“In Pakistan, individuals including dictators mattered more than institutions and processes… The governments of the past had not displayed a real allegiance” to Pakistan. “We are a very weak state and also a very scared state. We will take anything and not respond.” The minister said a US intelligence official had told him: “You are so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner…”
“I tried, in Pakistan, to define the sorrow which so constantly afflicts this country. The massive loss of life, the poverty, the corruption, the internal and external threats to its survival, the existentialism of Islam and the power of the army; perhaps Pakistan's story can only be told in a novel. It requires, I suspect, a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky.
But perhaps it is Pakistan's ability to do harm to itself that most struck me – symbolized, I fear, by the latest and most terrible affliction to strike it: child-kidnapping. Steal a little boy or a little girl, ask the parents for money, and kill the infant if they don't pay.”
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