Alex Massie Alex Massie

Pakistan Edges Closer to the Abyss

Sometimes it’s the seemingly minor events – minor, that is, in the grand scheme of matters, not necessarily small or insignificant at the moment they occur – that can carry more weight than more obviously important or telling developments. Lord knows, there’s been no end of troubling news from Pakistan in recent years. But, silly as it may seem, there’s something especially terrible about today’s attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team which killed at least six policemen and injured five members of the Sri Lankan team. (See Cricinfo’s rolling updates for the latest news.)

Political assassinations, for instance, are hardly unknown in Pakistan (or elsewhere on the subcontinent) and so it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to file them in a drawer marked Terrible Stuff That Sometimes Happens. By contrast, this attack has the Shock of the New about it. As Ducking Beamers says, the ghastliness of this latest act of terrorism is increased because its intended victims were not westerners. Whatever else may be said of the Bombay attacks, there was at least some degree of logic behind the attempt to target western tourists. Details may in due course emerge to contradict this, but at present it is hard to see any political motivation for this atrocity beyond edging Pakistan closer to fully-fledged failed state status. And that may be the point of it. In that sense, then, the immediate target may have been the Sri Lankans, but the real intended victim is Pakistan itself.

That is, it’s a message desgined to demonstrate that this is Pakistan’s new normality. Attacking the national pastime is a way of shutting off Pakistan from the rest of the world. Cricket was one of the few remaining arenas in which Pakistan could engage with other countries on anything like normal terms.

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