Another thought provoking post at the Pak Tea House- Shaheryar Azhar observes that the greatest casualty of President Bush’s version of the ‘War on Terror’ has been the death of common sense and intelligence itself:

As I was watching the coverage of the Mumbai massacres, the Western media was so busy bashing Pakistan or talking platitudes about the threat of hostilities between the ‘two nuclear powers’, that not once did I hear from all the expert talking heads about the ‘capacity’ of Pakistani state to take on the terrorists even if we assume the best of intentions and the political will of steel. Not once did the ‘wise men of Gotham’ say: If thousands of Pakistani soldiers and civilians are killed, if its generals and top political leaders are blown away, if its buses full of ‘all-powerful’ ISI staff are themselves bombed, if a five-star VIP-patronized hotel, a stone’s throw-away from the Prime Minister’s house is suicide-bombed with an incredibly powerful explosive and burned to the ground and if the President, the Prime Minister and the Generals of the country can not move about the cities with all the security at their disposal in the discharge of their normal duties, perhaps the state of Pakistan does not have the capacity to confront the enemy within. There is a limit how far one can take ‘rougue ISI and military elements in Pakistan’ argument to explain everything before it begins to sound trite  and lame.