base of both Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, and as homeland to a large population in Britain, Pakistan is far more important to our security than Afghanistan. But after spending two weeks travelling in Pakistan last month, I feel the situation has gone far beyond anything that a long-term strategy of building schools and training teachers can hope to restrain.
The Pakistani crisis has reached the point where Washington - its paymaster to the tune of billions of dollars over the past 10 years - is being urged to tear up the strategic alliance underpinning the war in Afghanistan.
Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California who sits on the House foreign affairs committee and has been dealing with Pakistan since working in the Reagan White House, says he now realises "they were playing us for suckers all along".
"I used to be Pakistan''s best friend on the Hill but I now consider Pakistan to be an unfriendly country to the US," he said. "Pakistan has literally been getting away with murder and when you tie that with the realisation that they went ahead and used their scarce resources to build nuclear weapons, it is perhaps the most frightening of all the things that have been going on over the last few years.
"We were snookered. For a long time we bought into this vision that Pakistan's military was a moderate force and we were supporting moderates by supporting the military. In fact the military is in alliance with radical militants. Just because they shave their beards and look western they fooled a lot of people."
Christine Fair, assistant professor at the centre for peace and security studies at Georgetown University in Washington, is equally scathing. "Pakistan's development strategy is to rent out its strategic scariness and not pay taxes itself," she said. "We should let them fail."
PAKISTAN'S prime minister, Yousuf Gilani, comes from one of Punjab's largest land-owning families. Watching Cameron sign over the £650m, he said: "I think the root cause of terrorism and extremism is illiteracy. Therefore we are giving a lot of importance to education."
If that were the case one might expect Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the most elite universities in the country, to be a bastion of liberalism. Yet in the physics department Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics, sits with his head in his hands staring out at a sea of burqas. "People used to imagine there was only a lunatic fringe in Pakistan society of these ultra-religious people," he said. "Now we're learning that this is not a fringe but a majority."
What brought this home to him was the murder earlier this year of Salman Taseer, the half-British governor of Punjab who had called for the pardoning of a Christian woman sentenced to death under the blasphemy law. The woman, Aasia Bibi, had been convicted after a mullah had accused her of impugning Islam when she shouted at two girls who refused to drink water after she had touched it because they said it was unclean.
Taseer had been a key figure in Pakistan's politics for decades and had suffered prison and torture, yet when he said the Aasia case showed the law needed reforming, he was vilified by the mullahs and the media. In January he was shot 27 times by one of his own guards. His murderer, Mumtaz Qadri, became a hero, showered with rose petals by lawyers when he appeared in public.
After the killing, Hoodbhoy was asked to take part in a televised debate at the Islamabad Press Club in front of students. His fellow panellists were Farid Piracha, spokesman for the country's biggest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Maulana Sialvi, a supposed moderate mullah from the Barelvi sect. Both began by saying that the governor brought the killing on himself, as "he who blasphemes his prophet shall be killed". The students clapped.
Hoodbhoy then took the microphone. "Even as the mullahs frothed and screamed I managed to say that the culture of religious extremism was resulting in a bloodbath in which the majority of victims were Muslims; that non-Muslims were fleeing Pakistan. I said I'm not an Islamic scholar but I know there are Muslim countries that don't think the Koran says blasphemy carries the death sentence, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt.
"I didn't get a single clap. When I directly addressed Sialvi and said you have Salman Taseer's blood on your hands, he looked at them and exclaimed: how I wish I had done it! He got thunderous applause."
Afterwards, "I came back and wanted to dig a hole in the ground," he said. "I can't figure out why this country has gone so mad. I've seen my department change and change and change. There wasn''t one burqa-clad woman in the 1980s but today the non-hijabi, non-burqa student is an exception. As for the male students, they all come in turbans and beards with these fierce looks on their faces."
Yet, he points out, these students are the super-elite, paying high fees to attend the university: "It's nothing to do with causes normally associated with radicalism; it's that the mullah is allowed complete freedom to spread the message of hate and liberals are bunkering down. Those who speak out are gone and the government has abdicated its responsibility and doesn't even pretend to protect life and property."
