chaudhry javed iqbal

I'm in the office of Dr. Sono, one of Pakistan's most extraordinary social entrepreneurs. Born a Hindu Dalit or "untouchable," he has worked for his country since his youth and emerged as one of the most important grassroots leaders in Sindh. He runs the Sindh Rural Support Organization, a nonprofit company that has emerged as the leading coordinator of local relief during the floods, providing food, sanitation, water and healthcare to six provinces, and serves 60,000 individuals two hot meals a day. With him are Sabiha Bhutto and Asma Soomro who Dr. Sono introduces as his "commandants." Both women carry serious expressions that give them gravitas and weight. Asma wears a black shalwar and an olive-and-rust-colored tropical print shawl over her head. Saibiha wears red-and-white narrow striped cotton. These two women led others to mobilize 80,000 people during the flood emergency.

I ask what they learned from the experience. Asma responds, "We learned to really go to their level, speak their language, feel what they would feel, and build trust." This is classic social-organizing language. "During these three weeks, I met a 90-year-old woman. She wanted to see how other people were coping in the disaster because she herself had gone through crises and was herself prepared for what might come. This inspired me a lot."

Sabiha speaks as much with her eyes as her hands. She remembers the sense of panic among people in Shikarpur who were understandably terrified by the threat of floods. "I spread calm to the people, and promised that Shikarpur would make it through the floods. I urged them to help those who were really in need." When local residents wanted to cross the river, she stopped them. She could see what others could not -- buffalos flying through the churning rapids, most of them drowning. Her neighbors trusted her, and lives were saved. I ask what she had learned. "I realize what it means to be brave," she answers.

Neither Sabiha nor Asma consider being a woman a hindrance, even in conservative parts of Pakistan. "People know that we are here for them," says Sabiha. "We've earned their trust." Between them, they've delivered sixteen women to the hospital to enable them to give birth during the crisis period.

Dr. Sono jumps in and says, "Last week, I received a phone call from a nearby village. The caller said people were drowning. And you know, I love that village." His eyes twinkle so that you can feel that love. I adore Dr. Sono for being so exquisitely alive and caring. He continues:

I called Sabiha and Asma and told them to go to the village and help people escape before the flood waters came. It was 10:30 at night, and still they went. This is a dangerous area, and women especially can be killed going out at night. But they went. And by midnight, the village was empty and there was not a single drowning.

The conversation turns to Pakistan's future, and what can be done about corruption.

Corruption is a big problem here. But we are seeing changes. We have minimized corruption at the district level, and now we have to translate that to the top level. We also have to focus on educating people at the grassroots, too, so that they begin to question government. This way, we can start to end corruption.

This way, the world can change.

As I listen to Dr. Sono and these two extraordinary women, I'm reminded of the true power of Pakistan, if only the country would allow it to flourish. Dr. Sono speaks the language of collaboration, courage, self-sacrifice, determination and inclusion. He dreams of a Pakistan where all people can access services. Sabiha and Asma show no insecurities about being women. They risked their lives going to those villages at night, but they saved their fellow citizens.

I could not be prouder to know Dr. Sono and to have worked with him through Acumen over the years. He is a teacher and a mentor, and I'm one of his biggest fans. Over lunch, I learn that it is his birthday today and I tease him about spending it in camps for the internally displaced. "What better thing could I be doing?" he asks with a smile.

Indeed.

LAHORE: The death toll from suicide attacks that targeted a busy procession in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore rose to 31 on Thursday as six people succumbed to their injuries, officials said.

Three suicide bombers targeted a Shia mourning procession made up of thousands of people on Wednesday at the moment of the breaking of the fast in the holy month of Ramazan, wounding hundreds.

It was the first major attack in Pakistan since devastating floods engulfed a fifth of the volatile country over the past month in its worst disaster yet.

“Thirty-one people have died and a total of 281 were injured,” Fahim Jehanzeb, a spokesman for Lahore's rescue agency told AFP, adding that he feared more would die from their injuries.

Sajjad Bhutta, a senior local administration official, also confirmed the new death toll.

A mass funeral was hastily arranged for later in the day with police and paramilitary providing tight security, while local authorities announced a day of mourning with all public and private institutions closed.

