The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

hundreds were injured. It was a staggering global terrorist spectacle, arguably the most audacious since 2001, and it unfolded live on television, leaving indelible images of a blazing five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel and bloodied bodies strewn around the Leopold Café, which was popular with foreign tourists. And all of it had been remotely directed from a house in the Karachi suburbs. A single attacker survived. Ajmal Kasab was a high-school dropout from a Punjabi backwater who had joined Lashkar a year earlier, seeking fame and adventure. In the iconic image of the massacre, Kasab strides through the packed Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, an assault rifle under his arm, spraying gunfire at helpless commuters. The Indian police captured him two hours later as he drove in a stolen car towards Malabar Hill. The semi-literate militant was unlikely to have grasped the historical irony of his mission: to carry out a massacre of rich Indians in the name of Pakistani nationalism, in the shadow of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s abandoned mansion.