Raza Rumi, a young development worker and artist who blogs regularly, agrees. As we sat in a lively coffee bar in Lahore that could have been in the West until the lights went off in one of the frequent power cuts, he said: "Radicalism in Pakistan isn't equated with poverty and backwardness - we're seeing more radicalisation of the urban middle and upper class. I look at my own extended family. When I was growing up, maybe one or two people had a beard. Last time I went to a family wedding I was shell-shocked. All these uncles and aunts who were regular Pakistanis watching cricket and Indian movies now all have beards or are in hijabs.
"I think we're in an existential crisis. The moderate political parties have taken a back seat and chickened out as they just want to protect their positions. What is Pakistan's identity? Is it an Islamist identity as defined by Salman Taseer's murder, ISI [the intelligence service], the jihadists? Is that really what we want to be?" He does not know how much longer he will write about such things. "I've been getting repeated emails that I should leave the country or shut up," he said.
When I left the cafe I was followed for the rest of the day by a small yellow car.
The next morning I drove to the suburb of Cavalry Ground to a road cut off by armed guards at sandbagged gun placements.
Beyond is a stunning house filled with modern art and large stone sculptures around a swimming pool. This is where Taseer lived and his wife and children now shelter in fear of their lives.
His daughter Shehrbano, 21, finds herself taking on his cause. As a servant came with squares of bread topped with smoked salmon, Shehrbano told me it was she who had alerted her father to Aasia's case at breakfast while they were on holiday in the Murree hill resort. She had read about it on Twitter. By lunchtime Taseer had called President Asif Zardari and was trying to get a mercy petition. "My father kept saying it's not about religion, it's about humanity and a mother in her forties who is illiterate and wasting away in jail."
It was the start of a campaign that ended in his death. "On the night of his murder my sister was inconsolable and I comforted her saying: 'Now you''ll see great things will come of this''," said Shehrbano. Instead, to her horror, anti-blasphemy cases are on the rise. In the first three months of this year at least 17 cases have been registered against 23 people. The accused include a mentally ill shopkeeper and a 17-year-old schoolboy who is alleged to have scribbled something sacrilegious on his physics exam paper.
Last month a Christian accused of blasphemy, Qamar David, was found dead in his Karachi jail cell. Officials say he died of a heart attack but his family and lawyer suspect foul play. "He had no heart problems," said Pervez Chaudry, his lawyer, "and he had been getting threats in jail."
"This is not the country I grew up in," said Shehrbano. "They've unleashed the dogs of hell. When lawyers garlanded Qadri I was dumbfounded."
She and her family struggled to find anyone to carry out the prayers at her father's funeral, including the governor's official mullah and the cleric at the Badshahi mosque where Taseer had always donated generously: "The man we finally found did the fastest ever prayers and then he and his family have had to flee."
They had even more trouble trying to find a lawyer. "It's so easy this case, there's a murderer, a confession, a weapon, video, so many witnesses," she said. "Yet everyone is so scared."
By contrast Qadri was showered not just with petals but offers of lawyers to defend him pro bono. One of them, Rao Abdur Raheen, boasts: "We are trying to get into the Guinness World Records for the most number of lawyers offering to work pro bono on a murder case - we've had thousands." He insists Qadri will go free. "I threw flowers on him because he saved the law - it's like self-defence, he defended religion," he said. "Taseer was guilty of blasphemy because he said the woman was innocent and abused the law."
IF views such as Qadri's are so widely supported, the question must be: which side is Pakistan on? It may be the biggest victim of terrorism - 2,670 civilians were killed in attacks in 2009 - but it is also clearly its biggest exporter.
It is base to an alphabet soup of militant groups, not just in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan but also in Punjab, its heartland.
Some of those, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, were founded by Pakistan's military under General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s as proxies to launch attacks against its great enemy India and to fight for the disputed province of Kashmir. Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Mumbai massacre in 2008 and, according to US officials, is now focusing beyond India on worldwide targets and is increasingly active in eastern Afghanistan.
Some in the US military believe that Pakistan's authorities have tried to rein in these groups but can no longer control what they created. Asked about Pakistan, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Afghanistan, told a Senate hearing last month: "There is, I think, a growing recognition that you cannot allow poisonous snakes to have a nest in your backyard even if they just bite the neighbour's kids, because sooner or later they're going to turn around and cause problems in your backyard."
