A pink madrassa and a police guard car

I'm driving around Pakistan's largest city and financial capital, Karachi, with the mayor, Syed Kamal, who tells me that Islamists have penetrated th slums of this crucial port metropolis, pop 17 million, and may threaten its future.

We ride in an SUV preceded and flanked by police vans with a gunner poking his head through the roofs and two other shooters looking backwards out of the van. We pass by the highway overpass where the late Benazir Bhutto's convoy was blown up in Dec. 2007, shortly before she was assasinated in Islamabad. We drive by the radical religious school outside which Danny Pearl's body was dumped.

What's most scary is two things: first, there are 3500 such radical schools or madrassas, where young boys are closeted away until teenagerhood and brainwashed with radical versions of Islam. Many of them have been painted pink, in sympathy with the Red Mosque, a hotbed for radical preachers in Islamabad which was razed a couple of years ago but has now reopened. 

Second, there are mammoth slums in this city, into which refugees from Pakistan's Pashtun tribal areas have poured, and the mayor believes they contain sleeper Taliban cells that could be triggered to shut down the city, through which pour the supplies that travel by road to U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Heroin from Afghanistan,  also pours out of this port, he says, and Pakistan's strange police system - which leaves mayors without control over their security forces - allows this outflow to proceed unchecked.

Suleiman Minhas

My driver, helper and protector in Islamabad is Suleman Minhas, the Operation Manager of the Central Asia Institute, run by Greg Mortensen, the author of the longrunning bestseller, Three Cups of Tea.

Greg has built 78 girls schools in Pakistan and 25 in Afghanistan. His book details his rescue by Pakistani villagers from a mountain climbing accident on K-2 nearly two decades ago, after which he pledged to return to the remote mountainous area and build the village a school. On one of his early visits, Greg met Suleiman, who was then driving a taxi, but became inspired by Greg's idea and has been working with him every since. Now Suleiman makes all arrangements for Greg's visits and the visits of board members and others who work with the project.

Since then, he started the foundation and has built schools with a fraction of the money that would be expended by aid agencies, using local labor from villagers who want their children to be educated. With the earnings from his book and speaking engagements, he also pays for teachers and teacher training, until the local government is willing or able to take on that responsibility.

In 2007 I travelled with Greg and Suleiman to Pakistani Kashmir to visit schools they had rebuilt after the earthquake there. This year I'm lucky to have Suleiman helping to make my arrangements in Pakistan. 

Anyone who wants to know more about the Central Asia Institute, or to make a contribution, can go to www.ikat.org.

Black turban means"talib"

A self-declared member of Taliban lines up to be searched before praying at the infamous Lal Masjid or Red Mosque, in islamabad, where the government attacked around 21 months ago, killing scores of radical students and family members and arresting radical cleric Maulana Abdel Aziz. Taliban wear black turbans and hitch their pants up above their ankles (no, I do not know why).

Maulana Abdul Aziz was released from prison last week. I went to hear his Friday sermon, standing on the sidelines, the only woman among hundreds of men who gathered in the area surrounding the mosque. I was well covered, wearing a huge headscarf (called a chadoor), and no one caused me any problems.

Maulana Abdel Aziz, a Khomeini wannabe, announced he would travel around the country calling for imposition of Islamic law. He will tell the people that only Islam will bring them justice.

Will the goverment let him set out on his crusade?

Frontier Corps guards

Today I visited Balahisar fort, the incredibly impressive fortress where the Frontier Corps are headquartered may be as much as 2000 years old. I did an interview with the FC's impressive commander General Tariq Khan.

The British extended their rule to Peshawar in 1849 and reenforced the then mud fort at with bricks. 
On 14 August 1947, the Pakistan flag hoisted over Balahisar, and the following year it became the Headquarters of the Frontier Corps (FC).

The FC's paramilitary force, neglected for the past couple of decades, is being beefed up, including US aid and trainers, in the hopes that - since its members are Pathans from the tribal areas - it can be more effective in fighting militants who are gaining in strength there.  I will be writing about the prospects for remaking the FC in my Sunday column.

