Pakistan suicide bomb kills 80 as Taliban seeks revenge for Bin Laden | World news | The Guardian

 

• Friday 13 May 2011 20.43 BST

• Article history

 

When Osama bin Laden's Pakistani supporters strike back, this is what it looks like: twisted metal, scattered suitcases and body parts; blood and savagery.

The Taliban said the vicious double suicide bombing in Shabqadar, a trading town on the edge of the tribal belt in Charsadda district in north-western Pakistan, claimed the first part of the blood price they had promised to extract for the American killing of Bin Laden on 2 May. It was conducted with ruthless efficiency.

Abid Khan, 24, cowered in his sweetshop when he heard the first blast and then, eight minutes later, a second. Rushing to the scene, he found some 200 trainee soldiers strewn on the road among mangled vans and a pile of bags.

"It was very bad," he said in slow, precise English. "Some people had no hand. Some people had no foot. Some heads were far away [from] the people." He repeated himself. "It was very bad."

The dead and injured had been among 800 trainee soldiers partying just hours earlier with songs and music, having graduated into the ranks of the Frontier Corps, a poorly equipped paramilitary force drawn from the tribes of north-western Pakistan.

They had just completed a six-month training course at the FC's main training academy in Shabqadar – a British-era base with sweeping lawns and tree-lined drives – and came from districts that read like a roll-call of Taliban battlegrounds: Waziristan, Swat, Kohat, Lakki Marwat.

But they barely made it out of the gate. As the young cadets left the base at 6am, clambering into buses and piling their luggage on top, a suicide bomber approached on foot then exploded his payload. More trainees rushed out to help the wounded. But eight minutes later a second bomber turned up, on a motorbike, exploding a vicious hail of ballbearings that sliced through shops, buses and flesh. By evening the death toll had reached 80, of whom 66 were FC recruits, with another 120 injured. The toll, as ever, was expected to rise.

US officials are hoping to leverage outrage over Bin Laden to gain concessions from the Pakistani army. They want the military to push into Waziristan, to sever relations with militant groups such as the Haqqani network, and to arrest high-level fugitives thought to be still inside Pakistan, mostly notably Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.

Perhaps underscoring the drive, a CIA drone fired a missile at a car in North Waziristan, killing three people in the third such attack since Bin Laden's death. The US embassy in Islamabad did not comment, but it did issue a statement condemning the Shabqadar attack as the work of the "true enemy of the people of Pakistan".

It's still unclear whether the army, a past master at managing the tricky US relationship, will accede to any or all of Washington's demands. But it is sensitive to an unprecedented wave of criticism in Islamabad, where the top brass made a rare address to parliament.

The army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, and at least three other top generals fielded questions from parliamentarians late into the evening in a session that was closed to the public.

But some details leaked out – most intriguingly a claim by the country's air chief that Shamsi airbase in Balochistan, used by the CIA to carry out drone attacks, is actually under the jurisdiction of the United Arab Emirates.

But in Shabqadar, just a two-hour drive away, the repercussions of Bin Laden's death — what one local termed the "Osama drama" – had a very real impact. The town centre was deserted, shuttered by police as the authorities cleaned up the blast site. A dozen Hiace mini-vans, crushed like tin cans, clustered outside the gates of the base. Blood-soaked rags littered the pavement. A policemen emerged from the wreckage with a fistful of ballbearings.

"We are not afraid of the situation," he said, a little unsteadily. "Everything is for Allah." Hundreds of tiny holes pitted the shopfront behind him.

A few provincial ministers came up from Peshawar, 30 miles to the south, offering soundbites for the cameras then departing in a whirl of flashing lights, horns and armoured cars.

The scene was a reminder that, behind the spy games and hushed diplomatic shuffle, it is ordinary Pakistanis who have paid the price for their country's part in the fight against militancy.

Some 30,000 Pakistanis have died violently in the past decade, including 9,000 from the armed forces, according to official figures – 10 times the death toll in the US on 9/11. Commando instructor Gul Zaman, a burly man with a stone face, stood outside the crumbled barriers of the FC base, mourning his students. "They were all just young boys," he said quietly. "Not one was over 25 years old."

