A quick follow-up to yesterday's post on the inaccurate reports in the Pakistani media claiming that FP had named Karachi's mayor "the second best mayor in the world":

The Dawn newspaper, which gave prominent placement to the original inaccurate story, have now run a second story that quotes FP's Media Coordinator Jina Hassan setting the record straight.

According to Dawn's site, the story is the newspaper's most read and most e-mailed item today, so hopefully this clarification should put an end to the whole mess. Although the amusing headline, "Magazine denies declaring Kamal 2nd best mayor," kind of makes it sound like this is a matter of opinion.

We invite anyone who's still confused to just read the original piece.

One of my responsibilities here at Foreign Policy is manning the "FP Editor" e-mail account. It's always fun to come in in the morning and see how readers around the world are reacting to what we print. Sometimes, the reactions can be a bit strange, though.

Yesterday, we started receiving e-mails from readers and journalists in Pakistan asking for comment on reports that we had named Karachi's mayor, Mustafa Kamal, "the second best mayor in the world." This would be an understandable query if we had actually said anything of the sort.

At issue is a sidebar from FP's recent Global Cities Index that names Kamal, Berlin's Klaus Wowereit, and Chongqing's Wang Hongju as "mayors of the moment" who have found innovative ways to globalize their cities. The mayors are not ranked, nor are we implying that they are objectively "better" than any other mayors, but that didn't stop the Karachi city government from issuing a press release on its Web site (they've changed the text since being contacted by FP) congratulating Kamal for being the No. 2 mayor in the world. For the record, the three names are not listed in any particular order.

Pakistan's biggest English-language newspaper, Dawn, then printed a glorified transcription of the mayor's press release by the government-controlled Associated Press of Pakistan as a front-page story without ever checking with us to see if it was accurate.

According to the e-mails we've received, the inaccurate story has been widely reported on Pakistani TV, radio, and blogs. Most absurdly, Karachi's city council apparently held a heated debate over whether to pass a resolution congratulating Kamal for the honor we allegedly bestowed on him. Judging by today's e-mails, the efforts of some blogs to correct the story only seem to have confused readers more.

According to one reporter, who unlike Dawn contacted us for comment, "Karachi is riddled with banners by the local government, congratulating Mr. Kamal for being declared as second best mayor of the world by the Foreign Policy."

We hate to rain on Kamal's parade, and certainly intend him and his city no disrespect, but we simply never ranked him in any way. This entire mess could have been avoided with some very basic fact-checking.

This autumn, an ancient trade route that crosses the disputed Kashmiri border between India and Pakistan opened after being closed 61 years ago, when the two countries broke free of the British Empire. Many hope the opening of the trade route, in a bitterly disputed Himalayan region, will boost the economy on both sides of the “Line of Control” that divides the territory. In the photo above, the first truck carrying goods from the Pakistani side rumbles across the bridge to the Indian side.

For Kashmir's artisans, famed for their rugs, copper bowls, and other handicrafts, the opening of the trade route is a sign of hope. Check out some of their beautiful creations and learn more about the trade route in this week's photo essay, "Making Peace, One Trinket at a Time."

TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images

I'm pretty sure it would be illegal for Barack Obama to accept these funds. And perhaps a nonpartisan appeal to the next president would be wiser at this point. Still, it's a very enterprising idea from a bunch of young teens in Peshawar -- give us "books and pens," not "bombs and missiles":

A group of schoolchildren in Peshawar collected 261 US dollars for 'Uncle Obama’s election campaign' in a bid to help restore peace in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and Frontier province of Pakistan.

Holding placards and charts inscribed with slogans for peace and 'No more war and bombings,' the school children, mostly aged between 10 and 13 years, denounced increasing incidents of blowing up of schools, bombing of residential areas and displacement of families in the Fata and the volatile Swat district of the Frontier province.

"Uncle Obama we expect peace from you," read one placard held by a 10-year-old boy. Another chart, shown by an 11-year-old girl, stated: "Let us smile and play." They appealed to Barack Obama, the Democratic party's nominee for office of the US president, to give them books and pens instead of bombs and missiles.

The schoolchildren said they planned to hand the money over to the local U.S. authorities to pass along to Obama.

In Friday's Morning Brief, I noted that a Pakistani judge had detained Judi Kenan, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin, for attempting to enter Mohmand Agency, a militant-dominated Pashtun district in Pakistan's tribal areas that is off-limits to foreigners. Kenan said he was visiting a friend in Mohmand, but didn't have his friend's address. He was found with a knife, according to his lawyer.

