THE TELEGRAPH: Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari, met President George W Bush yesterday on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York.
Mr Zardari is seeking to mend fences with his ally in the "war on terror" after his predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, was less than candid about the Muslim state's covert support for the Afghan Taliban.
But Mr Zardari faces an even greater challenge at home, where many Pakistanis see the rising tide of Islamist violence as part of a foreign conspiracy or, even, something to be supported if it harms America.
Western observers thought that Saturday's bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed 53 people and wounded more than 260, would shock ambivalent Pakistanis into supporting their government's crackdown on home-grown terrorists. But it has merely highlighted just how confused and conspiracy-riddled is Pakistan's popular opinion.
Many I met on the streets of the capital believe the blast was caused by a "foreign hand", a reference that usually denotes anyone from India, Afghanistan, Israel and Russia to the United States. A Question of Trust in Pakistan, the Land of the Conspiracy Theory >>> By Isambard Wilkinson in Islamabad | September 24, 2008
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