FSO killed in Karachi

After a bit of a search on Google News, I found the name of the FSO killed in Karachi, although I found it in the Toronto Star after a fruitless search in US journals and sites.

The hapless FSO was David Foy, FMO, Financial Management Officer. I have not been back to the State Dept for a while, but I wonder if Mr. Foy will make it to the marble wall of FSOs who died in the line of duty which is in the main lobby of the "General Hospital" [what now King Abdullah called the State Dept building 20-plus years ago in perhaps the only memorable phrase he has heretofore uttered] in Foggy Bottom.

Foreign Service Officers get pretty short shrift nowadays and the Service has been attenuated by ambitious programs like the "Mustang" program which allowed Foreign Service Staff to upgrade into full Officer status. Wendy Chamberlain, whom I knew in the Dept when she worked as a staff officer, eventually became US Ambassador to Pakistan.

Back to the "wall of memory." A friend of mine was Arnie Raphel, who was Ambassador to Pakistan when he was killed along with the country's President, General Zia, in a plane blown up by a terror-bomb in the 1980s, is certainly on the wall.

Also, when I was in Vietnam, a USAID volunteer named Fred Abramson was killed a couple of years before, in the late '60s, and somehow I ended up with his impressive collection of books. Abramson was a Stanford grad, as I recall, and it brings to mind a lost generation of Peace Corps and Development volunteers. I don't recall if Abramson made it onto the wall.

Actually, I recall having once visited the Karachi Consulate General during the '80s, when a Westerner needed no special protection or bodyguards. I met a relative of Benazir Bhutto, [whose mother was Iranian, I was told] and the poisoning of one of her brothers in a family feud. Bhutto's father was the wildly popular PPP Party chief who rose to be President and then was convicted and hanged by a military junta. I once finished off a bottle of vodka with the Russian Ambassador to Islamabad, as he explained to me that the invasion of Afghanistan was "all a misunderstanding."

Nowadays the madrasas are churning out young Wahhabis steeped in aggressive fundamentalist Islamic doctines. Indeed, Pakistan is a country that is simmering in all sorts of tensions, including when one senior Pak official in Peshawar asserted to me that the western half of the country's wish to secede and associate with Iran, something you don't read about in the foreign policy universe, would occur in the near future. [That was twenty years ago, but maybe many people still feel the same way.]

I stayed in a Shi'a district for a week in Azad Kashmir [where the recent quake occurred or nearby] and got a sense of how gigantic the country is, with a minority of Shi'a living precariously on mountain slopes while the cities like Lahore, one of the most beautiful cities in Asia, now teem with angry Muslims, mostly Sunnis. [The Kipling Museum in Lahore is worth a detour.]

My daughter wants to become an FSO, but I do not support her wish wholeheartedly. Too much danger out there nowadays.