Irfan Alalawi

The sophisticated truck bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on 20 September, which took dozens of lives, was the latest incident in a campaign to destabilise the entire subcontinent. Most reports have blamed al-Qa’eda militants but the real blame for the crime belongs with the Talebanised sectors of the Pakistani armed forces and intelligence service (ISI), and the pusillanimity of the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto. The Marriott assault was clearly a sequel to the bombing less than three months ago, on 7 July, at the Indian embassy in Kabul, which was also devastatingly murderous. Pakistani authorities tried to deny the involvement of ISI agents, as detailed in communications intercepted by US intelligence services.

The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to extricate his country from its benighted state. Yet political modernisation has been so slow as to be almost invisible. King Abdullah may be an absolute monarch, but there are limits to what he can do — and he is badly isolated within the kingdom. The work facing the reformers was neatly summed up in a cartoon in the Saudi daily Al Watan (the Nation) on 7 October.