Good Thing That State Of Emergency Has Been Lifted

Since the terrorist threat in Pakistan is obviously in its last throes.

More than 30 people were killed on Friday in a suspected suicide bombing at a mosque in northwest Pakistan, where a former interior minister was offering Muslim Eid festival prayers, police said.

Former interior minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, who belonged to President Pervez Musharraf's government, was at the mosque at the time of the attack but it was unclear if he was the target. He said he escaped unharmed but his son was injured.

"More than 30 people have been killed in the blast," Feroz Shah, a senior police official at Charsadda district, in North West Frontier Province, told Reuters. "We still don't have an exact figure."

Militant Islam was never the reason for the imposition of martial law, and nothing has been done to decrease that threat in any meaningful way during that martial law. And in the meantime, while the government lost all credibility inside the population due to the hijacking of any vestige of democracy, they're also dealing with their very own Abu Ghraib:

Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies, apparently trying to avoid acknowledging an elaborate secret detention system, have quietly set free nearly 100 men suspected of links to terrorism, few of whom were charged, human rights groups and lawyers here say.

Those released, they say, are some of the nearly 500 Pakistanis presumed to have disappeared into the hands of the Pakistani intelligence agencies cooperating with Washington’s fight against terrorism since 2001.

No official reason has been given for the releases, but as pressure has mounted to bring the cases into the courts, the government has decided to jettison some suspects and spare itself the embarrassment of having to reveal that people have been held on flimsy evidence in the secret system, its opponents say [...]

In one case, a suspect tied to, but not charged with the 2002 killing of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist, was dumped on a garbage heap, so thin and ill he died 20 days later. He, like one other detainee, was arrested in South Africa several years ago and released in Pakistan this year.

You think that's not driving the militant strain? You think that's not a recruiting tool?

One of the positive steps Congress took before breaking for the holidays was to restrict military aid to Pakistan and condition it to the restoration of democratic institutions. If we can't control our government at home, maybe at least we can stop funding one that's imitating it.