An AFP reporter said that all markets were closed and the roads were quiet on Thursday, after the attacks provoked an outpouring of fury in the city a night earlier, with mourners trying to torch a nearby police station.

Police fired tear gas to force back the surging crowd as furious mourners beat the bodies of the suicide bombers with sticks and shoes, while others beat their own heads and chests at the site of the attacks in frustration.

The emotional crowd chanted slogans against the police and the provincial government over their failure to protect the Shia procession, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.

Lahore, a city of eight million, has been increasingly subject to Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked attacks in a nationwide bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,600 people in three years.

The procession hit by the blasts was being held to mark the anniversary of the martyrdom of Hazarat Ali, who is revered by Shia Muslims and is the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed.

Shias account for around 20 per cent of Pakistan's mostly Sunni Muslim population of 160 million.

Religious violence in Pakistan, mostly between Sunni and Shiite groups, has killed more than 4,000 people in the past decade, and it is not the first time Lahore has seen bombers target religious gatherings.  – AFP

LAHORE: Pakistani officials say three suicide bombs have exploded during a Shiite religious procession in Lahore, killing four people and wounding more than 80.

 

The explosions took place at three separate sites amid a traditional mourning procession.

 

Khusro Pervez, the top administrative official in Lahore, said the number of dead could rise.

 

Footage of the first explosion shown on a news television showed a small blast erupting amid a crowd of people on the street followed by a large plume of smoke.

August 20th, 2010 by Cy

IT didn’t register immediately. That the flood coverage is really about two catastrophes, not one. There is of course the damage caused by the flooding itself, the one Pakistan will take years to recover from. Then there’s the damage of the last 63 years that the floods have uncovered.

By now everyone’s seen them on television screens, the miles-long processions of barely recognisable humanity, the materially dispossessed, the broken and the bowed.

Traumatised, lives shattered, you expect the flood victims to look a certain way. But it’s more than that. The victims are clearly not new acquaintances of adversity. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their eyes, sense it through their leathery skin. The victims of the floods carry the burden of a lifetime of misery.

The second catastrophe: the great floods of 2010 have uncovered 63 years of the great unwashed masses of this country. The people the state has failed in the most terrible of ways, not this week, not last month, but over its entire, sordid history.

Everyone knows, or should know, there is poverty here. Thirty-five per cent, 20 per cent, 45 per cent, whatever it was or is, the number is large. But in an antiseptic sort of way: sterile, faceless numbers, percentage points haggled over by bureaucrats that would appear to mean little — unless you stop to think those little decimals are dividing 170 million.

Still, that poverty exists here and is a significant problem shouldn’t be a surprise. Everyone has seen the poverty, in the cities, in the towns, in villages. But it’s quite another thing to see it on this scale, up and down the country, the length and breadth.

All at the same time, every ethnicity, every pocket of suffering. A human canvas of misery stitched together from 10 million, 20 million, tales of wretchedness. Many of the people on our television screens and newspaper pages aren’t just flood victims, they are living indictments of the Pakistani state failing large swathes of its citizenry.

Pakistanis who can afford to think about poverty, by definition the non-poor here, are usually quite casual about it. There’s no real structural, or structured, thought put into it. A few notes and coins dropped into grubby, outstretched hands at a traffic light, a langar organised here and there, and that’s about it.

There is, however, some pride taken in the fact (assumption, speculation, really) that ‘we’ don’t have poverty on a scale that the Indians do. Pfft, India Shining. Have you seen the poverty there, they’ll ask. There’s 450 million of them. It’s so shameful, they’ll tut-tut, and the place is so dirty. And the US? Did you know that the world’s richest country has a 14 per cent poverty rate, they’ll sniff.

Poverty here? Over here, there’s some vague recognition that the Thar area and swathes of Balochistan are backward places; that southern Punjab and upper Sindh are poor; that northern Pakistan and the tribal areas haven’t been developed. But there’s little understanding about what that means, that it translates into millions upon millions of the poorest of the poor, quite literally a mass of humanity existing outside and away from the tattered umbrella of the Pakistani state.

