Slowly Falling Apart

57 people were killed from a truck bomb outside the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, including two Americans and a diplomat from the Czech Republic. The explosion also injured 266 people, 11 of which were foreign. Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the attack at the Marriott Hotel "is the biggest attack, volume-wise" in Pakistan in seven years. The driver tried to talk his way past the gates at the hotel with his truck packed with 1,300 pounds of explosives. He was a suicide bomber.

Watch the CNN news video on the attack here, and click "Suicide Blast Rocks Islamabad".

No arrests have been made with connection to the attack, but Malik says that all paths lead to the tribal regions of Pakistan. South Waziristan is where most trails wander, and is one of Pakistan's seven tribal areas where Taliban and al Qaeda militants are active. It is in tribal areas similar to Waziristan that reported sightings of Osama Bin Laden have come from, and with a big issue of this year’s election being our foreign policy and the war, Pakistan is daily becoming a more and more important country to the United States.

Pakistan is ranked as the ninth most unstable country in the world, behind countries like Somalia, which got first, Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (See the list here). I guess the point of all of this information is how upsetting it is. I feel incredibly sad when I realize that this is what the world has really come to, war, strife, and a lot of hatred. I also feel confused when I realize how little I actually know about Pakistan as a country. Pakistan is an amazingly pivotal country, and it is just looming there, waiting for the US to deal with. I guess what it really comes down to is who is going to deal with Pakistan. Most trails point to Osama Bin Laden being either in Afghanistan, where we are already, or in rural Pakistan, a place that the Pakistani government has no control over. I don’t know why it is strange to me that Pakistan is so violent, and unstable. Maybe I’m just used to the peaceful side of the beautiful Islamic religion. So is there hope? Or is the world just slowly falling apart, one country at a time? I sure hope not.