Yesterday morning two gunmen in Lahore, riding along on a motorcycle, shot and killed a lone Saudi diplomat on his way to work at the Saudi consulate. Last Wednesday, militants threw two hand grenades at the Saudi consulate in Karachi – no one was injured. One unnamed Pakistani Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the killing; another named by Al-Jazeera English as Ehsanhullah Ehsan, said: “We support the action but we are not afraid. Had we done it, we would have claimed it.”

So, have the Taliban turned on the hand which once fed it? Saudi money and more helped the American effort to recruit and train the Taliban in the 1980s to assist in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The Saudi Ambassador to Pakistan has responded to the killing of his diplomat by saying: “no one who carries out this kind of action can be a Muslim”.

Which brings me to a remarkable, even shocking, article in Saturday’s New York Times headlined “Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater Founder”. It describes a plane load of Colombian mercenaries, landing at dead of night in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and transferring to a secret desert military complex.

The article goes on to chart the build up of an 800 member battalion of foreign troops. The contract for this mercenary force is, according to the newspaper, worth some $529 million. And is being run by the billionaire, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (renamed Xe Services) – who provided thousands of “security personnel” for the American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and four of whose men stand accused of killing seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007.

The NYT identifies some $42 million that Blackwater (Xe Services) paid in fines levied last year by the US government for the unlicensed training of foreign troops in Jordan.

The 21st Century has seen the alarming and rapid growth of such forces across the world’s conflict zones. Beyond the protection that entities like the UAE believe they cannot provide for themselves these “security corporations” have become increasingly close to the action in the assorted wars in which we are involved. Despite the fines, there is huge money to be made from “military protection”.

But are our interests really being served by the growth of what look perilously close to highly trained mercenary forces? What measures are being taken by the UN and the international community to regulate these things? The United Nations may well be exercised by Governments that kill their own people. But what if the work is done by “outside agencies”, at arms length from the authorities? What role are these outfits already playing in the myriad attempts to suppress the Arab Spring?

Now that their own diplomats are dying, how much do we know about what Western-trained mercenaries the Saudis or any of these Arab regimes are hiring to protect their interests?

Sure, Osama seems to have been shot dead. The doubts surround the question of Pakistani complicity. Last night professor Akbar Ahmed, formerly a commissioner in Abbottabad, a former High Commissioner to the UK, and a respected authority on Pakistan and on Islam, suggested on Channel 4 News that the Pakistanis had known of Osama’s whereabouts and effectively held him as a “last throw of the dice” in the event that relations with the US deteriorated… deteriorate they did. And the attack was triggered.

It is surely not credible that “the most wanted man in the world” lived undisguised in a middle class neighbourhood 35 miles from Islamabad unknown to anyone… we now know that children came and went to play with Osama’s own children for example. His kidney doctor came and went to give Osama dialysis. The nature of the compound has been well rehearsed.

You then have the “cover” of denial by the Pakistani authorities. “We never knew he was there” said President Zardari. How convenient… so that when America struck, no mud would stick that would ignite the fires of fundamentalist hatred within the country. Suited America too, so heroic, an attack in the face of potential hostility. Save that from Pakistan itself, there was none.

So US forces were “in country” for more than an hour, airborne for some thirty minutes of that time. The US UK trained Pakistani forces failed to scramble a single military boot, let alone a plane or helicopter.

I have always been taught as a reporter never to bank on conspiracy, never to underestimate incompetence. I am trying, heaven knows, I’m trying. But a seasoned nose, tutored in all sorts of trouble spots from El Salvador to Iran, suspects this doesn’t stack up.

I know this is a more than usually speculative Snowblog, but I thought I’d share it, in case it stirs someone else’s knowledge/experience/thoughts.

Osama bin Laden: Dead and buried.

It’s not a headline I ever expected to wake up to. Of late I had even begun to wonder whether he was anyway some kind of composite figure. That’s the intrigue of the unseen enemy – he is so easily contorted into whatever you want to make him.

Is he alive/dead/figment of our imagination? But then in the end he was always more “inspirational” than “active”.

Hence his death, even though he has clearly been inactive in recent years beyond a few audio messages, is structurally important. He was a totem for many for whom he was seen as the enemy of their oppression. For the rest, he was a divisive hate figure who polarised communities across the world.

But when I stood amongst the heaving crowds of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, never the word Osama, bin, nor Laden was ever present – in voice or in written slogan. Osama did not drive the Arab Spring – he was no part of it anywhere.Did the appalling achievement of 9/11 elevate him to a false pedestal of capacity? Almost certainly. His presence in the world has distorted global relationships for two decades. There is no iconic successor to lead what was already a fading movement.

So what now? Pakistan is bound to upheave. Prime Minister Zadari only clung to power courtesy of a patched up deal in the past few days with Musharraf’s Party. He will be personally hugely vulnerable – locally and internationally.