The floods have brought all those people into our living rooms. Seeing the broken bodies on television, the sunken eyes captured through a photographer’s lens, you can easily deduce many have never seen the inside of a clinic or a school, have probably never had two square meals in a day in their lives — every last one of them a Pakistani, but for whom that is as theoretical a concept as an escape from poverty.

In the unhappiest of ways, the floods of 2010 and the violence at the start of the new millennium have book-ended a decade of exposures of state failures here, a catalogue of human misery.

We’ve failed the people of Fata. We’ve failed the people of Swat. We’ve failed Balochistan. We’ve failed southern Punjab. We’ve failed the people of Karachi. We’ve failed the denizens of Lahore and Islamabad racked by violence. We’ve failed the freshly minted middle class whose incomes and jobs have been decimated. We’ve failed the rural poor.

The roll call of failures is long, depressing and is continuing.

In recent weeks, looking at India, Balochistan, Afghanistan and now Karachi has taken me frequently to the offices and homes of a slice of the Pakistani state machinery, in search of answers on state policy.

The luxury SUVs and sedans I have to weave through in the driveways and the well-appointed, sometimes garish, offices and living rooms, I notice — you can’t help but notice — but I don’t begrudge them. Silks and baubles are the favoured pastimes of the powerful the world over.

I have, however, often come away thinking one thing, do they even get it?

Strategic concerns, vote banks, cutthroat politics, in all of that stuff it’s never quite clear: where exactly in the bluster of the uniformed and the snivelling of the non-uniformed is the concern for the people of Pakistan, about making this country a better place, more responsive to the needs of its people?

Yes, deep down you know that the problems here would test the best government, the best administration and the best armed forces in the world. But we have none of those luxuries.

You know that Pakistan isn’t a failed state. But it is a state of failures, repeated and egregious.

You know that finite resources mean some must go without. But you know that many will just get swept under the fraying rug of green and white, out of mind before they are even out of sight.

I don’t mind the challenges, one of those tilting against windmills told me recently, because challenges can help focus the human mind.

Then, resignedly, he said, I just don’t get it, they don’t seem to care.

cyril.a@gmail.com

The greatest taboo: One woman lifts the lid on the tragic genetic consequences of when first cousins marry

By Tazeen Ahmad
Last updated at 11:11 AM on 23rd August 2010

Sitting in the family living room, I watched tensely as my mother and her older brother signed furiously at each other. Although almost completely without sound, their row was high-octane, even vicious.

Three of my uncles were born deaf but they knew how to make themselves heard. Eventually, my uncle caved in and fondly put his arm around his sister.

My mum has always had a special place in her family because she was the first girl to live beyond childhood. Five of her sisters died as babies or toddlers. It was not until many years later that anyone worked out why so many children died and three boys were born deaf.

Today there is no doubt among us that this tragedy occurred because my grandparents were first cousins. 

Tazeen Ahmad files a courageous and controversial report on one of the great taboos of modern Britain

My grandmother’s heart was broken from losing so many daughters at such a young age. As a parent, I can’t imagine what she went through.

My family is not unique. In the UK more than 50 per cent of British Pakistanis marry their cousins – in Bradford that figure is 75 per cent – and across the country the practice is on the rise and also common among East African, Middle-Eastern  and Bangladeshi communities.

Back when my grandparents were having children, the med­ical facts were not established. But today in Britain alone there are more than 70 scientific studies on the subject.

We know the children of first cousins are ten times more likely to be born with recessive genetic disorders which can include infant mortality, deafness and blindness.

We know British Pakistanis constitute 1.5 per cent of the population, yet a third of all children born in this country with rare recessive genetic diseases come from this community. 

Despite overwhelming evidence, in the time I spent filming Dispatches: When Cousins Marry, I felt as if I was breaking a taboo rather than addressing a reality. Pakistanis have been marrying cousins for generations.

In South Asia the custom keeps family networks close and ensures assets remain in the family. In Britain, the aim can be to strengthen bonds with the subcontinent as cousins from abroad marry British partners.

Some told us they face extreme pressure to marry in this way. One young woman, ‘Zara’, said when she was 16 she was emotionally blackmailed by her husband’s family in Pakistan who threatened suicide over loss of honour should she refuse to marry her cousin.

