Pakistan Feels More Volatile Than Ever

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 22, 2008 — -- In this country, on this day, each headline seemed to top the next.

The incoming Afghanistan ambassador was kidnapped at gunpoint in Peshawar, the largest city in the northwest.

A small militant group claimed responsibility for the country's largest ever suicide attack, the truck bomb that ripped through the Marriott Hotel on Saturday night, killing 53 people.

The Pakistani military, a publicly declared ally of the United States, fired warning shots at American helicopters near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, according to local residents.

On this day, this country has rarely felt more volatile.

And it was just before sundown when, perhaps, the man closest to the truck that blew up the Marriott to survive revealed his story, a graphic reminder of what this country is facing.

"I heard a blast," Imran Ali, a security guard in the Marriott's lobby, told ABC News while lying in his hospital bed a mile from the hotel. The lobby is only 75 feet from the blast site, and Ali might have been the only person in that room to survive. "When I woke up," he said, "I was covered in corpses."

Pakistan has been declared "the most dangerous country on Earth," and some local newspapers claimed the Saturday, Sept. 20, bombing as Pakistan's "9/11," and the Marriott this country's "ground zero." But it is highly unusual here that so many incidents would occur on one day. It is, perhaps, happenstance, or a sign that the country is becoming more unstable.

"This sort of challenge is so great because the enemy is not so visible, the enemy operates in the shadows, and we have to fight our own people," said retired Gen. Talat Masood, a former defense secretary.

It was rush hour when multiple gunmen jumped out of a car and ambushed Abdul Khaliq Farahi, the designated Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, while he drove in Peshawar. His driver was killed and he was taken into the nearby Khyber agency, the closest agency to Peshawar, according to Peshawar police.

Tonight, police sealed one of the areas in Khyber where they believe the Afghan diplomat was taken, as well as all the exit points from Peshawar, following an incident that could strain an already touchy relationship between neighbors, both suffering from Taliban-influenced terrorism.