Hours after a truck bomber slew 53 people last weekend at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, the country’s interior minister laid responsibility for the attack on Taliban militants holed up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, the remote, wild region that straddles the border with Afghanistan. “All roads lead to FATA,” Interior [...]
Read more →The generation entering professional life towards the mid and late 1990s was uni-focal on Islam and conversant only with Islamic discourse on politics, society and global affairs. They had a natural affinity with Islamic radical elements like the Taliban The September 20 suicide attack in Islamabad was the deadliest so far by Islamic militants based [...]
Read more →PAKISTAN IS being drawn inexorably into the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, as both sides there escalate that conflict beyond its borders. Last Saturday’s car bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed 53 people and wounded at least 200, is a stark warning to the new president Asif Ali Sardari of how potent [...]
Read more →ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — More than any other terrorist attack in this volatile country, the devastating truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel over the weekend has presented government and military leaders here with a stark choice: Go all out against extremists or risk the nation’s collapse into chaos. That is the growing consensus among many Pakistani [...]
Read more →Whenever the terrorists succeed, whenever an atrocity is of a scale to hit the front pages of the world’s newspapers, there is always an inquest into the failures of intelligence that allowed it to happen. After the slaughter at the Marriott hotel in Islamabad on Saturday, the intelligence agencies of a dozen or more countries [...]
Read more →The one ton truck bomb that ripped apart Islamabad’s Marriot Inn last Saturday was both a warning to its pro-American elite and a revenge attack against Pakistan’s new government At least 56 people – a probably many more – were reported killed and some 250 injured by the huge explosion that tore off the front [...]
Read more →