A Taliban spokesman said the atrocity was the first revenge for the "martyrdom" of Bin Laden. "There will be more," Ehsanullah Ehsan told Reuters. But senior police officials believe the bombing was more connected to the war in nearby Mohmand tribal agency, which starts just three miles from Shabqadar. Pakistan's army has been fighting the Pakistani Taliban there for more than two years, as part of a series of rolling battles across the tribal belt. The fight is vicious.

In December a Taliban suicide bomber killed at least 50 people at a public meeting; this week they assassinated one pro-government militiaman and kidnapped another. On Thursday a stray shell landed on a house in Mohmand, killing one person and wounding a woman and two children. People in Shabqadar can hear the artillery.

But the suicide bombings were also a challenge to Pakistani politicians who want to spurn western assistance. A half-shredded poster at the blast site carried the image of Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician who once advocated talks with the Taliban. His supporters, including many women, protested outside parliament as the generals spoke, carrying posters that read "What are you hiding?"

The message echoed widespread scepticism among Pakistanis who, despite the blasts, continue to believe in astonishing numbers that the death of Bin Laden was concocted. "It was all just a drama. Osama wasn't really there," said taxi driver Hakimullah Jan in Shabqadar. "The Pakistani army and the Americans are just players in this Osama drama."

Caught between army hawks, a disbelieving public and an angry America, others simply feel beleaguered, as if their country has nowhere to turn. "So we are doomed if we side with militants and doomed if we don't," tweeted @ghamidiview, a follower of the moderate Islamic scholar Javed Ghamidi.

As evening fell in Shabqadar, a small group of staff emerged from the base, which was still shuttered, to gather up the luggage in the street.

One by one, they unrolled the dead soldiers' belongings – bundles of bedding wrapped round piles of neatly folded, military jumpers. Then they quietly rolled them up again, and carried them back into the base.

My arranged marriage disaster | Life and style

 

• Saturday 14 May 2011

• Article history

 

Zarghuna Kargar. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

It was while recording a story about the impossibility of divorce for women in Afghanistan that Zarghuna Kargar decided she must find the strength to end her own arranged marriage. Brought up in Kabul and then Pakistan after her family fled from the Taliban, she was engaged at 16 to a distant relative she had never met and married in London after her family claimed asylum in Britain.

Trained by the BBC World Service's charitable arm in Pakistan, in London she became the presenter of Afghan Woman's Hour, a weekly magazine programme modelled on Radio 4's Woman's Hour that highlighted the terrible position of women in Afghan society. The show was a huge hit and was praised for its frank treatment of subjects including domestic violence and homosexuality.

But though her own family was educated and liberal, and her parents moved to the west partly for the benefit of their five daughters, an arranged marriage was expected and Zarghuna accepted that.

"I did have a lot of arguments with my parents during the engagement but it was something I had to do," she says. "I had to either be a good Afghan girl, who accepted whatever decision was made for me, or be a bad girl and leave. Breaking an engagement was a big thing and I got scared. So I decided, I'm a good Afghan girl, I'm going to do it the Afghan way. And we got married. The whole time it was a horrible feeling."

Now Zarghuna, who is 28 and known as Zari because some British people find the guttural "gh" sound difficult, has written about her miserable three-year marriage in her first book. Dear Zari is a heart-wrenching anthology of the personal stories broadcast on Afghan Woman's Hour. It includes appalling stories of abuse – of girls given away as household slaves to settle family feuds, of widows shunned, of wives blamed for giving birth to daughters.

Interwoven are intimate details of the author's life, including her wedding night. "God, please make sure I bleed; that's the only wish I have. I don't want money or a big house to live in – I just want this blood," was Kargar's prayer on the day of her marriage. Submitting to her husband, Javed, whom she did not like and hardly knew, and shaking uncontrollably, she spent the night weeping uncontrollably because the wished-for "proof" of her virginity did not materialise.