Others insist there is evidence of continued close relations between ISI and these groups. In his plea bargain, David Headley, an American Pakistani who was a target spotter for the Mumbai attacks, named ISI officials as having co-ordinated them. The ISI chief and a senior officer have been named in a case being brought by American victims of the attack.
Pakistan's military argues it has 140,000 troops in its tribal areas and has lost 2,700 soldiers in the fight against militants. But to Washington's frustration it has steadfastly refused to go after the Afghan Taliban or the Haqqani network (a Pakistani group allied to the Taliban), both of which run their operations from Pakistan.
A senior Pakistani military officer invited me for a lengthy briefing over lunch during which he used the expression "strategic assets" to refer to both groups. "Why should anyone in the world expect us to sacrifice our long-term objectives for their short-term objectives?" he asked. "The priority of the state is to go after those directly threatening us, such as TTP [Pakistan Taliban]. If we go after other groups such as Haqqani, wouldn't our people have the right to ask: what has Haqqani done to me? Why are you chasing him?"
When I asked a senior Punjab government official why militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba were allowed to operate openly in his province and why not one terrorist has been prosecuted in Pakistan despite more than 100 suicide bombings last year, he asked me to turn off my tape recorder. "One word," he replied. "Army."
The close links between the military and such groups were made clear to Khalid Ahmed, a leading journalist on jihadis. He was instructed by Pakistan's last chief minister to apologise to Hafiz Saeed, the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (widely thought to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba), for an article he had written about the group. Saeed is a regular guest at army receptions and later told Ahmed that ISI had put him up to complaining.
"It's not just a matter of creating proxies," said Ahmed. "I think we need to realise that Pakistan's security agencies and Al-Qaeda share the same ideology."
The toll this has taken has been enormous. "We're engaged in a guerrilla war," says Rehman Malik, the purple-haired interior minister. The country certainly looks at war. Embassies, hotels, government ministries, banks and universities are surrounded by concrete blocks with police checkpoints and gun emplacements.
All of this security is to protect against attacks from the Pakistan Taliban. Yet the military has convinced Pakistanis that the real enemy is the United States. Polls repeatedly show that 60% of the population see America as the biggest threat compared with about 10% saying it is the Taliban.
Almost every Pakistani one meets believes the United States wants to seize the country's nuclear weapons. In Karachi I met a group of people in their thirties and forties - graphic designers, fashion writers and entrepreneurs who have set up a group called Citizens For Democracy as an alternative to the radical propaganda. The conversation degenerated into an attack on the Americans with comments indistinguishable from those of a spokesman for a radical religious party. It is almost as if the only thing uniting Pakistan, once hatred of India, is now hatred of the United States. The new American consulate in Karachi looks like a vast bunker - far more guarded than its Indian equivalent.
What has fanned this anger is the use of unmanned aircraft to kill militants in Pakistan's tribal areas. Started by President George W Bush in 2006, the attacks have been stepped up under Barack Obama, to 133 last year, largely out of frustration at Pakistan's refusal to take on militants.
Pakistan condemns the attacks as violating its sovereignty yet has allowed the use of its airbases while its agents work closely with the CIA to establish targets. A 2008 cable from the US ambassador, published by WikiLeaks, quoted Gilani, the prime minister, as telling her: "I don't care if they do it, as long as they get the right people. We'll protest in the national assembly and then ignore it."
This fiction initially suited both sides but Washington has got fed up with the endless criticism in Pakistan's media, which is heavily influenced by the military. America became so concerned that Pakistan's military was taking its money but still helping militant groups that it sent in security contractors to spy.
One of these, Raymond Davis, shot dead two men in Lahore in January after they apparently threatened him. A second American, whom he called into assist, ran over and killed a third Pakistani. After being arrested, Davis was found to have photographs of Lashkar-e-Taiba locations. The incident played into all Pakistan's conspiracy theories and threatened to derail relations. Admiral Mike Mullen, the US military chief, held a heated meeting in Oman with Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, to warn that matters were going too far. Davis was released last month after £1.1m in blood money had been paid to the dead men's relatives.
The day after his release America carried out the biggest drone attack for months. Kayani reacted with outrage, claiming 41 civilians had been killed and calling it "unjustified and intolerable".
