Editorial: Pakistan has run out of chances

Opinion

When he was coaching the Pakistan cricket team, Geoff Lawson said repeatedly that players touring there were in no danger.

This week, contrition accompanied shock as the former Australian pace bowler pondered the terrorist assault on the Sri Lankan team in Lahore.

He was not alone. Others had said cricketers who refused to play in Pakistan were timidly surrendering to terrorism or making too much of the risk to their wellbeing.

Terrorists would not dare target it for fear of the popular backlash. More broadly, had not there been a tacit agreement of immunity for sportsmen and women since the Black September onslaught at the 1972 Munich Olympics?

That understanding endured, against the odds, for 37 years. Some sporting teams, most notably the 2002 Black Caps, had brushes with terrorism but were not the target.

Now, however, there can be no equivocation. Javed Miandad, one of Pakistan's greatest batsmen, said that refusing to tour his country would be akin to handing victory to the terrorists.

But, plainly, no cricket team will go there in the foreseeable future, and sportsmen and women will see themselves as potential targets for terrorism anywhere.

There is no surprise that Pakistan is at the centre of this development. The Australians have long considered it too dangerous to tour, and last year's Champions Trophy was called off. Sri Lanka was there only as a goodwill gesture after India refused to tour.

Only by good fortune were none of its players killed, but the wounding of the likes of Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene, regular visitors to this country, supplied a jolt missing from previous atrocities.

According to Geoff Lawson, the prospects for Pakistan cricket are now "absolutely horrendous". The same might be said for the country. The consensus is that home-grown Islamic fundamentalists intent on destabilising Pakistan were responsible for the ambushing of the Sri Lankan team bus.

The assault was carried out by a group that may have had access to details of the security being afforded the Sri Lankans. That, not for the first time, suggests collusion between Pakistani security forces and terrorism.

Pakistan, a brooding, nuclear-armed nation, already appears, to all intents, to be so unstable as to be almost ungovernable.

The civilian Government of President Asif Ali Zardari, which took over last year from the regime of General Pervez Musharraf, has quickly squandered the goodwill associated with its election. It is weak and intent on settling old political scores.

Tackling terrorism and righting a distressed economy seem lesser priorities. Its mindset was signalled last month when, in return for a ceasefire with Islamic extremists, it allowed Sharia law to be introduced in the Swat Valley, a once-popular tourist destination.

Such capitulation has taken place even though fundamentalist parties performed poorly in the latest elections. Most Pakistanis are moderate Muslims, but many seem too willing to shift the blame for their country's ailments to the United States or India.

The Minister of State for Shipping even accused India of responsibility for the Lahore attack, apparently in retribution for last year's assault on Mumbai.

Too many gullible Pakistanis, not all of them from the illiterate and poverty-stricken throng, were prepared to believe him.

Those same people will be the losers from the terrorism. No longer will they see their cricketers and hockey and squash players competing on home soil.

Their country's only real hope lies in the moderate forces in its society exerting a greater influence and demanding more from their Government. If this were to occur, it could yet stump those responsible for the assault on Sri Lanka's cricketers.