"As a result, my married life had begun with my husband failing to trust me," she writes. "Whenever he spoke unkindly to me after that, I thought it was because he didn't believe I'd been a virgin on my wedding night."

Unlike many of the Afghan marriages she describes, Kargar's relationship was not violent. She and Javed did not even argue that much, she says, because they were not that involved. "It was my destiny, but it wasn't a good feeling. He was about 25 – a young man – but when I met him it didn't really work for me in a girl way, or a woman way. I just didn't have any feelings and I think it was the same from his side. We were just put together by two families."

Kargar says that she tried to embrace her role as a wife, but they barely talked – she thinks partly because Javed envied her career. She hoped if he got a good job, the situation might improve, but instead she got lonelier and more convinced that their marriage was a disaster.

Her career flourished, as Afghan Woman's Hour achieved audience figures in the millions. But as her life became increasingly unhappy, Kargar found herself moved by the harrowing first-person stories featured on the programme to look again at her life. "I felt that discussing these kinds of women, their stories and the way they talked, and what they wanted, empowered me. I was feeling a kind of hypocrisy inside me because the experts I invited on the programme were giving all this advice, but I was not making decisions in my own life."

It was the story of Anesa, a woman married to a gay husband who moved his lover into the family home, that finally gave her the push she needed. For four years, Anesa said, she lived with her children, her husband and his lover. The lover was the favourite, while her sons were beaten and often went hungry. Yet she was unable to leave. Though Anesa's husband's homosexuality was frowned on by Afghan society, and his children victimised as a result, if she divorced him she would lose them. She often thought about killing herself.

In the office, Kargar and her World Service colleagues discussed divorce and the insurmountable problems facing women in Afghanistan who wished to leave their husbands. "And I was thinking, actually I have choice. I was educated, I had a good job and no children. I was capable of doing it and I had the support of the legal system."

In 2006, aged 24, and having lost all hope and respect for the relationship, she asked her husband to leave. At first he was angry, and tried with her parents to make her change her mind. But she stood her ground, and in the end the divorce papers came from him. He has since remarried.

 

Last year, the funding for Afghan Woman's Hour was cut, and Kargar transferred to the Afghan news service. The programme was not without its critics, as the money came from Foreign Office counter-terror funds, but Kargar is passionately proud of its role in promoting women's rights and freedoms.

When she arrived in the UK as an 18-year-old in August 2001, the September 11 attacks were still a month off. Ten years on, she supports the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and fears a return to even greater chaos. Her father, who was a government official during the Soviet invasion, and later worked as a writer on the World Service's Afghan soap opera, New Home New Life, now teaches Pashtun to British soldiers.

But while she was inspired by the young revolutionaries in Tahrir Square in Cairo, she is made uncomfortable by the celebrations in the west of the death of Osama bin Laden.

She kept her divorce secret from colleagues for two years after it happened, and is still working through her feelings about what happened, wiping away tears when she recalls her wedding. "I was just very upset, and very angry with everything. When they talked about the decorations, I said 'Just take the chairs from the kitchen! I don't care!' And I really didn't care. It was very difficult."

Her family hopes that she will remarry one day, and she says that although two of her sisters' arranged marriages have worked out well, her parents have decisively broken with the custom. She sees them every week and has forgiven them for her earlier unhappiness. They are proud of her book, she says – though she has been warned against publishing pictures of her relatives, including childhood photographs.

As a teenager in Peshawar, Pakistan, where women were more restricted than in 1980s Kabul, and she first became used to covering her head with a scarf, Kargar had no romantic or sexual experiences of any kind. "I was a very dull teenager, very quiet and isolated from boys," she says. "We were a girls family [five sisters, one brother] and in our culture, love stories are not really good stories to hear, so maybe those things had an effect. I didn't even understand that these feelings existed; I never even had a crush. It was weird."

What is disturbing in the book, and must surely be for many women in reality, is the way that such complete ignorance – even on her wedding night, in London, Zarghuna had no idea what to expect in the bedroom – is suddenly shocked out of them, as they are expected instantaneously to turn into adult women. One girl known to her family in Pakistan and mentioned in the book, offered in a marriage exchange at 11, died in childbirth after the book went to press – aged 13.

