Tariq Ali

Following the Diary I wrote in the last issue of theLRB I received a number of angry emails. One reader was annoyed that I was sceptical regarding the rumours of Zardari’s involvement in his wife’s assassination. I was sent a link to a video showing one of Benazir's main bodyguards, Khalid Shahenshah, behaving most oddly in the minutes before her death.

P.J.Tobia’s photographs of these monstrous buildings in Kabul convey only part of the horror. Their location is not too far from the slum dwellings that house the poor of the city, sans water, sans electricity, sans sewage, sans everything. A young photo-journalist from Philadelphia, Tobia supplied the captions and writes on True/Slant:

With the historical memory of the country virtually non-existent it's good to know there are a few wise heads still around at the BBC who are, at least, aware of what's going on in the world even if they can't share this knowledge with viewers who pay to keep the BBC going as a public service. Adam Curtis's documentaries are usually very good but he makes only one or two a year. Why on earth he isn't given a weekly late-night history slot escapes me. Time surely for BBC viewers to organise a petition or threaten a licence-fee boycott if the Corporation continues to degenerate. In the meantime read Curtis's blog and learn about Yemen.

It's one of those ironies of history: a by-product of the clerical revolution in Iran was the emergence of a new wave of Iranian cinema. Kiarostami became the most celebrated auteur in the west, but he was part of a much larger creative and critical community. They view each other’s work at rough-cut stage, they comment on scripts, they suggest actors: there is a strong sense of solidarity. The cinematic language is varied, the interior destiny of each filmmaker is different, but even the self-contained Makhmalbaf family benefits from being part of a larger group. Watching their work one can see the influences that stretch from Rossellini, Fellini and Godard to Kurosawa, Ray and Hou Hsia-hsien. I’ve always regarded one of this group, Jafar Panahi, as the country’s most fearless filmmaker.

Never a quiet moment in the dear Fatherland. I'm not referring to the bombing of the US Consulate in Peshawar, which is hardly a surprise given the intensity of US drone attacks in recent weeks. On other fronts there are some interesting developments. Parliament has taken away all the president's powers, repealing the amendments introduced by previous military dictators. As if on cue the Supreme Court summoned the attorney general and asked him to provide the court with all the papers relating to the Swiss case against Zardari and his late wife regarding money-laundering and corruption. The Law Ministry refused to part with the documents. The attorney general informed the court and resigned in protest. Some spin doctor or other must have advised the president that a counter move was necessary to restore his image. Zardari announced that after his death all his organs, indeed 'his whole body' would be donated to the nation. When the news was reported on Pak Point, readers had a field day. A few of these comments convey the tone of the rest. Let nobody doubt Zardari's popularity: