Pakistan Conflicted

The government of Pakistan has more than its share of problems in its tenuous hold on the country's fortunes, slumping precipitously toward the abyss. There is the executive branch, and particularly in Pakistan, there is the army and the intelligence service; they're certainly not reading from, acting from, leading from the same hymnbook.

It seems that each time the country's president, Asif Ali Zardari, eager to ingratiate himself with the West, correctly identifies with the Western agenda, he's swiftly brought back to the reality of Pakistan's convoluted, corrupt reality.

A day following the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, and a day after president Zardari clearly blamed the Islamists based on the Afghan-Pakistan border for the attack, his Interior Ministry spokesperson claimed that the attack was to be laid at India's feet.

For Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency claimed that India had planned the attack, recruited for it, and saw it to its conclusion. Which will certainly go far in re-establishing already bruised relations between the two countries. Just as they originally denied the origin of the Mumbai attackers.

But this is another day, and now Pakistani authorities claim they have 'identified', although not yet arrested the terrorists involved in the attack. There have been some arrests, the detainees part of two outlawed militant groups linking with al-Qaeda.

From whose ranks the attackers who bloodied Mumbai came. And who themselves were and presumably remain, associated in the most sinister and believable way with the ISI.

Tuesday's attack was the work, it is now admitted, of Islamists from Punjab and the North West Frontier Province. How dreadfully awkward that is, given that the government has given its permission for the tribal Taliban in the Swat Valley to govern under sharia law.

And how utterly peculiar it is that a more organized and stringent protection was not given to the two buses of cricket players in Lahore. Something mentioned as being a suspicious occurrence, noted by people present there.

And how additionally peculiar it was that the contingent of police at the site, of whom there were assumed to be sufficient unto the day, were incapable of meeting the assault with equal determination and firepower, handily overpowering the dozen attackers.

As former president Pervez Musharraf remarked, the special police tasked with guarding the Sri Lankans should have been able to respond adequately - in fewer than three seconds. "That should be the level of training that I expect from an elite force ... we need to improve that standard", he said.

Understatements abound.