Now, with such innocence firmly behind her, Zarghuna is determined to make her own choices. She says the moment of her greatest strength was the decision not to have children with her husband when everyone around her encouraged it.

Pakistan may cut Nato's Afghan supply line after Osama bin Laden killing | World news

 

• Saturday 14 May 2011 20.51 BST

• Article history

 

Nato tankers burn in the northern town of Pindi Gheb, Pakistan, after an attack. There are fears that convoys will face a greater threat in future. Photograph: Mian Khursheed/Reuters

The security of Nato's main supply line into Afghanistan came under threat on Saturday as Pakistani parliamentarians voted to review all aspects of their relationship with the US amid worsening political fallout from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The unanimous motion was passed in the early hours of Saturday morning at the conclusion of an extraordinary 10-hour parliamentary session when the military's top brass offered apologies and admissions of failure, and the country's spy chief offered to resign.

Condemning the 2 May raid on bin Laden's house in Abbottabad, 35 miles northeast of Islamabad, as a "violation of Pakistan's sovereignty", parliament voted unanimously to review the country's terms of engagement with Washington.

In feisty speeches lawmakers warned against further "unilateral action", including CIA drone strikes, and urged the government to consider cutting the Nato supply line that runs from Karachi to Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and Balochistan.

Suspicious of Pakistan's failure to capture bin Laden but recognising the importance of the supply line and pursuing other al-Qaida fugitives, the Obama administration is dispatching Senator John Kerry – the "good cop" of US diplomacy with Pakistan – to Islamabad on Sunday.

"We're not trying to find a way to break the relationship apart, we're trying to find a way to build it," he told reporters in Kabul on Saturday.

Kerry arrives in Pakistan at a time of unprecedented criticism of the powerful military. On Friday night top generals were submitted to harsh questioning from parliamentarians during a marathon session that stretched late into the night.

The inter-services intelligence (ISI) chief General Shuja Pasha, one of the most powerful figures in the country, admitted to an "intelligence failure" on Bin Laden, insisting that the ISI had been kept in the "complete dark" by the US over the raid, and tendered his resignation to prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. It was not accepted – a sign that the government, led by Asif Ali Zardari, has decided to support the weakened military.

The fragile civilian government is gambling that its pro-army stance will guarantee it a full term in office. "It was politically a very astute move," said Talat Masood, a retired general and political analyst.

Another striking revelation came from the deputy air force chief, who admitted that CIA drones take off from Shamsi airbase in Balochistan province. But he insisted that the drones were unarmed – those carrying missiles came from Afghanistan, he said – and that Shamsi was actually under the authority of the United Arab Emirates, which built the remote airstrip in the 1990s for rich sheikhs on bird-hunting expeditions.

Despite having been technically held in camera, details of the parliamentary session leaked out to the media. One MP told the news website Dawn that the air force chief claimed to have ordered his jet fighters to shoot down US helicopters with Bin Laden's body on board when they were leaving Pakistan, but they were too slow.

Although generally apologetic, in some instances the generals struck back at their critics. When an MP from a religious party attacked Pasha, the spy chief told the mullah that was in no position to talk because he had received funds from Libya and Saudi Arabia.

The parliamentary motion appeared intended to deflect attention from uncomfortable questions about Bin Laden's Pakistan sanctuary onto complaints about US breaches of sovereignty. But the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted from power in a 1999 military coup, said he was determined to seek greater accountability of army power. "The elected government should formulate foreign policy. A parallel policy or parallel government should not be allowed to work," he told a news conference yesterday.

Deteriorating relations with the US are further complicated by a bitter row between spies on both sides. The fact that the CIA could run such a massive operation to capture Bin Laden had deeply embarrassed the ISI, said Vali Nasr, a former Obama administration advisor. "It's not just a diplomatic embarrassment, it's a counter-espionage failure," he said. "Suddenly the ISI is scared of what the CIA is capable of doing."

