Pakistan Provides a Cautionary Tale For Reformers (A.K.A. 'Blasphemers')

Warning to all genuine democracy-lovers in the Arab world. This (as outlined by Peter Preston in the Guardian) could be your fate:

Take the young people of so many Islamic nations struggling to secure their democratic freedoms. Take large, very powerful armies used to running or controlling the show. Take big pinches of poverty, frustration and religious fanaticism. Spice with visceral violence. Stir briskly – and what have you got? Welcome back to Pakistan. We may be hoping for good things in Cairo and praying for good things in Libya. But good things, ominously enough, don't happen in Jinnah's "Pure State" any longer.

Now here's one especially dismal thing among many others, because it tests principle as well as feeble political resolve. Shahbaz Bhatti, Islamabad's minister for minorities, is assassinated outside his home by four assailants who leave Taliban tracts behind them. Bhatti was a Christian, speaking out for an increasingly oppressed minority and ceaselessly advocating the repeal of Pakistan's blasphemy laws.

But a couple of weeks ago, while the world was watching Cairo and Tripoli, his own prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, quietly abandoned any attempt to repeal Pakistan's blasphemy laws – and the death penalty for breaking them. The battling woman backbencher who'd pushed for abolition retreated. The ministries working on amendments threw them away. Blasphemy, as defined in the statute book by Pakistan's last military dictator but one, remains a capital offence...

"Good things," ominously enough, can't happen while sharia's in the picture.