The weekend bomb which tore through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing 53 people, was a reminder that Pakistan is entering the eye of the storm of Islamist militancy. But for me, it was also a more personal reminder of a childhood friend who went from a suburban upbringing in London to become one of Pakistan’s most notorious militants.

Omar Sheikh, a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of the Prophet) organisation which has been linked to the bombing, is currently on death row in Pakistan for organising the kidnapping and beheading of the brilliant Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in February, 2002.
 
I had long since lost contact with Omar since we both graduated from Forest School in north London in 1992 and the sight of a heavily bearded Sheikh flanked by Pakistani police during the Pearl trial came as a shock. My jumbled memories of Omar were of a tall, lantern-jawed adolescent with dark-rimmed glasses, a serious but polite demeanour, a childish sense of humour but an unblinking, fearless appetite for a fight. Even as a boy, he spoke feverishly and often of “My Country” and praised the authoritarian and strictly Islamic regime of General Zia — who ousted and killed Benazir Bhutto’s father and helped the mujahedin throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

A tangle of contradictions, Omar’s other great love aside from patriotism was arm-wrestling and the would-be Islamist would often be found in smoky pubs — drinking only milk — competing with his team.

We had both started at Forest School at the age of 11 and I remember he never cried at anything - unless he was angry with himself. He loved chess and often spent his lunch breaks pouring over a chess board with a group of friends who were mainly from Sri Lankan, Indian or Bengali families.

The son of a clothes merchant in Wanstead, north London, Omar lived in a nondescript house in a cul-de-sac, where he invited me for lunch after he returned from three years of schooling in Pakistan at the age of 16. Wary of England’s influence, Omar’s father sent him to study at Lahore’s exclusive and disciplinarian Aitchison school — he returned a junior boxing champion and full of stories of contacts with organised crime, gun battles in the ghettos of Lahore, visits to brothels. At the time I thought they were all tall stories - as the chess-lover that he was, Omar’s conversation was full of bluffs and feints — but now I’m not so sure. What I remember of our long lunch were Omar’s fascination with girls and his shock at the liberal relations between young girls and boys in England.

In the sixth form, he became interested in economics, dreamed of going to study in the United States at Harvard, and even sat the SAT exams, and he went everywhere with a sturdy black plastic suitcase which weighed a ton (I think he carried weights around to pump up his muscles for arm-wrestling). He seldom had fights at school after he returned from Pakistan and had trained as a boxer, but he would often joke around by letting his fists fly within inches of your face as if he were shadow boxing.
 
Looking back, Omar’s years in Pakistan were the first step in a transformation which was completed when he went to the London School of Economics and threw himself into the cause of persecuted Muslims in Bosnia. After a mysterious trip there at the end of his first year in 1993, Omar dropped out of his studies and his conversion to militancy began.
 
By the time of the Pearl kidnapping, Sheikh was already a high-profile militant: he had been detained in India in 1994 for the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in the volatile Kashmir region. Via our school, his lawyer asked if I would be willing to testify as a character witness at his trial, a request I turned down. In any case, I couldn’t see what my testimony as a character witness could achieve, given that Omar appeared to have undergone an ideological transformation by that stage.

Finally, Omar walked free in 1999 when Islamist militants hijacked an Indian Airlines flight with 155 people on board from Kathmandu, forcing it to land in Kandahar in Afghanistan. The Indian government exchanged Omar and two other prisoners in return for the release of the passengers and crew.
 
In many ways, Omar’s Westernised identity made him a precious commodity in the militant world. In his book “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”, left-wing French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy cites evidence Sheikh had spent time with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the al Qaeda founder referred to the genteel and well-educated economist as “my favourite son”.
 
Levi also cites evidence Sheikh was a conduit for funds from the head of Pakistan’s fractious but powerful military intelligence agency ISI to the pilots of the 9/11 planes in the United States. The Wall Street Journal’s Pearl was investigating the embarrassing allegations that one of the U.S. government’s most important allies in fighting terrorism was actually linked to the New York attacks at the time he was kidnapped — a charge Pakistan has denied.
 
