Basharat Peer, the author of Curfewed Night, a memoir of the Kashmir conflict, and a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, uncovers lessons from last spring’s Swat valley campaign. From the National:
On the morning of May 27, Tariq Ali, a 42-year-old clerk at Rescue 15, a police helpline centre in Lahore, reported to work after a weekend visit to his family a few hours outside the city. He shared an office with two other clerks and a police officer. The building faced a shopping complex with a Toyota dealership and an immigration consultancy. Next door to Rescue 15 was an unmarked residence, known to locals as the Lahore office of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s dreaded spy agency. Half an hour after Ali arrived, shots rang out over the noise of passing traffic. Police sirens sounded, and Ali rose from his desk. Some of his colleagues ran to fetch weapons. Ali was still unsure what to do when an enormous blast threw him onto the floor. A suicide bomber had exploded a car inside the office compound.
“I saw a black wind filled with shards of glass tear into my office. Then the ceiling and the walls came crashing on us,” Ali told me, a week later, lying on his bed in the intensive care ward of Gangaram Hospital, surrounded by fellow policemen, his brother and his teenage son. Ali’s face was burnt, and the glass had cut most of his back, his lips, and both his eyes, one of which the doctors had sewed up – the other one was bandaged. The attack killed 23 people, including the officer who shared Ali’s office, and injured 150. More:
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