The Long View

Yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai (formerly Bombay, a global financial capital) and car bomb outside the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, remind us of the instability in Central/South Asia. India, a secular democracy, has a large (over 100 million citizens) Islamic minority, and the Hindu majority country also has a cadre of militant Hindu extremists. It is uncertain if the current terrorist attacks were a response to India’s ongoing conflict with Pakistan over India’s Islamic-majority region in the north, Kashmir.

In last Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof noted that the new Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, is not equal to the task, recently appointing two cabinet ministers who play from the same rule book as the Afghanistani Taliban:

One new cabinet member, Israr Ullah Zehri, defended the torture-murder of five women and girls who were buried alive (three girls wanted to choose their own husbands, and two women tried to protect them). “These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them,” Mr. Zehri said of the practice of burying independent-minded girls alive.

Then there is Pakistan’s new education minister, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani. Last year, the Supreme Court ordered him arrested for allegedly heading a local council that decided to solve a feud by taking five little girls and marrying them to men in an enemy clan. The girls were between the ages of 2 and 5, according to Samar Minallah, a Pakistani anthropologist who investigated the case (Mr. Bijarani has denied involvement).

With an ally like that, who needs enemies?

As The Onion (America’s News Source) has noted of the recent US presidential election:  “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job” (cleaning up other people’s messes).