She relented and lives in a deeply unhappy marriage. But others told me of the great benefits of first cousin marriage – love, support and understanding. To them, questioning it is an attack on the community or, worse, Islam.

At a Pakistani centre in Sheffield, one man said: ‘The community feels targeted, whether that be forced marriages or first-cousin marriages. The community is battening down its hatches, not wanting to engage.’

As a British Pakistani, I am aware of the religious, cultural and racial sensitivities around this issue and understand why people would be on the defensive when questioned about it.

At times I was torn between explaining the health risks while privately understanding the community’s sense of being demonised.

But I have also grown up in a family that has suffered the medical implications and strongly believe that people should have the choice to make an informed decision.

Throughout I had to remind myself that this is a health story – nothing more. It is not about religion or cultural identity. It is about avoidable suffering such at that experienced by Saeeda and Jalil Akhtar, whom I met in Bradford.

They are first cousins and have six children, three with the genetic disease mucolipidosis type IV. This stops the body getting rid of waste properly and affects brain functions controlling vision and movement.

Mohsin, their second eldest, is 17 and blind. He wanders aimless and helpless, often crying in frustration. His sisters Hina, 13, and Zainab, 11, have the same condition. They live in almost complete darkness.

Saeeda is worn down from years of round-the-clock care. She spoon-feeds them, dresses them and fears for them. Neither she nor her husband can quite accept that their familial link is the cause of this pain.

This is a major public health issue that has huge implications for other services. The cost to the NHS is many millions of pounds.

On average, a children’s hospital will see 20 to 30 recessive gene disorders a decade, but one hospital in Bradford has seen 165, while British Pakistani children are three times more likely to have learning difficulties, with care costing about £75,000 a year per child.

However during this investigation we found no efforts to introduce any national awareness-raising campaign. Why?

We approached 16 MPs with a significant number of British Pakistani constituents for interview – every one declined. We asked 30 MPs with a high population of British Pakistanis

in their seats to give their views in a short survey. Only one, who wanted to remain  anonymous, responded, saying anyone who tried to talk about it risked being attacked politically. 

A lone voice was Ann Cryer, former Labour MP for Keighley, near Bradford, who said ‘fear of being accused of racism or demonisation’ prevented politicians speaking up.

It is not just British Pakistani families who suffer. Wayne and Sonia Gibbs are white and first cousins once removed. They had no idea this could lead to problems. Their daughter Nicole had juvenile osteopetrosis, a genetic disease that causes the bones to thicken and crush the body’s organs. Nicole died aged two.

The couple now know both carry the recessive genes that caused Nicole’s illness. They wanted more children – but had genetic counselling first. They have two healthy boys today.

I have travelled nationwide, meeting doctors and families whose lives are full of pain. To me the solution is simple: Ring the alarm bells loud and clear.

In Birmingham, one GP practice has taken radical action. The doctors have campaigned heavily to stop cousin marriages. They have introduced genetic screening and testing for patients, starting at 16, and now claim that very few cousin marriages take place there.

My mother tells me that, long before I was born, her siblings and their cousins decided their tragedy would never recur. 

The conclusion some will draw is that cousin marriages should be banned. I disagree. But people must be able to make informed choices about the risks involved and options available, be they genetic screening, counselling or carrier-testing.

At least there should be leaflets in doctors’ sur­geries and school campaigns.

Meeting the families in the programme upset me greatly. Every day for them was an uphill struggle, mostly because their children needed so much help and this put enormous stress on their family lives.

Yet this was avoidable. If this were any other health issue, politicians would have been out in force. But they are silent and as a result children continue to be born with terrible, prevent­able disabilities that are devastating their lives and those of their loved ones.

* Dispatches: When Cousins Marry is on Channel 4 at 8pm tomorrow.

In response to this story a Department of Health spokesman said: 'The risk of having a child affected by a genetic disorder following cousin marriage is a complex and sensitive issue that is best discussed and assessed with specialised genetics services.

'Through genetic services the NHS runs local initiatives aimed to raise
awareness of the risks associated with cousin marriage.'

Pakistan wicketkeeper Zulqarnain Haider is unlikely to play again in the Test series against England due to a hairline fracture on a finger in his right hand.