In a further sign of cooling relations General Khalid Wynne, chairman of Pakistan's joint chiefs of staff committee, has cancelled a five-day visit to the United States due to start on 22 May.

The US has begun to look to central Asian countries to reduce its reliance on Pakistan for military supplies to Afghanistan. The cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has already threatened to have his supporters block military trucks passing through Peshawar.

But outside parliament, the gap between political rhetoric and ground realities is as stark as ever in Pakistan. On Friday a CIA drone fired missiles that killed five people in the tribal belt, the fourth such attack since 2 May.

Yesterday the death toll from Friday's Taliban suicide attack on a paramilitary training centre climbed to 89; a Taliban spokesman said the vicious bombing was to avenge the al-Qaida leader's death and warned of more to come.

Karen Woo: film tracks murdered doctor's doomed Afghan mission | World news | The Observer

 

• Sunday 15 May 2011

• Article history

 

Dr Karen Woo, an aid worker, was murdered by the Taliban. Photograph: Century Films

When Dr Karen Woo went to Afghanistan it was not only to take her medical expertise to where it was most needed, but also to capture some of the country and its people on film, to show their desperate need for healthcare.

Her video footage shows children in Kabul suffering from the afflictions of war – the lost limbs, disease and malnutrition – and explains in detail why she felt drawn to face the risks of working in a conflict zone.

When the 36-year-old from Stevenage, Hertfordshire, was murdered, in August last year, in a remote area of the country, her fiance Mark "Paddy" Smith saw some of her film for the first time and decided to finish her work. For the past nine months, he has worked on an extraordinary project – a film that Woo began and that he has now completed, with a far different ending than she would have envisaged, but one that, he says, would have won her approval.

The Life and Loss of Karen Woo, to be shown on ITV next Sunday, is a moving documentary of two lives caught up in the complexity of Afghanistan.

"Karen's principal reason for being in Afghanistan was to help people by using her medical skills. But she also really wanted to make a film to show the human side to Afghanistan, that people here were human beings and we all have our fears and worries," said Smith. "Health is the leveller, everyone knows what it's like to be sick. And when you can't just run down the local hospital… it's tough.

"Although Karen never expected it would get any kind of national, wider audience, Karen was one of those people who believed in fate and that things come into your life for a reason. It might not have been the documentary that she would have made, of course, but to try to finish her work, using her footage, was very important and gave me something to throw myself into," he said.

Woo was on her way home after having joined a gruelling two-week aid expedition when she was killed. She had been part of a team taking medicines deep into Nuristan, a remote and impoverished region in the far north east. The 10-strong expedition, including six Americans, a German and two Afghan medical-aid workers, was ambushed by men claiming to be Taliban fighters. In cold blood, they were shot one by one. There was one survivor, an Afghan driver, left to tell the story.

For Smith, one of the hardest things to hear from the traumatised driver who survived the attack was how, 20 minutes before the Taliban ambush, his fiancee had been dancing around the vehicle, singing with excitement that she was soon on her way home to be married.

"She was so excited that in two weeks she would be Mrs Woo-Smith, she was so happy," he said. At 36, she had found what she had so long worried she would never find – the perfect partner – and was due to fly home to the UK for their wedding in London as soon as the team got back to Kabul.

"I was left with such an inordinate sense of loss, of the most perfect person for you, that person that everyone hopes to meet, the person that you want to be with, have children with," said Smith. "The completion of Karen's work was just something that was there to be done, it was the primary reason for her being there in the first place."

Smith, 36, a former Royal Engineer, met Woo in Kabul where he works as a security consultant. The couple set up home together after a whirlwind romance. Watching Woo's video, including the film from the trek, was a difficult experience, as was hearing her talk about the risks that she faced.

"I knew most of it. We had sat and discussed it at length," he said. "The trek we discussed at length but, to be honest, it was really not a security issues we were worried about. That area that they were going to – there was no one there, not any bad guys. The worst that we were planning for were things like a vehicle roll-over, or someone breaking a leg in such a remote area. Our contingency plans were all about getting a helicopter in, in case there was a medical emergency.