Sheikh appears to have spent a week in the hands of the ISI before being turned over for trial for Pearl’s killing, and Pakistan has steadfastly refused to hand him over to US authorities. Sheikh remains a mysterious figure: Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf alleged he was actually working for British intelligence and downplayed his significance.
 
Even before the July 7, 2005 bomb attacks on London, Omar was an early reminder of the fragmented and conflicted identity of some young Muslims in England. Indeed, the Jaish-e-Mohammed group, linked to Pearl’s beheading and the Islamabad bombing, is alleged to receive much of its funding from Pakistanis living in Britain. While Omar had a reckless longing for adventure which propelled him along his path to radicalism, he also shared with many second-generation immigrants to Britain a longing to belong and he struggled to find anything in British society with which he could strongly identify.

Can Britain be called a functioning multi-cultural society? Has the appeal of armed Islamist groups been heightened by Britain’s military intervention in Muslim states like Iraq and Afghanistan? And as the United States frets about the risks of young men with western passports being trained up by militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas to carry out suicide bombings at home, what can be done to prevent them from being drawn into militant circles?
 

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone.  The writer is a former Reuters Middle East correspondent who now works in documentaries for Channel 4. Here he writes about how Pakistan looks from London.

                                               By Amil Khan

It’s nice to feel wanted. If you are British-Pakistani, British of Pakistani descent, Anglo-Pakistani, or whatever, it’s a familiar and complicated state of mind. Britain is keen that you feel British - even though no one can explain what that really means. On the other hand, if you describe yourself as “British” to a born and bred Pakistani, you might as well have “traitor” stamped on your forehead.

This identity tug of war partly explains why I have a love-hate relationship with my father’s country, but it’s not the whole story. Pakistan - like other former colonies - has a national love-hate relationship of its own with Britain. But that’s not why I have one with Pakistan. Being born of immigrant parents always means that you have more than one part of the world claiming your loyalties. But that’s not it either. After all, many people have multiple loyalties. You can be far more content being British and Indian.

As a teenager, Pakistan provided refuge when you were made to feel as if you didn’t belong. When right-wing politicians said you weren’t British as adamantly as their successors in the same party now tell you that you can’t be anything else, it was satisfying to cheer the Pakistani cricket team - and it still is. Pakistan was the place grandparents became all misty eyed about when they spoke of “home”. I heard that Pakistan was a country born of its people’s desire for self determination and steely will. I knew Pakistan could be chaotically disorganised and fractious, but always pulled together in the end and answered adversity with guts, genius and determination. For me, the core of Pakistan’s character was a “don’t take no s**t” attitude. When I went to work as a journalist in the Middle East and saw posters of dictators adorning every wall, while in Pakistan military rulers past and present were lampooned in cartoons, I thought it was a national character I could relate to and respect.

Early disappointments with Pakistan came when I visited the country as a teenager. But I brushed away the reality of grinding poverty, corruption, deep inequality and crushing injustice by blaming British colonialism and America for its proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. That was enough - for a while. When I was at school, Nawaz Sherif came on an official visit to Britain as prime minister. He told the press he would turn Pakistan into an economic powerhouse and all the Pakistanis in Britain would want to return. He then went back to Pakistan and built a couple of mansions. A couple of years later, Pakistan carried out nuclear tests just to show India it could. The U.S. imposed sanctions and Sherif said; “If the nation is forced to eat daal (lentils), so will my children”. He then promptly built another mansion.

I watched all this from Britain and thought; “Come on Pakistan! What’s wrong with you? Get rid of these idiots.” I had come to think of Pakistan as a nation of immense potential, and I badly wanted it to realise some of that. I wanted to believe - as I had been led to believe - that malevolent outsiders conspired to keep Pakistan underdeveloped. It was confusing and disenchanting to realise the blame lay with Pakistanis themselves.

