The Nation The whips lashed down amid screams of pain as one after another pair of men went thumping down into the aisle ways. Kunta and his shaklemate hugged each other on the shelf as the searing blows jerked them convulsively back and forth. Then hands clamped roughly around their ankles and hauled them across the shelf's mushy filth and into the tangle of other men in the aisle way, all of them howling under the toubob whips. These lines are from Alex Haley's epoch-making novel, Roots which is not based just on fiction. Haley researched for twelve long years, and travelled, from continent to continent, to write this book. There were long queues of people, both white and black, in front of bookshops when the novel was released in mid seventies. The book containing sage of a black American family, was translated into 37 languages. The author traced his origin back to Gambia's Kunta Kinte who was captured by slave traders in 1767 and was brought, across Atlantic, in one of...

The Nation The Pakistan Army is struggling in Swat and Bajaur, the restive North Western areas of the country, to destroy the hideouts of militants. The Air Force has also joined them. However, the big question is: if the armed forces succeed in ending the present turmoil, will the problem be sorted out forever? Dealing with militants militarily is, of course, indispensable in the present circumstances, but it amounts to suppressing the fever and not treating the infection, or the cancer, causing the fever. There are three main factors behind the unending replenishment of manpower to militants. Firstly, myopia of successive Pakistani governments vis-à-vis mushroom growth of madrassas which are in thousands now across the country. The main bastions of the seminaries are the tribal areas, situated at the Afghan border and governed directly by the federal government, settled districts of North Western province and fertile vast plains of South Punjab. If lack of modern education is the rea...