Word: baghdad
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...Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy last year after he had come back from reporting in Iraq. He called his return “jarring,” stating that Cambridge is “sort of all the things that Baghdad is not.” Aided by a slide show of photographs, Filkins spoke of being in Afghanistan before the NATO invasion, until he was arrested and expelled in the summer of 2000, and later, of shadowing a marine battalion during the invasion of Iraq. Filkins likened the aftermath of the American...
...grin a mix of humor and utter seriousness in the rearview mirror. In a second, we were off again, dust flying, as the muffled voice of the lead driver came in over the radios: "Go, go, go! Don't anyone stop!" It may be easier to drive out of Baghdad now, but danger still lurks on the road...
Call it the Baghdad effect. The colorful moniker may differ slightly from the "green-zone" U.S. forces carved out of central Baghdad, but Islamabad is beginning to feel a little like the Iraqi capital these days, especially since the devastating Marriott bombing that killed 54 people. True, Islamabad is not tattered by years of economic sanctions, nor pockmarked by days of aerial bombardment. And it is not occupied by a foreign army. But on my first trip here in six months, I'm struck by all the ways - small and big, physical and mental - Islamabad has become Baghdad circa...
Take those concrete barriers. They are not yet the 12-foot tall monsters that eventually scarred Baghdad's streets like lifeless, bleached reefs (and which were being taken down in one part of the Iraqi capital last week). But big or small, the effect on traffic is the same: huge jams, boiling frustrations and growing chunks of the city off limits to ordinary citizens. The most visible no-go area in Islamabad today is the high end of Constitution Avenue (there's a moral in that somewhere), but security forces are also closing off smaller roads, remaking traffic flows...
...explosion as the Marriott went up. "Horrible," he says. "The whole thing is horrible. You can hardly go out anymore without worrying" There's still lingering hope that the new government can improve security and get the economy humming again. But perhaps the scariest part of comparing Islamabad to Baghdad is the knowledge that things got much worse in Iraq before they got better...