QUETTA, Pakistan – The 11-year-old girl blushed as she walked into the car dealer’s showroom on Quetta’s Adalat Road in southwest Pakistan. Her 17-year-old cousin, eyes fixed to the ground, followed her. When the younger girl asked the owner for five rupees (6 cents), he pointed to the back room and told both girls to follow him. 

A stocky man in his mid-forties with sallow skin and puffy eyes, he told the girls to lift their shirts – he wanted to see. ”Very nice,” the owner said. “They are getting bigger,” he told the 17-year-old as he touched her. 

The 11-year-old was excited as she told us the story; we had followed them inside the showroom pretending to be customers interested in renting one of the Land Cruisers parked inside. The owner had given them 10 rupees (12 cents), the girls told us, more money than they had asked for. Then, giggling, they ran away.

It’s dangerous to be seen following these girls – some of their clients are wealthy feudal land barons and powerful politicians, others are ordinary shopkeepers who will give money to the poor, but want to get something in return.

The girls are part of an alarming problem that gets little attention in Pakistan.

“Prostitution is rampant in all the big cities throughout the country,” said Senior Superintendent of Police, Raja Shahid, who heads the police investigation unit in Rawalpindi, a city close to the capital Islamabad.

“There are loopholes in the laws that need to be changed. For example, in order to nab the culprits, we need to conduct a raid – but we cannot conduct a raid without permission from a magistrate. By the time we get the permission we have missed our chance,” he said.

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With violence drastically reduced in Iraq, car sales are taking off – dealers are reporting up to a 300 percent increase in sales from last year.
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BEIJING – In an exclusive interview with NBC News in Beijing, prominent American economist Joseph Stiglitz discussed the challenges facing leaders at the upcoming G-20 summit and lauded China’s handling of the global economic crisis. 
Formerly chief economist of the World Bank and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, Stiglitz is in Beijing as part of a high-powered delegation from New York’s Columbia University. They are here to celebrate the opening of the new Columbia Global…(read more)