Last week in Pakistan I met a receptionist at the World Food Programme in Islamabad. It was brief – I was presenting myself for an appointment, and I do not know if she was Gulrukh Tahir, one of five people killed there today by a suicide bomber.
But I can picture her foyer; it must be wreckage now. I remember smiling at the guards who checked my bag when I entered the fortified compound, the same guards who were evaded by a man suspected to be Pakistani Taliban. His target was a United Nations agency charged with getting food to disaster zones and preventing hunger in poor communities. In Pakistan, some of its beneficiaries are the millions displaced by the Taliban’s conflict with the government. Full article.