Here's how the Taliban grow. These are refugees from the Bajaur tribal agency who were forced to flee their villages when the army came in looking for Pakistani Taliban. They were caught in the middle.

Now 16,000 (of 85,000) are stuck in Kacha Garhi camp near Peshawar, a flat expanse of nothing but dirt and khaki tents. No water to wash, no firewood to cook, no electricity, overflowing latrines, no work. No future. The government was supposed to resettle them but no sign of it.

These were not Taliban before, but they now provide perfect recruiting material for Islamic militant groups. Talking with the desperate elders, who are nearly in tears at the destruction of their dignity and futures, makes one want to weep. US aid money, if nothing else, should be building them new homes. Much cheaper than fighting thousands of new Taliban. 

Number Three-Lush

In Islamabad, many visitors avoid hotels (especially since the Marriott got bombed) and head for a guesthouse.

These come in all forms, and levels of comfort, but the top end costs about 25-50 % of what a hotel room would cost, and, in the nicer parts of town has wi fi in the rooms, which usually also include a desk and a sitting area. Helpful staff bring up simple meals and newspapers, and the guesthouses usually have around 8-10 rooms. They are favored by visiting news correspondents.

Guesthouses also have the advantage of not being obvious targets for bombers. My guesthouse, with the improbable name of Number Three-Lush,  is a large villa on a tree lined street and like most single family Islmabad homes, has a huge gate, watched by a guard, that shuts behind entering cars, leaving outsiders with no glimpse of the yard and house inside.

Beofre I came to Pakistan, I decided to have a shalwar khameez made to order. So I called ahead to the guest house in Islamabad where I was staying and gave them my measurements. They said they'd be happy to oblige.

That is the standard uniform in Pakistan, loose tunic and trousers for men, often with a vest (suits or shirts and trousers are more de riguer in the cities) and a variation on that theme for women.

However, the guest house sent out to a fashionable shop in Lahore, Pakistan's cultural capital to make my outfit. What I got were two elegant outfits, one beige, one navy, both very inexpensive and excellent for hiding bulges. But then came the scarves. 

In Lahore, ladies wear more gauzamer creations, that are thrown backwards around the neck so the ends float almost to the ground, and thrown over the head when necessary. In Islamabad, most scarves I see are less elegant, more utilitarian, more often covering the entire head. But in Peshawar the scarf morphs into an all-enveloping "chadoor", not the Iranian kind which is a black tent showing only the face, but a huge scarf which, when thrown over the head and then looped over one shoulder, envelops one like a blanket. My Lahore scarfs, tucked away in my back, would cause a scandal in Peshawar.

This dusty, low slung city, its downtown filled with narrow streets of two and three story buildings with business signs hanging off sagging balconies, hardly looks prepossessing enough for the legions of spy stories written about characters that passed through here under the British. Nor does it resemble the days when thousands of itnernational spooks were living in Peshawar and paying the bearded mujahadin fighters who crossed into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.

Today, many of those fighters, both Afghans and Pakistanis, are based in nearby tribal regions, threatening the city and nearby settled areas like Swat. In the past I have travelled from here to the Kyber Pass, leading to Afhganistan, but now that road has become too dangerous. Outside the city are huge refugee tent camps full of Pakistanis displaced from tribal areas when the Pakistani army tried, fruitlessly and halfheartedly, to crush the militants.

On the streets one rarely sees a woman, and the two I do spot are in full Afghan-style burkas, a tent with only a mesh piece for the eyes. The men wear full beards and long tunics over baggy pants. When I step out of my car in a tunic and full pants with a huge head scarf people stare.

The highway to Peshawar, capital of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), is almost empty. Peshawar is the gateway to the tribal areas where militant Islamists are based, some along the border with Afghanistan, and some who are now spreading out to more settled areas. But no one is rushing there from Islamabad; in the 15 months since I was last here the city has had periods when there was speculation it might fall to Islamists who were conducting a spate of assasinations and suicide bombings.

During my stay I meet with several people who had close calls. Latif Afridi, head of the bar association points out a metal gate screening of his driveway, now repated, but once penetrated by 72 bullets. The U.S. consul general Lynne Tracey survived only because her bullet proof car stopped a hail of bullets last year.