New Zealand cricket boss Justin Vaughan is treading lightly in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan.

"Given the tragic events" in Lahore, it is "very unlikely" the Black Caps' tour of Pakistan, scheduled for November and December, will go ahead, he says.

Forget "unlikely", a term presumably adopted so as not to upset the International Cricket Council, which takes a dim view of countries that alter their playing schedules unilaterally. The New Zealand cricket team will not be going to Pakistan this year or any time soon. Nor will any other international sporting side.

The attack by 12 gunmen, which killed six policemen and a bus driver, and wounded six of the Sri Lankan players, has sent shockwaves rippling through the sports world. No sports team will entrust its safety to the Pakistani security forces, which, according to English match official Chris Broad, promised before the tour to provide "presidential-style security".

But an end to sports tours is the least of Pakistan's worries. While President Asif Ali Zardari's People's Party and rival Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League squabble and jockey for political advantage, the country is sliding into lawlessness. The government is unable to protect its own citizens, unable to protect visitors and gradually ceding control of large parts of its territory to fundamentalist organisations with links to al Qaeda and the Taleban.

One of those organisations, Lashkar-e-Taiba, has been blamed for last year's terrorist attack on Mumbai and is also suspected of responsibility for the latest attack.

For the rest of the world the disintegration of Pakistan represents a nightmare scenario. Pakistan is a nuclear state. Its principal intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, played a pivotal role in the creation of Lashkar-e-Taiba and is accused of still having links to the Taleban.

Pakistan's remote tribal areas have become a giant petri dish for Islamic terrorism and serve as a resting place for Taleban fighters between sorties into Afghanistan.


For any Pakistani administration the challenges are immense. No government has ever controlled the remote tribal areas. The best that has been achieved is an uneasy truce.

But Mr Zardari's government is losing ground at an alarming rate. In the Swat Valley, once a tourist destination, the government has just bought a temporary peace with local militants by agreeing to the imposition of Sharia law on the region's inhabitants. Elsewhere, girls' schools have been burned down, video stores and other shops selling Western goods closed and politicians and journalists cowed into silence.


The best hope for Pakistan, and it is a slim one, is that the terrorists have this time gone too far.

As a people, Pakistanis take almost as much pride in their reputation for hospitality as they do in the feats of their cricketers. Perhaps the attack on foreign guests and the game Pakistanis love will spur the silent majority into doing what the government clearly cannot do stand up to the misogynists, thieves and tyrants who are taking their country back to the Dark Ages.