New victim in India-Pakistan 'cyberwar'

By Phil Hazlewood (AFP)

The "cyberwar" between India and Pakistan has claimed another victim, with the hacking of a high-profile lawmaker's website that experts say highlights the woeful lack of Internet security in South Asia.

A group calling itself the Pakistan Cyber Army said it hacked into the website of independent Indian MP Vijay Mallya, a flamboyant liquor baron, who is also head of Kingfisher Airlines and the Force One Formula One racing team.

"This is payback from Pak Cyber Army in return to the defacements of Pakistan sites!" the message on www.mallyainparliament.com said, according to Indian media. "You are playing with fire! This is not a game kids.

"We are warning you one last time. Don't think that you are secure in this Cyber Space. We will turn your Cyber Space into Hell," the message added, warning of "revenge" if Indians hack any Pakistani websites in retaliation.

Mallya, who also owns Indian Premier League cricket outfit the Royal Challengers Bangalore, has vowed to take up the matter with the government in New Delhi and police.

Security analyst Ajai Sahni dismissed the hacking, which coincided with Independence Day celebrations on both sides of the border at the weekend.

"They hack through any number of sites every year. It's just a bunch of kids who have got nothing better to do," said Sahni, the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi.

"The more serious threat is not this kind of childish prank but Pakistan's use of net-based communication for actual terrorist operations," he told AFP.

The Pakistan Cyber Army claims to have hacked a number of Indian websites in recent years, including India's state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, in retaliation for Indian hackers accessing Pakistan sites.

It is the latest in a tit-for-tat campaign by groups on both sides dating back to the late 1990s when tensions over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir brought the nuclear-armed neighbours to the brink of war.

Indian IT specialists said they were unsurprised at the latest incursion because of the lack of awareness about Internet security across the country, including in the corridors of power.

"It's non-existent," said Vijay Mukhi, a self-styled Internet security "evangelist" in India's financial capital Mumbai, who writes on computer technology.

Indians place little or no value on the kind of data individuals and organisations in many countries prefer to keep confidential, like passport and bank account details or work contracts, he said.

"Privacy is a concept not rooted in India culture. I don't think we can change that and I don't think it's going to change in my lifetime," said Mukhi.

"The government doesn't care" about protecting information online, he said. "Corporates for some reason just don't want to spend the money. They don't think it happens often.... Web security is a low priority."

Arun Prabhudesai, who writes about business and technology issues, said the ease with which websites can be set up is adding to the problem -- and will only get worse as more Indians get online.

"The people who do it don't have enough knowledge of security. That's why Vijay Mallya's site got hacked," he said.

According to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, a government agency that tracks IT security issues, more than 3,600 Indian websites were hacked in the first six months of this year.

Canadian researchers in April pointed the finger at a China-based network for stealing Indian military secrets via a "Trojan" virus as part of an elaborate cyber-espionage scheme targeting computers worldwide.

Prabhudesai said software to find "back doors" into websites is easily available and many of India's growing number of IT specialists have themselves taken to hacking, although more out of curiosity than malice.

Computer security firm Symantec said India had a surge in malicious activity in 2009, sending it from 11th to fifth spot on the list of sources of Internet security threats, including viruses and spam.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

By Sajjad Tarakzai (AFP) – 13 hours ago

NOWSHEHRA, Pakistan — Six million children are suffering from Pakistan's devastating floods: lost, orphaned or stricken with diarrhoea, they are the most vulnerable victims of the nation's worst-ever natural disaster.

At relief camps in government schools and colleges, and in tent villages on the edge of towns and by roadways, children are prostate from the heat, sick from dirty drinking water, or simply trying to find work.

"These are the most bitter days of my life," said Iltaz Begum, 15, suffering from diarrhoea and stretched out in a government tent on the muddy outskirts of the northwestern town of Nowshehra.

"The weather has made our lives miserable," she said. "I had to leave my blind mother behind and there's no one to look after her as my father died two years ago."

The tent village has no electricity. The rains have gone, only to be replaced by heat and humidity. Flies buzz everywhere and the smell of faeces wafts through the camp.