Mohmand Agency sounds like a lovely place to visit. New York Times reporter Jane Perlez visited a hospital there in 2007 and described the region as "a desolate landscape where women are strictly veiled." The local Taliban commander is a nasty fellow named Omar Khalid who has ties to terrorism stretching back before 9/11 and claims to have 3,000 fighters under his command. Several teenage suicide bombers in Afghanistan have been traced to the area.

As for Kenan, The News reports that he was "bearded" and "clad in traditional Pakistani dress" when he was apprehended. According to the Karachi-based newspaper, he had actually been living in Miriamzai, "a village located close to the volatile Matani and Badaber towns on the Peshawar-Kohat Road," where his father grew up. His mother is from Florida.

Curiously, U.S. news organizations don't seem to have picked up this story yet, perhaps because there is little information to be had. What I want to know is: Was Kenan just a naïve tourist exploring his ethnic homeland? Or was he going to Mohmand to receive some kind of training before returning to the United States on a mission? Does America, in short, have its own home-grown terrorism problem?

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images

Do we need another secret intelligence assessment to tell us that Pakistan is falling apart?

No.

If anything, that country's slow-motion collapse been reported to death over the past several months. Nonetheless, it's reassuring that the situation there is getting high-level attention in Washington.

Much has been made of Pakistan's troubles with terrorists and tribal militants, and there are lots of good ideas out there for how to address them. Less discussed? The country's economic meltdown.

As Fasih Ahmed reports for Newsweek, Pakistan's economy is in "free fall." The country's credit ratings are being slashed; creditors are making runs on banks; inflation is soaring; and capital is fleeing. If things continue to get worse, we may come to find that -- while the two issues are certainly related -- the global financial crisis did to Pakistan what the terrorists never could.

Barack Obama and John McCain like to disagree about Pakistan, as they did in the debate last night. Obama says yay to cross-border raids if key terrorists can be picked up or killed. McCain says nay, arguing that the soft talk/big stick approach will work better in a country where public opinion is already dangerously set against U.S. efforts.

But no matter how much both candidates mumble about fundamental differences with their opponent's approaches, each seems to agree on one thing: They expect that results in the war on terror can come sooner rather than later.

I'm about to ruin the party.

In Pakistan, not only are results are not only a long way off, but they are looking more and more elusive. Carnegie Endowment scholar Ashley J. Tellis offered this timeline in a policy brief earlier this fall:

Even if Islamabad were to overcome the immediate problems related to terrorism, the permanent transformation of Pakistan would be decades away."

Why so long? FP wanted to get a bit more nitty-gritty. So this morning, I chatted with Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, who has done sharp reporting for his book, The Forever War, in Iraq and subsequently in Pakistan.

The good news is, Pakistan is no Iraq. The bad news is, the timeline might be even longer. Sorry senators, but that might mean the victory fireworks will come long after the first term, if indeed they come at all.

Check it out.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan suprised quite a few with his comments about relations with India in a Wall Street Journal interview over the weekend:

When I ask whether he would consider a free-trade agreement with traditional archenemy India, Mr. Zardari responds with a string of welcome, perhaps even historic, surprises. "India has never been a threat to Pakistan," he says, adding that "I, for one, and our democratic government is not scared of Indian influence abroad." He speaks of the militant Islamic groups operating in Kashmir as "terrorists" -- former President Musharraf would more likely have called them "freedom fighters" -- and allows that he has no objection to the India-U.S. nuclear cooperation pact, so long as Pakistan is treated "at par." "Why would we begrudge the largest democracy in the world getting friendly with one of the oldest democracies in the world?"

Not only does Mr. Zardari want better ties with Delhi, he notes that "there is no other economic survival for nations like us. We have to trade with our neighbors first." He imagines Pakistani cement factories being constructed to provide for India's huge infrastructure needs, Pakistani textile mills meeting Indian demand for blue jeans, Pakistani ports being used to relieve the congestion at Indian ones. For a country that spent most of its existence trying to show that it's the military equal of its neighbor, the agenda amounts to a remarkable recognition of the strides India has made in becoming a true world power.

Zardari's description of the Kashmir rebels as "terrorists" rather than "freedom fighters" or "jihadis" as Pakistani politicians have traditionally referred to them was particularly controversial. Kashmiri seperatists responded by breaking curfew to protest and burn him in effigy. Zardari has since walked back his remarks somewhat, assuring the public that there's no change in Pakistan's Kashmir policy.