"The trek was going to focus with those real issues of getting healthcare out to the remotest areas, and it was a chance for her to see somewhere that very, very few people actually get to see.

"If I hadn't gone back home for a friend's funeral, I would have gone on the trek as well. As it was, I flew back to Kabul on the Wednesday, and she was killed on the Thursday.

"Yes, I wish I had been there. You want to protect the person you love, but could I really have done anything to stop what happened? My understanding of the speed and efficiency at which it all happened, I doubt it."

No one is really sure why the medical team was murdered. The Taliban took responsibility and claimed that the medical-aid trek was actually planned to convert local people to Christianity – something that was patently untrue . But the Nuristan Taliban shadow government distanced itself from the crime, saying that those killed were friends of Afghanistan. "And they were," said Smith, who still lives in Kabul.

"My analogy with Afghanistan is that's it's like receiving a poke in the chest every day. Every day it doesn't hurt, but after a while you've got an almighty bruise. They killed Karen, but I know that the Afghan in the street didn't have anything to do with it.

"I'm not after revenge or retribution. I don't know if I'll ever find out why it happened. None of it means Karen is coming back."

The month before she died, Woo wrote in her blog about the death of two friends in the country: "All of these people come to Afghanistan of their own volition, they come knowing that they may pay with their lives… no one ever expects it to be them, perhaps not their immediate friends either, it is always some poor unknown person, a local national, a third-country national."

 

www.karenwoofoundation.com

The Life and Loss of Karen Woo will be screened on ITV on Sunday 22 May

Royal Marine killed in Afghanistan explosion | UK news | guardian.co.uk

 

• Sunday 15 May 2011 15.16 BST

• Article history

A Royal Marine was killed by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan on Sunday, the Ministry of Defence said.

The marine, from 42 Commando Royal Marines, was involved in an operation to search a compound in the Loy Mandeh Wadi area of the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand province, an MoD spokesman said.

Next of kin have been informed.

Lieutenant Colonel Tim Purbrick, spokesman for Task Force Helmand, said: "It is with great sadness that I have to announce the death of a Royal Marine from 42 Commando Royal Marines. The Royal Marine was involved in an operation which was investigating suspected insurgent activity in a number of compounds in the Loy Mandeh Wadi area of the Nad-e Ali district in Helmand province when he was fatally injured by an improvised explosive device early this morning. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends."

The death takes the number of UK military personnel who have died since operations in Afghanistan began in 2001 to 365.

We must seize the day in Pakistan and Afghanistan | Peter Preston | Comment is free

 

• • Sunday 15 May 2011 18.00 BST

  • Article history

 

A police station destroyed by a suicide bombing in Swat district ? one of a series of attacks that have cost so many lives in Pakistan. Photograph: Sherin Zada/AP

The first thing that happened in Washington after Operation Geronimo, once the whooping and hollering faded, was a whole spectrum of politicians telling President Obama to quit Afghanistan ahead of his 2014 exit plan. After all, Osama bin Laden was dead: surely this was mission accomplished? The second thing that happened was a sustained attack on Pakistan, its leaders and its top military brass, as "faithless allies" (a New York Times coinage). Surely they deserved a good kicking with the money tap turned off? Now, though, put one thing with another.

If you ask the people of Afghanistan (via regular polling for the International Council on Security and Development) what they think, their answers echo bleakly. Maybe the north of the country is a touch more optimistic, but it's Helmand province that absorbs most effort and sheds most blood. Did Marjah district there think Bin Laden's death good or bad news? Bad news, said 71%. And right around Helmand, 63% of Afghans concluded that Nato couldn't protect them, surge or no surge, with 56% more disillusioned than this time last year. Only one policy for the future commands consistent majority support: 61% want negotiations with the Taliban. In short, jaw-jaw rather than more war.

But, just over the border in Pakistan, any such prospect seems far, far away. A berserk Bin Laden revenge attack left at least 80 young soldiers dead. Many MPs rail against the west and threaten to cut military supply lines to Afghanistan. Other MPs – and TV pundits – hammer the frailty (or duplicity) of army intelligence chiefs who couldn't see Bin Laden living in a villa down the road, and then couldn't catch three Navy Seal choppers doing the retribution job for them.

