1. Do you hear the editors of every major newspaper on earth reaching for the same word ‘Pakistan’ to explain how the world stepped back from the edge?
2. Do you see the world looking at Pakistan differently this morning, not through the lens of its struggles, but through the light of what it just accomplished?
3. Do you see the relief on faces in Tehran, in Tel Aviv, in Dubai, in Riyadh -- faces that went to sleep that night not knowing if they would wake up to war or to peace?
4. Do you hear Washington, Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Jerusalem, London, Paris and Berlin -- for once, at the same moment -- speaking the same name?
5. Do you hear Alfred Nobel, from wherever history keeps its conscience, recognising in this moment exactly what he had in mind in 1895?
6. Do you feel the ground shifting under Islamabad,from a capital the world worried about to a capital the world is now grateful for?
7. Do you hear the traders on the floors of Seoul and Frankfurt and London exhaling -- finally exhaling -- because the number that was falling stopped falling?
8. Do you hear the silence where the sirens were?
9. Do we Pakistanis grasp that while others debated, calculated and hesitated, Pakistan simply acted?
10. Do you feel, somewhere in the marrow of what it means to be Pakistani, that something has permanently changed -- that the country the world doubted just became the country the world needed?
The writer is an Islamabad-based columnist.