"It's like they were saying we control your skies," said a Pakistani military officer. Pakistan announced it was pulling out of talks on Afghanistan. But a US diplomat insisted the timing of the drone attack had not been deliberate: "It's different departments not talking to each other."
Is Pakistan about to be dumped by the United States as Britain tries desperately to remain a friend? It clearly believes that it will always be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, which is saving it from bankruptcy, and western taxpayers.
Its nuclear programme, created as a defence against India, has taken on a new importance as an instrument of blackmail to get western aid. Given Pakistan's instability and increasing radical element, most intelligence analysts see these weapons falling into the wrong hands as one of the greatest threats to the world.
"We have all the leverage," said an army officer, smiling. "Nato needs us in Afghanistan for getting supplies in and because only we can deliver the Taliban to the negotiating table. Then there are our nukes ..."
"Frankly, if it wasn't for the nukes, we'd be treating them like Congo," admitted a senior American official.
The article speaks for itself and clearly present the conflicting definition of Pakistan as a US ally, in light of its support in terror organisations which operates against NATO forces in Afghanistan and against India. It is obvious that Pakistan is conducting a 'blackmail policy' towards the US: "give us economic and military assistance if you want us to keep our nukes safe and let you retreat from Afganistan without so many casulties (and of course without any achievements)"
Food for thought.
=========================
The Sunday Times, April 10, 2011
By: Christina Lamb
Britain is spending millions bolstering Pakistan, but after touring the country, Christina Lamb finds it is a nation in thrall to radical Islam and is using its nuclear arsenal and instability to blackmail the West
========
When David Cameron announced £650m in education aid for Pakistan last week, I guess the same thought occurred to many British people as it did to me: why are we doing this?
While we are slashing our social services and making our children pay hefty university fees, why should we be giving all this money to a country that has reduced its education budget to 1.5% of GDP while spending several times as much on defence? A country where only 1.7m of a population of 180m pay tax? A country that is stepping up its production of nuclear weapons so much that its arsenal will soon outnumber Britain's? A country so corrupt that when its embassy in Washington held an auction to raise money for flood victims, and a phone rang, one Pakistani said loudly: "That's the president calling for his cut"? A country which has so alienated powerful friends in America that they now want to abandon it?
As someone who has spent almost as much time in Pakistan as in Britain over the past 24 years, I feel particularly conflicted, as I have long argued we should be investing more in education there.
That there is a crisis in Pakistan's education system is beyond doubt. A report out last month by the Pakistan education taskforce, a non-partisan body, shows that at least 7m children are not in school. Indeed, one-tenth of the world's children not in school are in Pakistan. The first time I went to Pakistan in 1987 I was astonished to see that while billions of pounds' worth of weapons from the West were going to Pakistan's intelligence service to distribute to the Afghan mujaheddin, there was nothing for schools.
The Saudis filled the gap by opening religious schools, some of which became breeding grounds for militants and trained the Taliban. Cameron hopes that investing in secular education will provide Pakistan's children with an alternative to radicalism and reduce the flow of young men who want to come and bomb the West.
"I would struggle to find a country that it is more in Britain's interests to see progress and succeed than Pakistan," he said. "If Pakistan is a success, we will have a good friend to trade with and deal with in the future ... If we fail, we will have all the problems of migration and extremism that we don't want to see."
As the sixth most populous country, with an arsenal of between 100 and 120 nuclear weapons, as the base of both Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, and as homeland to a large population in Britain, Pakistan is far more important to our security than Afghanistan. But after spending two weeks travelling in Pakistan last month, I feel the situation has gone far beyond anything that a long-term strategy of building schools and training teachers can hope to restrain.
The Pakistani crisis has reached the point where Washington - its paymaster to the tune of billions of dollars over the past 10 years - is being urged to tear up the strategic alliance underpinning the war in Afghanistan.
Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California who sits on the House foreign affairs committee and has been dealing with Pakistan since working in the Reagan White House, says he now realises "they were playing us for suckers all along".
"I used to be Pakistan''s best friend on the Hill but I now consider Pakistan to be an unfriendly country to the US," he said. "Pakistan has literally been getting away with murder and when you tie that with the realisation that they went ahead and used their scarce resources to build nuclear weapons, it is perhaps the most frightening of all the things that have been going on over the last few years.