It's a bubbling brew of violence, despair, humiliation and rage; much of it directed inwards on those who have helped make a failing state but much of it directed against a US and a CIA, whose interventions stoke constant resentment. What does Washington want us to do next? Root out Mullah Omar, the original Taliban leader, and hand him over. The pressures to comply (for cash) and to scheme or grandstand (for domestic purposes) are cruel and irreconcilable. But if they can't be reconciled pretty soon, Pakistan could be a far greater problem than Afghanistan ever was. What happens when a nation of 178 million souls slides into chaos?

If Nato got out of Afghanistan fast, there would be no need to bend, bully and bribe Pakistan politics this way and that. If there were less outside pressure on Islamabad then President Zardari – whose wife, remember, was a victim of murderous zealotry – would be forced to address the state of his own nation. Wouldn't the generals who reckon they always call the shots get in his way? Not in their current depleted, almost disgraced, position. The democrats would be strengthened by settlement in Kabul, not weakened. And if Washington wanted to do something really helpful, think back to the cricket world cup: India and Pakistan's prime ministers sitting side by side. Pakistan needs India, its trade, its friendship; and India needs a stable Pakistan, cleansed of paranoia.

Of course, glowing scenarios are always one suicide blast away from destruction. Of course, calling on Pakistan's elected politicians to take the high road of statesmanship, rather than the low road of cowardice and corruption, comes with incredulity attached. But even florid "wars on terror" have to end sometime. Bush invaded Afghanistan to "get" Bin Laden. Both of them are history now, but any chance of a settled, stable Pakistan will be history too, unless the calamitous chain of events along the Khyber is broken. When you're not winning in Helmand, stop digging: when you're losing in Islamabad, throw away the spade: when there's a chance of something better at last, seize it.

Bounding into action with the dogs of war | World news

• Sunday 15 May 2011 20.00 BST

• Article history

 

A US army soldier and his dog leap from a helicopter during training over the Gulf of Mexico. Photograph: Reuters

None of their identities are known, of course, but one member of the team of US navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden has become the star: the dog. Since being mentioned in the first reports of the raid, details of this elite animal have become as sought after as the man it helped to catch.

What breed was it, for example? (Alsatian, malinois, or possibly a labrador, which is popular with the US marines in Afghanistan. British forces prefer spaniels.) Did it actually rappel down from the helicopter? (It seems so, yes, with help.) What was it wearing? (A bullet-proof vest with a two-way audio-visual communications system.) Did it have titanium-tipped teeth, as some papers claim? (Don't be silly.) What does it eat? (Carpaccio of evil-doer, twice a day.)

Yet the use of dogs in war is far from new. According to legend, a dog fought for the Greeks against the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490BC. The Greek historian Strabo also reports that ancient Britons used their hunting dogs for waging war. More often, though, dogs have been used as trackers, messengers or guards.

The German shepherd owes its popularity almost entirely to its success in the first world war. Having created it deliberately as a guard dog, the breeder Max von Stephanitz cunningly offered them to the German army for free. By 1918, 48,000 were in service, and became so popular they were taken home by British and US forces after the war (the name "alsatian" was hastily devised, to shed their association with the enemy).

Somewhat shockingly, a unit of "anti-tank dogs" was also used, by Soviet forces during the second world war. They were expected to run at enemy tanks with bombs strapped on their backs, which would explode on impact. But their unreliability in distinguishing between German and Russian tanks – and their fondness, when confused, for running back to their handlers – made this a mercifully brief experiment.

Today, the use of dogs within the British and US military is increasing, thanks to their unrivalled skill in sniffing out hidden explosive devices. And there are even canine medals – last year a black labrador called Treo was awarded the equivalent of the Victoria Cross for finding hidden bombs in Helmand province by veterinary charity the PDSA. A further 26 other dogs have also won the award, introduced in 1943.