"I am not sure if Pakistan was created in the name of religion, but it is surely being destroyed in the name of religion." So wrote a distraught former army officer on December 16th, as a terrorist attack, awful even by Pakistan's grim standards, unfolded in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakh-tunkhwa province in the north-west of the country, not far from the border with Afghanistan. Seven members of the Pakistani Taliban, speaking with the local Pushtu accent and dressed in the uniforms of the local paramilitary force, came from a graveyard and over the wall of a large, army-run school. They then moved through it, murdering children and teachers with guns and grenades. Three or four attackers are said to have blown themselves up.
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