Two weeks on from the Lahore terror attacks that killed eight people and injured several others the future for Pakistan looks as bleak as ever.

The government in Islamabad, as so often in the recent past, teeters on the brink, President Asif Ali Zardari coming under enormous pressure from all sides for the increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian nature of his regime which has this week seen the sacking and then reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry and the bar on elected office of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother.

While Zardari may have bought some time with his u-turn on Justice Chaudry’s dismissal and Sharif’s subsequent decision to call off a march on the capital, the country remains in a state of flux, its people not knowing where next the terrorists will strike nor the Taleban rise, with the army poised to take power just as they did a decade ago under the whip of General Musharraf.

All of which makes the return of cricket all the more unlikely. This past week alone the International Cricket Council has switched the Champions Trophy – already postponed by a year – from Pakistan to South Africa, the proposed home series with Australia next month moved to Abu Dhabi and Dubai and the tour of Bangladesh scrapped altogether.

It is this last point that will cause the most alarm. Foreign teams refusing to travel to Pakistan is one thing; countries refusing to host them quite another, though had it been anyone other than Bangladesh, which has had its own internal bloodbaths lately and so may genuinely be unable to provide security, the fallout I’m sure would have been greater.

Though it’s not just Pakistan and Bangladesh that are under threat, with India also in the firing line, following the Mumbai terror attacks last November, and Sri Lanka in a state of near-Civil War due to the ongoing Tamil Tigers conflict.

Only yesterday it was announced that the Indian Premier League would have to be moved abroad - most likely to England or South Africa - after the Indian Government said it could not guarantee players’ safety as the nation’s security forces would be stretched to a critical level policing the forthcoming General Election.

The problems for Pakistan cricket, however, go back much further than the March 3rd attacks. For one, they did not play a single Test match in the whole of 2008. To put this in perspective, the last time any nation went a calendar year without playing Test cricket was 1970, when Pakistan, India, New Zealand and the West Indies all failed to take the field in protest at Apartheid.

Indeed, South Africa’s 22-year exclusion from 1970 to 1992 apart, no team, not Sri Lanka, not Bangladesh and not even Zimbabwe have gone a full year without Test cricket since being elevated to that status, Zimbabwe’s current Mugabe-induced suspension aside.

It’s not that they haven’t been playing any cricket nor even that they’ve not been playing at home, to which a sequence of 21 one-day internationals and five twenty20 matches will attest, two-thirds on home soil – including the Asia Cup – but that teams just weren’t willing to undertake extended tours for what have transpired to be very understandable reasons, though this doesn’t explain why they didn’t play any Test matches away.

The ICC Future Tours Programme must take some of the blame for this, and must surely now be scrapped in light of these and other events. Just one example of the absurdity of the FTP is their scheduling of a West Indies tour of England next summer, in addition to their tour this year as well as their visit in 2007, a total of three tours in four years. Now I enjoy seeing the Windies stuff England as much as the next man, but this is just overkill, quantity over quality, with the end result being a diminishing of the product, cheapening the value of a Test cap or an appearance at Lord’s.

For Pakistan, though, the Lahore terror attack was just the latest in a long line of sorry events to have befallen the nation’s cricketers in the last two-and-a-half years, from the Darrell Hair ball-tampering row at the Oval in August 2006 to the tragic death of coach Bob Woolmer at the World Cup in the Caribbean in March 2007 and the constant bickering amongst the leadership of the board.

On the field, they lie fifth in both the Test and ODI world rankings, and are one of the favourites going into this summer’s twenty20 world championships in England, a tournament in which they finished runners-up to India two years ago.

And if they are successful, it will be sure to restore the pride and lift the spirits of their people. “Our cricket is going through a rough phase,” declared Pakistan coach Intikhab Alam, “but we have to fight on and one way of doing that is to start winning titles like the World Twenty20″.

“We have a very reliable batting line-up, while our bowlers are also very good for the shorter version of the game. There is no doubt that we can win the title in England.”

Many non-Pakistanis would concur.

(1 votes. Average: 3 out of 5)