Girls like Iltaz are just a drop in the ocean for the massive relief effort that the international community is trying to mobilise in one of the biggest ever UN aid operations.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, visiting Pakistan on Sunday, said millions had lost their livelihoods as he witnessed "heart-wrenching" scenes of destruction. Pakistan says 20 million people have been hit by the floods.

"Many have lost families and friends. Many more are afraid their children and loved ones will not survive in these conditions," said Ban.

Sami Abdul Malik, spokesman for the UN children's fund UNICEF, said six million children were affected by the floods.

"Currently we are in a life-saving phase," he told AFP. "We are distributing high-energy biscuits because malnutrition is a curse. It can lead to several other diseases.

"Children are always vulnerable. They cannot control their thirst, they will drink any type of water and may get watery diarrhoea, cholera, malaria and other diseases."

In addition, there are trauma and psychological problems facing children who have been orphaned or separated from their parents.

In the south, people fleeing flooded homes have headed towards tent camps near the city of Sukkur. Abdul Ghani, 14, arrived from the remote village of Karampur, the eldest of seven orphaned siblings.

"Both my parents died in the space of six months last year. Me and a younger brother of mine worked as labourers to support the family," said Ghani, wearing a worn grey shalwar khamis.

"Life was already so difficult, but now we're doomed.

"My four-year-old sister is hungry and ill but I have no idea what to do, where to go. No one is there to help us," he said.

Shakeel Ahmed, 15, another orphan, faces a similar problem providing shelter and food for his three younger siblings.

"We're too young and no one takes our problems seriously. No one listens to us. I tried to explain our problems but they shrugged me away," he said.

In a relief camp at a Nowshehra technical college, children are crying, many walk naked without shoes, and a foul stench pervades the air due to people urinating and defecating next to the tents.

Doctors at the camp's field hospital say most of the children are suffering from gastroenteritis, skin diseases and dehydration caused by filth and infection resulting from the destruction of sewers in the floods.

Twenty-five year-old Bushra Humayun, a labourer's wife, said she had given birth to twins in the camp, adding to her six other children.

She recalled losing her house in the flood and wading up to her neck through water while pregnant to reach the camp, two miles (three kilometres) away.

"I'm not getting enough food to feed my two infants and they're getting weak as they remain underfed," Humayun told AFP, sweat dripping down her face.

Her 12-year-old son Haroon had stomach pain and mosquito bites all over his arms and face. Life in the camp is their only prospect for the foreseeable future.

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

NEW DELHI: Contrary to Centre's growing estimate that alleged Hindu extremists carried out the May 2007 Mecca Mosque blast in Hyderabad, the United States and the United Nations have held the Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI) responsible for it. The UN has, in fact, termed the blast a joint operation of HuJI and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and listed a number of other terror attacks in India in which these outfits were involved.

HuJI's role in the Mecca Mosque blast was highlighted both by the US and the UN while banning the outfit as a `terrorist organisation' and designating its top commander Ilyas Kashmiri as a `global terrorist' having links with al-Qaeda on Friday. Kashmiri had recently been indicted in the US for providing material support to Pakistani-American LeT operative David Coleman Headley.

India had also suspected HuJI's involvement in the Mecca Masjid blasts before stumbling upon evidence linking the terror act to the group aligned with Abhinav Bharat who are suspect in two other attacks on Muslim targets -- the blast at a mosque in Malegaon and at the Ajmer Shrine. It is possible that the UN and US authorities did not check with India for fresh updates on investigation into the crimes, going along with the initial line of Indian investigators.

Their "finding" may trigger a controversy because investigators have uncovered more evidence linking the Mecca Masjid blast which killed 16 people and injured 40 to Hindu extremists.

The US has pointed out that HuJI -- which has been operating in India and Pakistan -- had carried out this terror attack besides several others including the one in Varanasi in March 2007.

Justifying its determination, the US department of state in its statement said: "These actions were taken in consultation with the department of the treasury and the department of justice.... These actions will give US law enforcement additional tools needed to restrict the flow of resources to both HuJI and Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri."