After all, here was Osama holed up in a vast unexplained security compound half a mile from the Pakistani equivalent of  Sandhurst. Structural elements of Pakistan surely must have known he was there. Structural elements of a country with whom we enjoy friendly relations. Was he protected?

Obama too will be more vulnerable in a security sense. But today he was all but re-elected to be the next President of the United States. Osama is dead. The purpose of the Afghan war is done. Even if at the most terrible cost and what is bound to be a long-lasting and unstable aftermath. And Al Qaeda‘s rump? It will attempt a firework display of nasty action – perhaps.

But Osama’s gauntlet still clenches in death. From Bolton to Baghdad, from Düsseldorf to Mumbai, political and community leaders have a vast job on their hands. The challenge now to reach out to the alienated peoples who found in Osama hope and leadership. His fundamentalism feasted on inequality, poverty and hypocrisy.

The Arab Spring will not neutralise these issues in a very long time. The opposition to the Arab spring, rooted in Saudi Arabia, continues to fund Wahabi-ist fundamentalism in schools, madrassas and mosques in Europe and across the developing world.. Great oil wealth vested in a few mediaeval hands continues to spawn the strain of fundamentalism upon which one rich Saudi, Osama Bin Laden lived and died.

The killing in Pakistan of the Governor of Punjab by his own bodyguard on Tuesday, marks a devastating new high water mark both inside and outside that country. It comes in the wake of a year in which Christian communities all over the Middle East and beyond have come under pressure.
Against a backdrop in which Iraq has proved the infernal crucible for religious intolerance in which a thousand more of the country’s Christians have had to flee and in which many have been killed – in one instance amid the bombing of their church – it is important to take stock.

New year saw the attack on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria in Egypt in which 21 Egyptian Christians died.

Now there is the Pakistan assassination in which pressure on Christians has reportedly again played a part. The Governor, Salman Taseer had been prominent in attempting to defend Asia Bibi. She’s a Christian who was condemned to death last November under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws – laws Mr Taseer had also been more than prominent in attempting to reverse.

Two questions are in the air today. When two of the most openly-declared Christians to lead either Britain or America in recent times – Tony Blair and George W Bush – led the war on Iraq in 2003, what role has it subsequently played in the oppression of Christians in the region? And what role are the Saudis playing in the continued religiously-led radicalisation of of Pakistan?

Saudi Arabia’s embrace of, and dedicated export of Wahibiism, is most clearly identified in Pakistan through the hundreds of Saudi-funded madrassas. One of the central tenets of Wahabiism is the refusal to tolerate rival religious practices. Saudi funding for Iraqi Sunni Islamic groups – banned under Saddam, have been allowed free reign since US led invasion. Saudi funded madrassas, book shops and publishing in Britain are also claimed to be radicalising ethnic British Pakistani Britons.

The roles of messrs Blair, Bush, and the Saudi king, are unlikely to be uppermost in the minds of those see today’s state funeral for the dead Governor of Punjab. In any case many who have studied and reported the region fear that it is already too late to put the radical genie back in the bottle.

As school boys we were excited to learn that Western spies could now read number plates in Moscow’s Red Square – that was well over three decades ago. How come then, as the freed kidnap victims Paul and Rachel Chandler return home, a bunch of crude Somali pirates are able to run rings around the most sophisticated navies the world has ever known?

As drones wander about the border areas of Pakistan picking off alleged al-Qaeda leaders at will, these men are able to wander the high seas at will, snaring super tankers the size of several football pitches. How come?

Currently there are still dozens of ships held hostage, and some 400 sea-farers held hostage by Somali pirates. The EU/NATO fleet that is tasked with battling the pirates costs half a billion pounds a year to run. Sure, a good number of pirate vessels are frustrated by the force, but the Indian Ocean between Somalia and India remains the most dangerous maritime area the world has known since the North Atlantic came under fire from Germany’s U-boats.

Drones, satellites, high flying spy planes, radar, high powered computing, you name it, the world has it in abundance. Yet the pirates are not yet losing. Saudi Arabia has just seen a vast multi-million pound ransom paid to free one of her super tankers.

Will not history judge that in the early 21st Century humankind, at the pinnacle of technological achievement, in a time of war, the international community failed against some of the most primitive criminal forces deploying methods of the Middle Ages?

So what’s the problem? Is it that the world, despite spending half a billion a year, doesn’t really take Somali piracy seriously? Or is it that all that brilliant 21st Century technology proves close to useless when it comes to such a test on the high seas?

In those far off school days we used to be taught about quarantine – fixing a maritime boundary beyond which the “enemy” would not be allowed to venture. We were told how useful aircraft carriers were in policing such a zone with their fast flying harrier jump jets.

There is no full-time air craft carrier off Somalia. At the last count there were three naval reconnaissance aircraft in the region. Never mind, at least, if the pirates sport a number plate, we can still presumably read it from a very long way away.

A dead body on a European mountain; a surfeit of fish off Iceland; and still more flooding in Pakistan and Niger.