"We were snookered. For a long time we bought into this vision that Pakistan's military was a moderate force and we were supporting moderates by supporting the military. In fact the military is in alliance with radical militants. Just because they shave their beards and look western they fooled a lot of people."
Christine Fair, assistant professor at the centre for peace and security studies at Georgetown University in Washington, is equally scathing. "Pakistan's development strategy is to rent out its strategic scariness and not pay taxes itself," she said. "We should let them fail."
PAKISTAN'S prime minister, Yousuf Gilani, comes from one of Punjab's largest land-owning families. Watching Cameron sign over the £650m, he said: "I think the root cause of terrorism and extremism is illiteracy. Therefore we are giving a lot of importance to education."
If that were the case one might expect Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the most elite universities in the country, to be a bastion of liberalism. Yet in the physics department Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics, sits with his head in his hands staring out at a sea of burqas. "People used to imagine there was only a lunatic fringe in Pakistan society of these ultra-religious people," he said. "Now we're learning that this is not a fringe but a majority."
What brought this home to him was the murder earlier this year of Salman Taseer, the half-British governor of Punjab who had called for the pardoning of a Christian woman sentenced to death under the blasphemy law. The woman, Aasia Bibi, had been convicted after a mullah had accused her of impugning Islam when she shouted at two girls who refused to drink water after she had touched it because they said it was unclean.
Taseer had been a key figure in Pakistan's politics for decades and had suffered prison and torture, yet when he said the Aasia case showed the law needed reforming, he was vilified by the mullahs and the media. In January he was shot 27 times by one of his own guards. His murderer, Mumtaz Qadri, became a hero, showered with rose petals by lawyers when he appeared in public.
After the killing, Hoodbhoy was asked to take part in a televised debate at the Islamabad Press Club in front of students. His fellow panellists were Farid Piracha, spokesman for the country's biggest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Maulana Sialvi, a supposed moderate mullah from the Barelvi sect. Both began by saying that the governor brought the killing on himself, as "he who blasphemes his prophet shall be killed". The students clapped.
Hoodbhoy then took the microphone. "Even as the mullahs frothed and screamed I managed to say that the culture of religious extremism was resulting in a bloodbath in which the majority of victims were Muslims; that non-Muslims were fleeing Pakistan. I said I'm not an Islamic scholar but I know there are Muslim countries that don't think the Koran says blasphemy carries the death sentence, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt.
"I didn't get a single clap. When I directly addressed Sialvi and said you have Salman Taseer's blood on your hands, he looked at them and exclaimed: how I wish I had done it! He got thunderous applause."
Afterwards, "I came back and wanted to dig a hole in the ground," he said. "I can't figure out why this country has gone so mad. I've seen my department change and change and change. There wasn''t one burqa-clad woman in the 1980s but today the non-hijabi, non-burqa student is an exception. As for the male students, they all come in turbans and beards with these fierce looks on their faces."
Yet, he points out, these students are the super-elite, paying high fees to attend the university: "It's nothing to do with causes normally associated with radicalism; it's that the mullah is allowed complete freedom to spread the message of hate and liberals are bunkering down. Those who speak out are gone and the government has abdicated its responsibility and doesn't even pretend to protect life and property."
Raza Rumi, a young development worker and artist who blogs regularly, agrees. As we sat in a lively coffee bar in Lahore that could have been in the West until the lights went off in one of the frequent power cuts, he said: "Radicalism in Pakistan isn't equated with poverty and backwardness - we're seeing more radicalisation of the urban middle and upper class. I look at my own extended family. When I was growing up, maybe one or two people had a beard. Last time I went to a family wedding I was shell-shocked. All these uncles and aunts who were regular Pakistanis watching cricket and Indian movies now all have beards or are in hijabs.
"I think we're in an existential crisis. The moderate political parties have taken a back seat and chickened out as they just want to protect their positions. What is Pakistan's identity? Is it an Islamist identity as defined by Salman Taseer's murder, ISI [the intelligence service], the jihadists? Is that really what we want to be?" He does not know how much longer he will write about such things. "I've been getting repeated emails that I should leave the country or shut up," he said.
When I left the cafe I was followed for the rest of the day by a small yellow car.
The next morning I drove to the suburb of Cavalry Ground to a road cut off by armed guards at sandbagged gun placements.