The same day, the UN too imposed sanctions on both HuJI and its commander Ilyas Kashmiri, subjecting both the entity and the individual to "the assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo". The world body has also listed a number of terror attacks which were carried out by HuJI. Besides the Mecca Masjid blast, these include the twin explosions in Hyderabad in August 2007 and suicide bombing of the US Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2006 among others.

Though India had banned the outfit long ago, the UN's decision may have its implications in Pakistan as all members of the world body would now be required to implement "asset freeze, travel ban and arms embargo" against HuJI and Kashmiri.

Although the American decision gave credence to what Indian investigators had initially suspected on the basis of preliminary findings in the Mecca Masjid blast, it contradicted the recent probe suspecting links of perpetrators of this blast with those of the Malegaon (September 2006), Samjhauta Express (February 2007 in Haryana), and the Ajmer Sharif dargah (October 2007) blasts. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) was recently handed over the probe of the Samjhauta blast case. The investigation will also look into whether all these blasts were actually carried out by Hindu terror outfit Abhinav Bharat or some other Hindu extremists groups.

Though the initial probe had hinted at involvement of Hindu extremist group in the Samjhauta blast, the twist came when the US last year named one Arif Qasmani of Karachi as being involved in the Mumbai suburban train blasts of July 2006 and in the Samjhauta Express blast. The NIA will now have to find out the truth.

A week before her death, travelling through the same lowland towns of the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan that are now half-buried under mud, Benazir Bhutto said to me: "Pakistan has changed Mr Burke, Pakistan has changed. And I need to learn about it once more."

Bhutto had returned to her native land three months earlier and after an eight-year exile, a comeback in large measure due to arm-twisting by the Bush administration's top officials and the British Foreign Office. With characteristic brio, she had thrown herself into campaigning for scheduled elections. Her comments came after she had halted her armoured vehicle to plunge into a market in the scruffy town of Pabbi to buy oranges. "I need to know the price of vegetables," she had told me as we got back into her vehicle. "I need to know about my people."

Bhutto's death, at the hands of a 16-year-old suicide bomber, marked the moment that Pakistan returned to the limelight after several years overshadowed by Iraq and terrorism in Europe and the UK. Since then, it has barely left centre stage. Home to al-Qaida, much of the Afghan Taliban, an astonishing range of indigenous militants, beset by economic and environmental disaster, Pakistan is one of the victims and the villains of the ongoing multidimensional conflict that is the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the now defunct war on terror. The Wikileaks on the Pakistani security establishment's support for the Afghan Taliban, David Cameron's statement in India that the state must stop sponsoring terrorism overseas and now the visit of Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower and president of Pakistan since August 2008, who arrived in the UK last week, have focused attention on Pakistan again.

Pakistan is usually viewed through three prisms. The first is that of the Orientalists. Experts, officials, spooks and diplomats still frequently cite Winston Churchill or even Kipling as a useful guide to the North-West Frontier. This is roughly equivalent to using Emile Zola to learn about modern France, Joyce about Ireland or Dickens about today's East End. There has probably been deeper and faster social change in Pakistan in recent decades than in the UK. If you think Thatcherism changed Britain, imagine what the roughly contemporaneous rule of General Zia-ul-Haq did to Pakistan. Or the coming of mass broadcast media and telephones to the smallest rural settlement, where high levels of illiteracy still persist, in the last decade.

The second prism is that of the fragmented failing state. Pakistan is yet to fulfil any of the multiple warnings of imminent collapse since its foundation in 1947. With 180 million people, a dozen different ethnicities, languages, Himalayan mountains and Gulf beaches, Pakistan certainly is diverse. But no more so than many other big countries. Its state and social structures may be catastrophically weak but it is astonishingly resilient. In the last decade, Pakistan has suffered several major natural disasters, a coup and a virtual coup, mass civil unrest, a series of insurgencies that amount to a civil war, the killing of its best-known political leader, massive and barely governed economic growth followed by a crash and many other blows. Somehow Pakistan keeps going. It seems likely to in the next decades.

The third prism is the vision of Pakistan as a "battlefield between the moderates and the extremists". This is perhaps the most misleading. It is true that the exact role of Islam within Pakistan has always been debated – is it a country of Muslims? Or a Muslim country? – and that there are both relatively secular "moderates" and religious extremists. But if the religious right is a fringe element, so too are the "moderates". The "battlefield" prism obscures the critical mass in the middle who, while the two fringes exchange brickbats, is quietly forging a coherent, potent and fairly homogeneous identity.

