Thanks to Shuja Nawaz for his report from the border. As someone born in Lahore, I have a personal interest in Pakistan, and am saddened at the violence there. If we want to make changes, we have to do as he suggests. Work with local people. Help them with the basic necessities of their lives. Here, I am thinking of an analogy from missiology. In an earlier age, missionaries were sent to convert people. Build churches, baptize "the heathen". There was no thought to their lives, no thought to the foreignness of what was being imposed (there are no grapes in Indonesia, for example, and people eat rice instead of bread. How then were Indonesians to understand the Eucharist of bread and wine?). Now, we speak not of establishing the "church", but participating in "the reign of God", helping people to better their lives. That's precisely what we are not doing in Afghanistan and Iraq.