http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/19/w tal319.xml
British muscle and US jets arrive in jittery Islamabad By Tim Butcher in Quetta, Pakistan (Filed: 19/09/2001)
A SQUAD of muscular British men wearing civilian clothes arrived in Islamabad yesterday on a scheduled flight from Britain carrying diplomatic bags weighed down with what looked to the layman like military equipment.
Then the Pakistani capital's main airport was all of a sudden closed for two hours to allow military flights, believed to be by the United States Air Force, to land.
Finally the country's main military installations were put on the highest state of alert, especially near towns such as Quetta close to the rugged, mountainous border with Afghanistan.
The first major war of the 21st century might not yet have started but Pakistan's preparations for war were in full swing. Flights into the country were almost deserted but seats out were at a premium.
The government cancelled trading on the country's stock exchange for three days, adding to the overall sense of uncertainty, and all over Pakistan gaggles of people huddled by radios or in front of television screens to watch as their nation was sucked into a conflict which will almost certainly mean yet more refugees and yet more political instability.
President Pervaiz Musharraf is walking a political tightrope after backing Pakistan's old client, the Taliban, and knows that the crowds who have so far voiced their opposition could swell andthreaten the foundations of his state.
At a time when flags at government ministries, hotels and businesses all over the developed world still flew at half mast, it was significant to see that in Pakistan's seat of government no such gesture had been made.
The atmosphere on the streets of Islamabad was not of panic but of portent. These are worrying days for Pakistan and no one dares predict quite how it will play out.
Among Pakistanis there is a genuine sense of frustration that America should now be focusing its anger on Osama bin Laden, the same man who 15 years ago enjoyed CIA backing in his fight against Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
"What do you expect if you do not pay a man who has done work for you," said an elderly pensioner called Yunis, who had come home to Pakistan after a career driving buses in Redditch.
"He did their work for them for a long time but they did not reward him. If you had a labourer and he worked on your house but you did not pay him, you would expect him to get angry. That is what has happened with bin Laden."
In the frontier towns like Quetta they are preparing for yet another flood of refugees across the border from Afghanistan. So far the Pakistani authorities have only let a few hundred through to a new detention centre in the main soccer stadium.
But everyone in the town is expecting the flow to surge once the Pakistani government relaxes its border controls. There is even a slang word doing the rounds in Quetta, an unrecognisable bastardisation of English and Urdu, meaning dangerous crisis.
The word is "garberation" and before too long it might have stopped being slang and been adopted here as vernacular.