It was a scene familiar from coffee bars around the world. A student in designer clothes tapping away on his laptop while Pink Floyd’s Money blared out from a stereo and customers ordered iced Americanos and cinnamon cakes.The affable 21-year-old updating his Facebook page was Abdul Wahhab Qureshi. He was born in France, spoke perfect English and was finishing his studies in Abbottabad. Like many others his age, he dreamed of travelling the world after finishing his studies.
Abdul cheerfully told me how he had lain awake five nights earlier and heard the thump of American helicopters as they swooped on the world’s most wanted man. So what did he think about the death of Osama Bin Laden.
‘Oh, I don’t believe he is dead,’ he said. ‘If someone was shot in that house, it was not him. You cannot trust the Americans, they have changed their story so many times already.’
Abdul is not alone in his disbelief. A survey found two-thirds of people in Pakistan share his refusal to accept Bin Laden’s death, despite confirmation by Al Qaeda. Even the country’s most revered lawyer told me ‘the ghost of Osama has survived his execution’ given the lack of concrete evidence, storing up problems for the future.
Such profound scepticism, shared by sophisticated students and lawyers as well as farmers, sums up the baffling nature of this beguiling and near-broken country. It is a place that in the past decade has become a byword for terror and has been called the most dangerous country on earth. It is neither of these things. Not yet.
But even its stoutest defenders say it teeters on the brink of collapse. And the unanswered questions over the execution of the man who became an icon of terror has opened a new chapter in its epic saga of death, destruction and decay. It is a saga in which we have a big stake, since its problems are so entwined with our own involvement in Afghanistan and the future of the global jihadist terror movement.
Pakistan has also become the world’s fifth-biggest nuclear power – bigger than Britain or France – making its instability all the more alarming. Read More
"There were barely 200 of them, while foreign reporters milled around looking for incendiary quotes. I watched as a BBC news crew carefully repositioned one young firebrand to have bearded zealots behind him to ensure the usual images of Pakistan were presented to the world.
Cut out of the picture were two teenagers laughing and nudging each other at their friend’s antics for the camera.
There have been more than 5,000 military deaths over the past decade, while a constant stream of suicide bombs, executions and assassinations slaughtered more than 30,000 others. This is more than ten times the number killed in 9/11."
