Leading Article: Pakistan Finally Takes on the Monster It Created
THE INDEPENDENT: This is a battle that Islamabad should have embarked upon long ago

This week it became brutally clear that Pakistan is effectively at war. A series of brazen assaults by jihadis on police stations, army garrisons and civilian targets across the country in recent days have claimed 160 lives. The military, meanwhile, is preparing for an assault on the militant stronghold of Waziristan.

The death toll is destined to rise further. There will be more casualties, more bombings and more turmoil in this nuclear-armed nation. This battle against a diffused guerrilla force is likely to take years, rather than months. But we need to be absolutely clear about one thing: this is not a struggle that the Pakistani state can avoid. Indeed, it is one that it should have embarked upon a long time ago.

For the best part of two decades, successive Pakistani governments tolerated the growth of Islamist militias (both in the western tribal regions and in the Punjab) in the belief that these groups were useful proxies in the regional strategic struggle with India. The country's intelligence services even funded and armed them. Just as dangerously, the authorities allowed the religious fundamentalists to establish hundreds of schools which churned out indoctrinated recruits to swell the ranks of the militias. The leaders of the Afghan Taliban were trained in such establishments.

The Pakistani authorities believed they could control these fanatics. They were wrong. Earlier this year when the Pakistani Taliban moved into an area only 100km from the capital Islamabad and began to impose their own brutal penal code on its inhabitants, the penny finally dropped among Pakistan's leaders that they had created a monster. >>> | Saturday, October 17, 2009

Tehran: Army of Police and Militiamen Attack Unarmed Protesters
TIMES ONLINE: The Iranian regime warned that any demonstrations would be mercilessly crushed, and meant it. As darkness fell on baking, dust-shrouded Tehran last night an army of riot police and hardline basiji militiamen used batons, gun butts and tear gas to beat back thousands of Iranians converging on the city centre.

"The security presence was massive. It was like a military occupation," one witness told The Times. "They were clubbing the hell out of people."

The greater victory belonged to the demonstrators, however. Male and female, some quite old, they came armed with nothing more than a burning sense of injustice. They defied the risk of serious physical injury, and the very real possibility of arrest, incarceration and torture. They did this to show the world that their resistance to Iran's brutal and illegitimate government has not been extinguished.

"We went today to show them that we are still here and are not going away and they can’t talk or scare us away. And we'll be back every time there is an occasion to commemorate or when we're asked to," said Maryam, a young female office worker nursing an arm injured by a baton blow. “We want to be heard. We are not going to let the regime ignore us,” said Ahmad, a young man in his twenties. >>> Martin Fletcher | Friday, July 10, 2009