A Force For Good

Last month Pakistan, which hosts one of the world's largest refugee populations outside Middle England, arrested a woman who has been living there forty years, threw her in jail for two weeks, fined her £850 and told her to go back where she came from; namely Afghanistan, where fighting and general disorder unaccountably continue to occur despite a couple of centuries' worth of British intervention. Unfortunately, the woman is something of a celebrity, having appeared on the front cover of the National Geographic as a child; and the Pakistani government has allowed this to embarrass them into suspending her deportation, rather than simply allowing the Press to defame her as a terrorist or as ugly and badly-dressed, as would undoubtedly happen were the Pakistani sense of patriotism as highly developed as some. The migrant in question has now added to the embarrassment by refusing the condescension and saying she can't wait to leave because, somehow or other, her treatment "was seen as violating the Afghan notion of honour". It appears that Mad Tessie's trade mission to the Raj, where she informed the caretakers of India that they would need to take back more wogs in return for their students having the privilege of paying our universities' fees, has been a moral as much as a diplomatic success.