A few days ago a local newspaper published a cartoon of a political weather map forecasting bombs all across Pakistan. It is all too real. There has been no let-up in attacks in a country still reeling from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in a gun and suicide bomb attack in December 2007.
"Nothing can stop suicide bombers," said Kamran Khan, a moneychanger in Peshawar on Friday, the morning after a teenaged suicide bomber killed 11 people in a crowded Imambargah. It was the third serious blast in a week, two of them suicide attacks. The other attacks were in Lahore and Karachi.
At least 40 people died in total, and 2008 is shaping up to be as bloody as last year, when militants began a campaign of suicide bombings that has mostly targeted police and the security forces. Militancy cascading out of the tribal lands on the border with Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al Qaeda have taken refuge, is to blame, according to the government.
Pakistanis speak of their confusion and helplessness as they watch spiralling violence envelope the country and they inevitably blame President Pervez Musharraf and the authorities. "The government has totally failed to provide law and order and security of the people," Chaudhry Muhammad Amin, secretary of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Lahore, which has been at the fore of an anti-Musharraf lawyers' movement to defend the independence of the judiciary. There is no argument that al Qaeda wants to destabilise the Pakistani state.
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