Pakistan's leaders must act decisively after deadly Marriott bombing, analysts say
If the country doesn't take crack down on Islamic radicals, the experts suggest Pakistan could crumble into chaos.
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — More than any other terrorist attack in this volatile country, the devastating truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel over the weekend has presented government and military leaders here with a stark choice: Go all out against extremists or risk the nation's collapse into chaos.
That is the growing consensus among many Pakistani analysts and commentators, who fear that without rapid, determined and iron-fisted action by officials and security forces, this nuclear-armed land is in danger of becoming a failed state, with Islamic radicals in control.
Today, the government revealed just how close those militants may have come to dealing Pakistan an almost fatal blow. A senior official said that President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani and top Cabinet members were supposed to dine together at the Marriott on Saturday night -- but switched venues right before the bombing.
"At the eleventh hour, the president and prime minister decided that the venue would be the prime minister's house," Rehman Malik, the Interior Ministry's top official, told reporters. "It saved the entire leadership."
Malik did not explain what inspired the change in plans. A representative of the hotel later cast doubt on the statement, telling the Associated Press that there were no plans for a government dinner at the Marriott on Saturday.
Malik's disclosure, if true, betrayed the alarming extent to which militants have beefed up their own intelligence capabilities and have upgraded their planning and operations accordingly.
The suicide attack on the Marriott, an icon of social and political wheeler-dealing here in the Pakistani capital, killed 53 people, including at least two Americans, and wounded more than 250 people.
No verifiable claim of responsibility has surfaced yet, although a shadowy group called Fedayeen Islam told Al Arabiya news channel that it was behind the attack. From the ferocity and size of the bombing, suspicion has largely fallen on Al Qaeda and a group known as the Pakistani Taliban.
The violence gripping the nation continued today with the kidnapping of a top foreign diplomat in the city of Peshawar, in Pakistan's tribal belt.
Abdul Khaliq Farahi, the Afghan consul general there, who was due to become Kabul's ambassador to Islamabad in the next few days, was ambushed and abducted on his way home from the consulate this afternoon by gunmen who shot his driver to death. No word has been received from the kidnappers yet, said Majnoon Gulab, the deputy Afghan ambassador.