While it would be great if Zardari intended to get serious about normalizing relations with India, it seems like there might have been a bettter way to go about it than overturning decades of military policy through an off-the-cuff remark to an American reporter. Given how fragile his political position is, he might want to cover his flanks a bit more thoroughly before he makes another comment like this.

I was amused to see the BBC misquoting the new Central Command commander, Gen. David Petraeus, on the "existentialist threat" facing Pakistan:

You have heard the newly elected President Zadari. You've heard the army chief and others all recognise that this is in a sense an existentialist threat, this is a threat to Pakistan's very existence," the general added.

Of course, Petraeus actually said "existential threat," as the accompanying video shows, without the "-ist." He was referring to the Taliban and other militant groups.

But I wonder, what would an existentialist threat to Pakistan consist of? Suddenly, madrasa students are reading Sartre and Camus instead of memorizing the Quran and the Sunnah? Nihilism replaces Islamism as the reining ideology of tribal militancy? That, to me, sounds like positive change.

You know the situation is bad when people are fleeing to Afghanistan:

Fighting between Pakistani troops and militants in a tribal region has forced some 20,000 Pakistanis to seek refuge across the border in eastern Afghanistan, the U.N.'s refugee agency said Monday. [...]

According to Pakistani officials, the fighting in Bajur has displaced as many as 500,000 people. Most have found shelter with relatives across northwestern Pakistan, though about 100,000 have taken refuge in camps set up by Pakistani authorities.

I didn't watch the debate last night. But I did read parts of it, and I was particularly interested in the candidates' exchange about Pakistan:

In one of the more heated moments of the debate, Mr. Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, argued that he would take the war to Osama bin Laden’s cave door, whether Pakistan cooperated or not. And it was Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, who argued that without Pakistan’s cooperation, any such operation was doomed.

I have to say, McCain gets the better of the exchange. 

I've become convinced that Obama is making a huge mistake in endorsing the Bush approach, which will lead to disaster if it is allowed to continue. When FP asked five top Pakistani experts to tell us how to get Osama bin Laden, they all stressed passionately that the United States is heading down the wrong path by escalating a campaign of airstrikes in the tribal areas and, on at least one occassion, sending U.S. ground troops across the border.

There doesn't appear to be any genuine counterinsurgency strategy in place to do what General Petraeus did in Iraq -- protecting the local population from Taliban and other militant groups and seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Pashtun people. Instead, it's bomb, bomb, bomb. I understand the political appeal of getting bin Laden. But if you get the al Qaeda leader but turn Pakistan into a failed state, that is a strategic defeat, not a victory in the war on terrorism. 

Nor is there any apparent effort to rein in what Pakistan sees as India's attempt to encircle it in Afghanistan, or a major push to make progress on Kashmir. Many people seem mystified and frustrated by Pakistan's "double game" in the war on terrorism. Fear of India is the root cause.

Does Obama get all this? I understand the politics here. But as policy, the Bush approach to Pakistan is sheer folly.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

The New Republic's Jason Zengerle highlights a particularly cringe-inducing exchange from the meeting between Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and veep nominee Sarah Palin yesterday at the UN:

“I am honored to meet you,” Ms. Palin said.

“You are even more gorgeous than you are on the (inaudible),” Mr. Zardari said.

“You are so nice,” Ms. Palin replied. “Thank you.”

“Now I know why the whole of America is crazy about you,” Mr. Zardari continued. At which point an aide told the two to shake hands.

“I’m supposed to pose again,” Ms. Palin said.

“If he’s insisting,” Mr. Zardari said, “I might hug.”

Yes, Zardari's a sketchball, but unfortunately, I have a feeling that Palin would face a lot of this sort of thing if she became vice president. Palin had exactly zero international recognition until this month so as long as she is being so closely guarded by the McCain campaign, a lot of world leaders aren't going to know much about her besides how she looks and the less tactful ones are going to let her know it.

Well-qualified, confident female leaders like Angela Merkel or Condoleezza Rice would never get this kind of degrading, sexist treatment from their male peers. Oh wait. Never mind.

Photo by AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

Pakistani bystanders and rescue workers are seen beside a huge crater outside the burning facade of The Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on September 20, 2008, following a powerful bomb blast. At least 27 bodies could be seen at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad following a large bomb blast.

