Taliban Grab Pakistan

Read a wonderful column by Cowasjee this week. He writes that the MQM in Karachi are seizing lands designated to be green spaces and playgrounds and building homes on them. There is no environmental assessment and it's clearly a land grab.

You could say land grabbing is the least of Pakistan's problems but it's indicative of a deeper rot. A way of thinking that doesn't include the welfare of children, doesn't honour local government, and is, at its core, selfish.

In NWFP, there's a land grab of a different, more cancerous sort going on. Roughly a million people are pouring out of the SWAT Valley desperate to flee the Taliban. For the Taliban it's not just about land, it's about the subjugation of women, the owning of arms, and the spreading of a vile brand of Islam.

Relatives tell us that young children are being snatched from refugee camps and enrolled in Madrassas, Islamic schools, where they are indoctrinated with the Wahhabi brand of Islam. And girls are stolen by the dozen and forced into marriage with perverted old men who say they can have multiple wives. If the Prophet (PBUH) did it, then so should they.

There are so many things wrong with their way of thinking and it all comes down to lack of education. Lack of appreciation of the world, of the environment, of art, of beauty, of music. A fear of all things imaginative.

Yes, war does have something to do with it but ultimately it's the lack of education that has destroyed Pakistan.

It's too late for that once glorious, gorgeous country where I spent summers in the Karakoram Valley in my youth. Dear God help this sad, sad lost land.

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