Pakistan's Dr. Strangelove: Or, how my friend stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb-maker's daughter

I haven't seen Raph Worrick since November 21, 1979. He was using crutches due to some leg trouble he was having, which made him look particularly clumsy as we all scampered from terrorists who were attacking our American-run school in Islamabad. While we hid in gym locker rooms, the jihadists dispensed only minor mayhem around our school grounds, perhaps because they were already exhausted from a long day of destroying the American embassy across town. That latter story is detailed here in this Washington Post story (written by a former student of our school). These Carter-era events, among the first signs of growing anti-American Sunni rage, are also recorded in painful detail in entire chapters of Ghost Wars and The Siege of Mecca.

Raph and other American foreign-service brats were promptly evacuated, while I stayed in Islamabad for another year. We touched base by post or phone only a couple more times over the next few years. Then 25 more years ensued before the magic of Facebook allowed us to get back in touch. He's now a talented singer/songwriter, and one of his newer songs brings back some wild and bitter memories.

"Atom Girl" is his ode to Ayesha Khan, the pretty but brutally snobby girl who stole his heart just as skillfully as her fatherm, A.Q. Khan, stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands. A.Q.'s theft made him a hero to ordinary Pakistanis who had felt bullied by a nuclear India. And his subsequent marketing of that technology made him a hero to rogues around the world.

Scroll to the bottom here to listen to Atom Girl, a great little melody with some hilarious lyrics. It will make you think about what an odd world we live in, and it will remind me, again and again, of that elitist Ayesha, the girl who mocked me during square dancing, who beat me in a class president vote that I still think was rigged, and who was the scion of one of the most controversial men on this planet.

What a small, strange world. An interesting footnote: We used to proudly refer to our school as ISI, short for the International School of Islamabad. Now that ISI is more commonly used to refer to Pakistan's notorious intelligence agency, the school now differentiates itself by calling itself ISoI.