At about the same time, I came to think about my identity as more than a convenient cloak I could use to stick two fingers up at the world around me - which led to the question; “What does Pakistan actually do for me?” The answer was; “not much”. Nawaz Sherif’s comments in the UK before the political turmoil that led Pervez Musharaf to take power were the only time I can remember British Pakistanis were even acknowledged by the Pakistani government. For all the “always remember that you are Pakistani” from grandparents hankering back to the promise of Pakistan’s founders, its politicians were glad to see the back of us.

Israel, for example, arranges for young British Jews to visit the country every year. The notion that Pakistan could have the foresight to try to instill an attachment among a captive audience of millions across Europe and North America is laughable. A growing and confident India talks of British Indians as “ours” and an asset in the geo-political future the country sees for itself. After the 7/7 bombings in London, however, Musharaf said the young British men of Pakistani parentage were a British product and problem, not a Pakistani one. Instead of an asset, we became a problem that no one wanted to take the blame for.

Pakistan’s answer to the challenges of the post 9/11 world have shown it at its worst. Nawaf Sherif and Benazir Bhutto saw the rise of sectarianism and terrorism as an opportunity for personal advancement rather than as a national crisis. I saved a fair amount of my anger for the British news media, which failed to take Bhutto or Sherif to task, and instead bought into the “democracy against the dictator” news template. They failed to ask what Bhutto would do about the militants that Musharraf hadn’t already tried. Or question her about Pakistan’s arming of the Taliban during her term in office. Sherif plugged away at Musharraf for sacking Chief Justice Iftikar Chaudhary, but didn’t he sack a good few judges himself when he was in power? And underpinning it all, why did no one think to question the premise that these people are in any way democrats? Most Pakistanis seem to believe - probably rightly - that elections for prime minister are settled in backrooms and hinge on who can offer the biggest bribe to feudal landlords. He who buys the landlords, buys the votes of their millions of peasant farmers.

But where British journalists can be partly excused for having a sketchy understanding of a far away place, it is Pakistanis themselves who have to shoulder the real blame. I have been in Pakistan when both Sherif and Bhutto were serving as prime ministers. Their unpopularity when in office was staggering. Everyone knew about the corruption and ineptitude. So why did Pakistanis vote for their parties in the recent elections?

“There are few choices in Pakistani politics,” was one answer I got from a friend in Pakistan. Why is that? Pakistani diplomats are always keen to point out that their country is not a run-of-the-mill dictatorship because it has a strong civil society, a free press and no leader personality cult; so why there aren’t new people and parties ready to deliver good governance. Maybe that tenacious “take no crap” attitude I always wanted to believe lay at the centre of what it meant to be Pakistani has finally been defeated.

That attitude, I think, was the basis of Pakistan. The promise of an independent, modern, Muslim state that Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisaged morphed into another promise - a strong, militarily capable Muslim nation ready to stand up for suffering Muslims. But after 9/11, when Pakistan lined up in America’s corner, that last promise was destroyed. Suddenly - it seemed to the children of its diaspora - Pakistan was actually happy to take a lot of crap and some British Pakistanis gravitated to another promise; the Muslim pride and action of al Qaeda.

Last summer, while researching extremism I went to a rally organised by a radical Islamist group in London. When the protestors’ coach  passed a memorial to Commonwealth soldiers, one young guy from Luton shouted out; “Look! You die for them and they give you a bit of stone with ‘Pakistan’ written on it. God forgive our grandfathers for letting themselves be divided into meaningless nations created to serve the kuffar.”

The young man’s rejection of Pakistan comes from the same place as my dysfunctional relationship with the country; its failure to live up to its promise. It’s not a modern Muslim state charting its own way in the world, it’s a feudal mess that keeps failing to live up to the potential of its people. And the final straw has been its loss of backbone.

Then again, maybe that attitude I was drawn to is still there? But it no longer resides with the government or the ordinary office workers, mechanics, traders and farmers that make up 90 percent of Pakistan. It now resides with the ultra conservatism of Tehreek e Taliban. If that’s the case, Pakistan and I are beyond therapy.