Global news media turned their attention to Pakistan last week as conflict between military and Taliban forces escalated in the northern part of the country and displaced millions. Our community tracked this coverage in a week long News Hunt on Pakistan. Together we reviewed 45 stories on this conflict and its impact on the Pakistani population and foreign policy in the region.
Overall, the news coverage we reviewed was broad. At the core of many of our stories, however, was the question of how successfully Pakistani civil society and government could combat the Taliban.
In news, our top rated piece, 'Pakistan on the Brink,' came from the New York Review of Books. Ahmed Rashid gave a bleak assessment of the crisis facing Pakistan, where in April the Taliban won control of a swatch of land less than 100 miles from the capital. "Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more territory, and state power shrinks," Rashid said. "...we can expect a slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse."
On a more optimistic note, Link TV’s Global Pulse compared worldwide coverage of protests by Pakistani women against the Taliban. This video report pointed to a growing movement of women across the country - which is resisting the Taliban's harsh imposition of Islamic law.
Wired kept a beat on the U.S. military's involvement (or lack of involvement) in the conflict with reports on the use of drone planes to kill insurgents -- how the drone planes are used and how much information the CIA shares on this matter with the Pakistani government. Asia Times ran a dispatch from the ground in Pakistan, detailing the growing humanitarian crisis that many media began to report on mid-week. And GlobalPost profiled an organization that offers early morning and night classes to child laborers.
Our top opinion explained why Pakistani civil society has yet to achieve a unified resistance against the Taliban. In 'Talibanistan and the identity crisis' from Dawn, author Huma Yusuf said Pakistan is experiencing an "identity crisis," in which a plurality of interests and beliefs has prevented the population from coming to a consensus on why the Taliban should be rejected. "The first step to overcoming militancy is knowing ourselves," Yusuf concluded. "So before we can take to the streets with a single, articulate demand, we’re going to have to answer the question that we’ve been avoiding for over 60 years: who are we?"
Here's a sampling of our top news and opinion on Pakistan:
News
Pakistan on the Brink
New York Review of Books
Pakistan: Women vs. Taliban
Link TV
Hope for Pakistan's child workers
GlobalPost
Pakistan reels under Swat offensive
Asia Times
CIA: Our drones are killing terrorists. Promise.
Wired
Opinion
Talibanistan and the identity crisis
Dawn
The battle for the soul of Pakistan
Aljazeera
Pakistan's ethnic fault line
Washington Post
Pakistan: top rated stories
Pakistan: most recent stories
This Week: News Comparisons on the Economy
This week we're hosting a special News Hunt on the Economy, with a new twist. Rather than covering one broad topic as we have in the past, we'll focus on clusters of related stories on economy sub-topics such as: globalization, poverty, housing, or jobs (today's feature). Each day this week, the featured story on our home page will include links to related stories which we'll ask you to compare. Join this News Hunt and help us develop this new service by reviewing stories in the News Comparison box on our home page.
Link and Submit Related Stories
We also invite you to link (or submit) more related stories on this week's featured topics. When you have reviewed a couple linked stories on a topic, please write a comment in your review, or click the 'Like' button to let us know which story you found most informative. This experiment is a response to the sweeping support our News Comparison idea received in last week's survey on the future of NewsTrust (more on this later - we'll write up our findings on next week's NewsTrust blog post). In the meantime, your suggestions are welcome on our Feedback page.
-- Derek Hawkins, with Fabrice Florin and Kaizar Campwala
if it's the paki and afghan women who are against the taliban then arm them withAK-47s. amazons. women are more loyal to a cause especially if it is in their interest.
Posted by: marmaduke wran | May 25, 2009 at 10:45 PM