The excitement over the body was restricted to the fact that it was that of a First World War soldier, still in his fatigues and boots, found on the highest peak in the Italian Dolomites. The fact that he’d been exposed by the retreating permafrost was a bit part player in the report.

It was in talking to the Icelandic fisheries minister on Thursday, that yet again the matter of climate change arose as a mere side-issue. Jon Bjarnason’s government is wrestling with the EU over fish quotas.

The steep rise in water temperatures off Iceland have a bigger part to play in delivering the unprecedented tonnage of mackerel than the careful husbanding and quotas established by the international community. Yet rather than wonder about the rising sea temperatures and the implications for mankind, the issue was restricted to the fish.

It is still raining in Pakistan, and the south is being inundated by what had already engulfed the north.

Understandably, the agony and suffering of the people has been paramount. But this is a wholly unusual event that goes far, far beyond heavy monsoon activity.

It is still raining in Niger – this dusty, sandy, Saharan state is awash from the capital city to the outback – after months and months of drought.

Four stories, four instances in just one week, in which climate change, global warming, and man’s involvement rear their head as central issues for debate.

Yet no one could emerge from this week thinking – this was a week when the world took note.

Sure they took note of the suffering, but of the threads beneath? Was it the disastrous Copenhagen Summit last year; the e-mail furore amongst climate change scientists, or the recession that dealt the blow?

Is the climate change debate dead? Or is it still to be had? It has certainly ceased to dominate the West’s current agenda. Why?

We sat on our haunches drinking tea with extraordinarily red-bearded old men on the dusty pavements of Kandahar. That was in 1970. I was driving a bus overland from Liverpool to Varanasi in India. From time to time, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we would stop and absorb the atmosphere and life as our journey moved us ever further east.

No more. It is unimaginable, 40 years on, to think of innocent young white men and scarved young European women even making such a journey. The satanic scenes out of Peshawar last night were a searing reminder that the world has turned in a devastating way.

The clatter and din of the market in the middle of the town, the dense warrens of shops and homes pile atop one another, that had stood unmolested since the early British imperialists had cantered here on horseback in the nineteenth century, are done.

Suddenly, apparently live on camera, these tall dust strewn piles were tumbling into the alleyways. Makeshift stretchers, wet red blood, dry dark red dead blood interspersed with wails, cries and bangs. A vision of hell.

This is our ‘AfPak’ war. Do we know what we are doing? Do we know what ‘they’ are doing? Do we know who ‘they’ are?

Interference is the watchword in this region – the British, the Great Powers, the Russians – we have all been here – playing the ‘Great Game’. Today ‘we’ – whoever ‘we’ are – are back. So are the Chinese, the Indians, the Saudis and the Gulf States. These last, the Wahabis, the Sunni radicals, have a coherent strategy of religious expansion. What are ‘we’ about? 9/11? Fear? Fear of what? Nuclear? Islamic? Terror exports?

In our lives, that is in the life of every age reading this blog, we shall not sip sugary brown tea with those old red beards in the streets of these old towns again with ease. A small passing of a moment. But as Obama weighs more troops. What will we be able to do in these once mellow places? Do we have a clue. Is it really about Peshawar and Kandahar coming to visit Leicester, Burnley and beyond, or are we out to create a world in which haunch sitting, tea drinking, and such uncivilised inactivity, make way for the Blackberry?

I return from my “hostile environment” course with the word exsanguate ringing in my ears. It’s not a word I knew. But you cannot deal with battlefield scenarios without coming across the appalling prospect of an arterial bleed.

Pumping red, the stuff exsanguates from the body, and the only response, if it is in the leg, is to cut off the flow either by applying massive pressure on the critical blood flow point in the groin or, if it is in the arm, under the bicep. Alternatively a tourniquet is the last-ditch chance to save life.

There were 12 of us on the refresher course: five from ITN, four from Sky and three others. Inevitably the most recent terror attack was uppermost in our deliberations – the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan.

You can emerge from a course like this convinced the world is in a bloodier state than at any time in history. Certainly the cascade of political violence in Pakistan is some of the worst outside the Indo-Pak war since partition from India.

And yet I think I’m right in saying that this is only the second attack on an international sporting event since the Munich Olympics in 1972 – not that that makes it any better.

My friend from Sky challenged me to find a use for exsanguate in yesterday’s news. Could I have got the word into last night’s headlines. I wondered whether Harriet Harman’s leadership chances were exsanguating as a result of wounds inflicted by Fred Goodwin’s knighthood controversy (he got it for banking and not, as Ms Harman had suggested in the Commons, for charitable works) and the government’s evident difficulty in putting him on trial over his pension.

In truth, the use of words is a pivotal element of the television news trade. Some of us fear it is being eroded by the sheer multiplicity of tasks a television journalist now performs – shooting, editing, graphic design, super-captions.

Is it any wonder that no-one is experimenting with exsanguate. I guess I should issue a health warning: don’t try it at home.