Browsing Tag: Abbottobad

OUTSIDERS, especially Indians, have expressed dismay ever since Osama bin Laden was killed last month in Abbottabad, a prime military town in Pakistan. Here is a state that both fights, and protects, Islamic fanatics. Even when Pakistanis themselves are the main victims of attack by jihadis, the state fails to act.

With the US having achieved its aim of crushing the bogey it created, the rest of us are still wondering whether the world is a safer place in the same way as it was being questioned by people when Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi was killed in 1831. Islamic fundamentalism did not die with the death of the Sayyid nor will it die with the killing of Osama bin Laden.

So have we exorcised the ogre of a savage state? The most formidable and the ferocious are yet the most vulnerable. Be they be ever so well-bunkered in a metropolitan residence or in a 'place like a dream' not far from where beckons... a lonesome stream.