You often hear about the Arab Street but never the Pakistani Street. Yet the Pakistani Street – the man on the Gujranwala omnibus — is not only there but it – and he — is the future of the country.

Break Multan, once a provincial town in arid southern Punjab, is now a city of around 1.5 million where new hotels, shops, offices and religious schools are multiplying with equal rapidity. At a university on its outskirts, I spoke to some of the 14,000 students who, like their counterparts anywhere, sat, books spread around them, on the grass amid the buildings. They were the sons and daughters of the rapidly expanding Pakistani middle class, studying in a middle-ranking college, in a middle-sized town, of mixed ethnic origin, close to the geographic centre of Pakistan and the point where the country's four provinces meet. If anyone was representative of what Pakistan, where the average age is 21, will be and will think in a decade, they were.

The conversations we had were deeply depressing. Their view of the west, coloured by conspiracy theories about the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, a visceral anti-Americanism and a deep social conservatism, was overwhelmingly negative. The west's material conditions were undoubtedly attractive, many said, but there was no respect for women or the old and there was pornography, prostitution and Aids too. People should be able to choose whom they marry, they agreed, and women should work. But a balance none the less had to be kept.

Their patriotism was assertive and unabashed. "We are a proud and great country. We have nuclear weapons," said one. In Afghanistan and in Kashmir, Muslims were "as oppressed" as they were in Palestine, I was told. They all wanted "democracy" but said their politicians were corrupt and never helped the poor.

Though no one wanted clerics to rule, the laws of the country should however be in accordance with sharia. The students maintained a strict gender segregation. The girls were veiled. Many of the men were bearded. They were neither members of Jamaat-e-Islami, the big Islamist party, nor the ultra-westernised elite kids who party in Lahore or Karachi. They were "middle Pakistan".

A poll of Pakistanis released last month by the respected Pew Centre reinforced quite how widespread such views are. More people see al-Qaida, the Taliban and homegrown groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba more favourably than the US, it found. More than 80% supported segregating men and women in the workplace, stoning adulterers and whipping or amputation for thieves. Three in four endorse the death penalty for apostasy. And 80% said suicide bombing was unIslamic.

This is not just an issue for Pakistan. All militaries reflect the views and culture of the society that produces them and the half-million strong Pakistani army is no exception. An increasing proportion of soldiers come from the "emerging urban centres" which the historian of the Pakistani army, Shuja Nawaz, has noted are "the traditional strongholds of the growing Islamist parties and conservatism associated with the petit bourgeoisie".

After talking on al-Qaida at the army's headquarters, I was told off by senior officers for repeating the "lies of the western establishment". The "miscreants" against whom their comrades were fighting on the Afghan frontier had been "led astray" by India, the CIA or "the Jews", one colonel said. "We are the army of the nation," said another. It is a statement that is more accurate than many in the west care to think. It also explains policies, such as sponsoring the Afghan Taliban, which bewilder many western observers. This is not to say other values or perceptions do not exist – they do – but just that the views of students in Multan were thus mainstream.

So where does that leave Britain? David Cameron's visit in India last month revealed the vast gulf between how we now view India and Pakistan. We are happy with India's growing power and independence, not least in the hope it will counterbalance the far more frightening Chinese as the global eclipse of Europe accelerates. Yet for Pakistan, a decades-old policy continues. We ignore the increasingly powerful cultural and political influence of an increasingly conservative Middle East in the country. We hope our favoured English-speaking moderates, such as the Bhutto clan, can somehow fashion a new ally and partner out of this troublesome nation.

Yet what Benazir Bhutto had recognised a few days before her death was not just that Pakistan had changed but that the time for changing Pakistan had passed too. And this is the unpleasant new reality that Britain and America need to get used to. Pakistan's identity issues are steadily being resolved. But not how we would like them to be. Shout as much as we like, the man on the Gujranwala omnibus is increasingly unlikely to listen.

Jason Burke, The Observer