Pakistan: just the kind of stable, responsible country we'd like to see expanding its ability to produce nuclear weapons. The Institute for Science and International Security reports:

 ISIS has obtained commercial satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe taken on September 3, 2008, May 18, 2008 and February 9, 2008 of the Khushab plutonium production reactor site in Pakistan. The imagery shows further construction of the second and third plutonium production reactors at Khushab (Figure 1), and that construction of the second reactor may be nearing completion. The images show a clearly visible row of cooling towers, typically built in the later phase of reactor construction (Figure 3). Given this state of construction, the second reactor could start in a year.

Once completed, these reactors will increase several-fold Pakistan’s ability to make weapon-grade plutonium for nuclear weapons. The wider implication of Pakistan increasing its plutonium production capacity must not be overlooked—there is a real risk that it will exacerbate an India-Pakistan nuclear arms race and increase tensions more broadly between the two.

Pakistan's security establishment seemd a bit confused yesterday over whether troops had, in fact, fired on U.S. helicopters in South Waziristan. The Pakistani military had denied security officials' reports that the event had taken place. In the future, however, there may be no such ambiguity:

[A]rmy spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press that after U.S. helicopters ferried troops into a militant stronghold in the South Waziristan tribal region, the military told field commanders to prevent any similar raids.

"The orders are clear," Abbas said in an interview. "In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire."

If Bush is actually serious about catching Osama bin Laden before he leaves office, he's not going to do it without help from Pakistan. This is a situation that needs to be resolved immediately. Five Pakistani experts had some ideas for how to proceed in last week's web-exclusive, "How to Catch Osama."

FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/Getty Image

Pakistan's former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is making good on his threat to pull his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) from the ruling coalition that has bickered, quarelled, and basically done everything but govern the country since it took power after the February 18 parliamentary elections.

Sharif said he was withdrawing because the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the party of Benazir Bhutto widower Asif Ali Zardari, refuses to keep its word about reinstating all of the Supreme Court judges who were ousted by Pervez Musharraf last fall. (It probably didn't help when the PPP chose Zardari as its candidate to replace the former president rather than working to find a consensus pick.)

What does Sharif's move mean? Here's where things get complicated. Note that there are slightly conflicting reports about the precise number of seats each party holds and where the fast-shifting alliances are lining up. With those caveats, here's my quick whip count.

The National Assembly, a majority of which selects the prime minister, has 342 seats, and the PPP holds 125 of them. To get a majority and form a government, you need 172 votes, so Zardari needs at least 47 to put his party over the top. Musharraf's old party, the PML-Q (54 seats), looks to be lining up with Sharif and his party's 91 votes.

But Zardari is probably safe, both regarding his own presidential bid and control of the government. He already reportedly has the support of the Awami National Party (13 seats) and the Mutihida Majlis-e-Amal coalition (7 seats), whose bases are in the northwest, as well as the Mutihida Qaumi Movement (25 seats), giving him 45 additional votes. Sprinkle in a few independents and Baluchi nationalists (with 17 seats between them) and the PPP looks like it will squeak out ahead. Of course, Pakistan is a volatile place and these coalitions could easily change. Stay tuned.

SAMEED QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

To nobody's surprise, the Pakistan People's Party has settled on Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, as its presidential candidate. He is the party's cochairman.

The country will be holding an election -- in which only lawmakers can vote -- to chose Pervez Musharraf's successor on Sept. 6.

If you aren't familiar with the sordid background of Zardari (a.k.a. "Mr. 10 Percent"), you should check out this 1998 article by John Burns of the New York Times. He's a real prince, this one.

What's the first thing a former military strongman does after being ousted?

Apparently, he plays tennis.

Emily Wax, reporting in today's Washington Post, thinks so. Considering the longtime rivalry between the two neighbors, this seems counterintuitive at first. But Musharraf, at the very least, was a known quantity for India. Despite his imperfections, the general-turned-president was a source of stability, and his resignation marks an uncertain future for India-Pakistan relations:

He was India's best bet in Pakistan. We will miss Musharraf," said A.G. Noorani, a constitutional lawyer and Kashmir expert. "If he had not fired his judges and gotten bogged down in domestic dramas, I believe we would have been able to make a significant breakthrough in a peace deal in Kashmir today."

Unfortunately, those "domestic dramas" took a decidedly undemocratic turn, and firing the judges was a desperate move to cling to power. The question now for the two countries is whether recent tensions had more to do with Musharraf's waning influence, or his undermining the civilian government by refusing to bow out. Hopefully it's the latter, but I'm not convinced.