Beyond is a stunning house filled with modern art and large stone sculptures around a swimming pool. This is where Taseer lived and his wife and children now shelter in fear of their lives.
His daughter Shehrbano, 21, finds herself taking on his cause. As a servant came with squares of bread topped with smoked salmon, Shehrbano told me it was she who had alerted her father to Aasia's case at breakfast while they were on holiday in the Murree hill resort. She had read about it on Twitter. By lunchtime Taseer had called President Asif Zardari and was trying to get a mercy petition. "My father kept saying it's not about religion, it's about humanity and a mother in her forties who is illiterate and wasting away in jail."
It was the start of a campaign that ended in his death. "On the night of his murder my sister was inconsolable and I comforted her saying: 'Now you''ll see great things will come of this''," said Shehrbano. Instead, to her horror, anti-blasphemy cases are on the rise. In the first three months of this year at least 17 cases have been registered against 23 people. The accused include a mentally ill shopkeeper and a 17-year-old schoolboy who is alleged to have scribbled something sacrilegious on his physics exam paper.
Last month a Christian accused of blasphemy, Qamar David, was found dead in his Karachi jail cell. Officials say he died of a heart attack but his family and lawyer suspect foul play. "He had no heart problems," said Pervez Chaudry, his lawyer, "and he had been getting threats in jail."
"This is not the country I grew up in," said Shehrbano. "They've unleashed the dogs of hell. When lawyers garlanded Qadri I was dumbfounded."
She and her family struggled to find anyone to carry out the prayers at her father's funeral, including the governor's official mullah and the cleric at the Badshahi mosque where Taseer had always donated generously: "The man we finally found did the fastest ever prayers and then he and his family have had to flee."
They had even more trouble trying to find a lawyer. "It's so easy this case, there's a murderer, a confession, a weapon, video, so many witnesses," she said. "Yet everyone is so scared."
By contrast Qadri was showered not just with petals but offers of lawyers to defend him pro bono. One of them, Rao Abdur Raheen, boasts: "We are trying to get into the Guinness World Records for the most number of lawyers offering to work pro bono on a murder case - we've had thousands." He insists Qadri will go free. "I threw flowers on him because he saved the law - it's like self-defence, he defended religion," he said. "Taseer was guilty of blasphemy because he said the woman was innocent and abused the law."
IF views such as Qadri's are so widely supported, the question must be: which side is Pakistan on? It may be the biggest victim of terrorism - 2,670 civilians were killed in attacks in 2009 - but it is also clearly its biggest exporter.
It is base to an alphabet soup of militant groups, not just in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan but also in Punjab, its heartland.
Some of those, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, were founded by Pakistan's military under General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s as proxies to launch attacks against its great enemy India and to fight for the disputed province of Kashmir. Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Mumbai massacre in 2008 and, according to US officials, is now focusing beyond India on worldwide targets and is increasingly active in eastern Afghanistan.
Some in the US military believe that Pakistan's authorities have tried to rein in these groups but can no longer control what they created. Asked about Pakistan, General David Petraeus, the US commander in Afghanistan, told a Senate hearing last month: "There is, I think, a growing recognition that you cannot allow poisonous snakes to have a nest in your backyard even if they just bite the neighbour's kids, because sooner or later they're going to turn around and cause problems in your backyard."
Others insist there is evidence of continued close relations between ISI and these groups. In his plea bargain, David Headley, an American Pakistani who was a target spotter for the Mumbai attacks, named ISI officials as having co-ordinated them. The ISI chief and a senior officer have been named in a case being brought by American victims of the attack.
Pakistan's military argues it has 140,000 troops in its tribal areas and has lost 2,700 soldiers in the fight against militants. But to Washington's frustration it has steadfastly refused to go after the Afghan Taliban or the Haqqani network (a Pakistani group allied to the Taliban), both of which run their operations from Pakistan.
A senior Pakistani military officer invited me for a lengthy briefing over lunch during which he used the expression "strategic assets" to refer to both groups. "Why should anyone in the world expect us to sacrifice our long-term objectives for their short-term objectives?" he asked. "The priority of the state is to go after those directly threatening us, such as TTP [Pakistan Taliban]. If we go after other groups such as Haqqani, wouldn't our people have the right to ask: what has Haqqani done to me? Why are you chasing him?"
