Word: pakistan
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...thwart the bomber, who blew himself up near the back of the crowd. After a loud blast, large plumes of white smoke filled the air. Some of the marchers fell to the ground, while others fled in a panic. "It was an inhuman act of terrorism," Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, told TIME. Suspicion immediately fell on the Pakistani Taliban. (See Karachi's defiant fashion week...
Since the 1980s, Pakistan's Shi'ite community has been subjected to brutal attacks from extremist Wahabi-inspired militant groups that regard them as heretics or apostates. With the emergence of the Pakistani Taliban, that threat has intensified. In recent years, the town of Parachinar in the wild tribal areas along the Afghan border, Baluchistan province's capital of Quetta, Dera Ismail Khan in the northwest, and parts of Punjab have been among the areas scarred by anti-Shi'ite attacks. The latest bombing will call attention to the Taliban's long-standing but murky presence in Karachi. Until this...
Monday's bombing comes at a sensitive time for Pakistan, as President Asif Ali Zardari appears to be battling for his political survival. A day earlier, while marking the second anniversary of the slaying of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari raised a defiantly worded warning that democracy was imperiled. Since the Supreme Court earlier this month struck down an amnesty that had cleared Zardari and some of his closest aides of long-standing corruption charges, pressure has increased on the presidential palace, slowly eating away at the occupant's authority and raising the prospect of a destabilizing...
Speaking near his wife's grave on Sunday, Dec. 27, Zardari railed against unnamed forces that were conspiring to derail his shaky and unpopular government and Pakistan's democracy. Writing in the Wall Street Journal the same day, Zardari said that "a litany of ancient charges of corruption - the modus operandi of past plots against every democratically elected government in Pakistan - now threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our government." The blame, he added, lies with those who refused to stand with him against terrorism and his opponents in the media...
...overstepping its role by lifting the amnesty on Zardari's corruption charges. A potentially destructive confrontation between the two is now feared. Meanwhile, the political opposition is slowly ratcheting up pressure on Zardari to step down, something he is no mood to do. The bad news for Pakistan is that, yet again, its rough-and-tumble politics may mean that not enough attention will be paid to defeating the terrorists who hit Karachi on Monday...