What intrigues me about Pakistan is that the country was ruled by a woman, the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, but these crimes against women never stopped. In 2002, when Mukhtar Mai faced her brutal penalty, local newspapers reported 434 other cases. Several other cases have never even caught the attention of the press. The most common reaction from Pakistani women submitted to this terrible violence has been to commit suicide. Why did Benazir fail to act when she had the opportunity to abolish this horrible custom?

I am not saying that terrorism is not a real threat. It is. The intrinsic insanity of terrorism has victims around the world, spreading fear, violence and radicalism, and no one knows how to combat it effectively. Conventional war is an insufficient answer and only empowers local warlords. So terrorism has to be confronted, but I would enlarge the meaning of the word. The Newsweek Magazine said, in its Editor’s Desk section, that “in our view, the most dangerous country, from American perspective… is Pakistan”. Fair enough. However, there are many other ways to view Pakistan. It’s also the country where one woman, illiterate until recently, has been leading a revolution against evil. She is fighting with all the might she can mobilize. In Meerwala, the city where she lives, she used money from the judgments she won against her aggressors to open and maintain the city’s first school for girls. Her dream is to teach mutual respect to the next generation of Pakistanis generation. Mukhtar is working hard to reduce the dangers in Pakistan.

Is Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world? To answer this question, we have to define “dangerous.” If dangerous means to be a risk to local communities, the country to choose would be Sudan because of its many civil wars, chiefly Darfur. If we think of risk more broadly, encompassing global warming and its threat to humankind, the most dangerous countries might be the U.S. and China, the largest greenhouse gas emitters, whose governments refuse to cap their pollution levels.

South America’s most dangerous country is Venezuela. Hugo Chavez is threatening democratic institutions in his country, and undermining peace between South American countries. Empowered by skyrocketing oil prices, Chavez is shopping around in the global arms bazaar, buying heavy weaponry that could trigger a weapons buildup throughout Latin America.