When I asked a senior Punjab government official why militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba were allowed to operate openly in his province and why not one terrorist has been prosecuted in Pakistan despite more than 100 suicide bombings last year, he asked me to turn off my tape recorder. "One word," he replied. "Army."
The close links between the military and such groups were made clear to Khalid Ahmed, a leading journalist on jihadis. He was instructed by Pakistan's last chief minister to apologise to Hafiz Saeed, the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (widely thought to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba), for an article he had written about the group. Saeed is a regular guest at army receptions and later told Ahmed that ISI had put him up to complaining.
"It's not just a matter of creating proxies," said Ahmed. "I think we need to realise that Pakistan's security agencies and Al-Qaeda share the same ideology."
The toll this has taken has been enormous. "We're engaged in a guerrilla war," says Rehman Malik, the purple-haired interior minister. The country certainly looks at war. Embassies, hotels, government ministries, banks and universities are surrounded by concrete blocks with police checkpoints and gun emplacements.
All of this security is to protect against attacks from the Pakistan Taliban. Yet the military has convinced Pakistanis that the real enemy is the United States. Polls repeatedly show that 60% of the population see America as the biggest threat compared with about 10% saying it is the Taliban.
Almost every Pakistani one meets believes the United States wants to seize the country's nuclear weapons. In Karachi I met a group of people in their thirties and forties - graphic designers, fashion writers and entrepreneurs who have set up a group called Citizens For Democracy as an alternative to the radical propaganda. The conversation degenerated into an attack on the Americans with comments indistinguishable from those of a spokesman for a radical religious party. It is almost as if the only thing uniting Pakistan, once hatred of India, is now hatred of the United States. The new American consulate in Karachi looks like a vast bunker - far more guarded than its Indian equivalent.
What has fanned this anger is the use of unmanned aircraft to kill militants in Pakistan's tribal areas. Started by President George W Bush in 2006, the attacks have been stepped up under Barack Obama, to 133 last year, largely out of frustration at Pakistan's refusal to take on militants.
Pakistan condemns the attacks as violating its sovereignty yet has allowed the use of its airbases while its agents work closely with the CIA to establish targets. A 2008 cable from the US ambassador, published by WikiLeaks, quoted Gilani, the prime minister, as telling her: "I don't care if they do it, as long as they get the right people. We'll protest in the national assembly and then ignore it."
This fiction initially suited both sides but Washington has got fed up with the endless criticism in Pakistan's media, which is heavily influenced by the military. America became so concerned that Pakistan's military was taking its money but still helping militant groups that it sent in security contractors to spy.
One of these, Raymond Davis, shot dead two men in Lahore in January after they apparently threatened him. A second American, whom he called into assist, ran over and killed a third Pakistani. After being arrested, Davis was found to have photographs of Lashkar-e-Taiba locations. The incident played into all Pakistan's conspiracy theories and threatened to derail relations. Admiral Mike Mullen, the US military chief, held a heated meeting in Oman with Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, to warn that matters were going too far. Davis was released last month after £1.1m in blood money had been paid to the dead men's relatives.
The day after his release America carried out the biggest drone attack for months. Kayani reacted with outrage, claiming 41 civilians had been killed and calling it "unjustified and intolerable".
"It's like they were saying we control your skies," said a Pakistani military officer. Pakistan announced it was pulling out of talks on Afghanistan. But a US diplomat insisted the timing of the drone attack had not been deliberate: "It's different departments not talking to each other."
Is Pakistan about to be dumped by the United States as Britain tries desperately to remain a friend? It clearly believes that it will always be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, which is saving it from bankruptcy, and western taxpayers.
Its nuclear programme, created as a defence against India, has taken on a new importance as an instrument of blackmail to get western aid. Given Pakistan's instability and increasing radical element, most intelligence analysts see these weapons falling into the wrong hands as one of the greatest threats to the world.
"We have all the leverage," said an army officer, smiling. "Nato needs us in Afghanistan for getting supplies in and because only we can deliver the Taliban to the negotiating table. Then there are our nukes ..."
"Frankly, if it wasn't for the nukes, we'd be treating them like Congo," admitted a senior American official.
mr42O
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CHange Pakistan with India and you will be attacking every one. Btw India have more poor ppl than all Africa..... Go and fix ur own problem
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