"We have recovered two rockets along with launchers," a police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The rockets have been defused."

An intelligence official said the rockets were attached to wires and mobile phones and were pointed toward the main government buildings.

Just behind the parliament are the official residences of the president and prime minister. However, it was immediately not clear whether President Pervez Musharraf or Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were present there.

The parliament is not in session.

Police and the army cordoned off roads leading to parliament house and investigations have started, a senior police official said.

As police recovered rockets, the state-run Pakistan Television showed Musharraf appearing in a conference on the reconstruction of northern parts of the country following a devastating earthquake a year ago.

"We have detained a few people for questioning," the senior police official said.

Witnesses saw police taking away in buses scores of laborers working at a nearby construction site.

On Wednesday night a small explosive device exploded in a park near Musharraf's army residence in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, adjoining Islamabad.

Musharraf stays in Rawalapindi and seldom uses the presidential residence in Islamabad.

The military said the blast in the Rawalpindi park was unrelated to Musharraf or his military residence, Army House.

Musharraf, whose cooperation with the United States in its war against terrorism has put him at the top of an al Qaeda hit list, survived two assassination attempts in December 2003.

The Pakistani leader returned at the weekend from a three-week overseas trip, during which he launched his memoir "In the Line of Fire" and held talks with President George W. Bush.

Musharraf has held onto his role as army chief since coming to power in a bloodless military coup seven years ago, and was snubbed by major democracies round the world until he was propelled to the front of the world stage in 2001 by the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Bush persuaded Musharraf to help a U.S.-led invasion force topple the ruling Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan for harboring al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.

Brunson now finds himself out of tune with his country's senators. By 409 votes to two, they have approved a measure to ban internet gambling by making it impossible for the websites to process transactions. The rhetoric from some senators is worth quoting without parody. Jim Leach, a Republican from Iowa, says online betting is like injecting drugs without needlemarks. "You just click on the mouse and lose your house," he says.

That is not the experience of most of us. Yes, addiction and under-age gambling is a problem, and deserves more attention, but the vast majority of gamblers would regard what they do as a pastime. It will be profitable for some, unprofitable for most, but we are consenting adults.

It is hard to believe Leach represents mainstream American opinion. Walk into a bar in California and the television is as likely to be showing a game of celebrity poker as a game of baseball. Poker is a great American pastime, born in the days of the wild west and played by presidents. Truman used to fleece the White House press corps; Nixon reputedly financed his first congressional campaign from his poker winnings as a serviceman.

So what is going on, and is this the end of online gambling? Presbyterian America, as represented by Leach, clearly has the upper hand over those who see themselves as part of the frontier tradition; but there is more to this. The clue lies in the bill to which the anti-gambling legislation was attached: the ports security bill, which seeks to confine ownership of US ports to interests perceived to be friendly to America. In other words, it's a protectionist measure. So is the anti-gambling law. America is seeking to protect its gambling interests.

The big Vegas casinos have been nervous about online gambling for obvious reasons. Established US sports betting interests did not like the idea that upstart British companies, paying little tax from their Gibraltar hideouts, could offer better odds on the Superbowl. Unsurprisingly, the powerful US horse racing lobbying has escaped reform, securing a "carve-out" from the new rules.

At one level, the legislation will be effective. The likes of PartyGaming, as a member of the FTSE 100 and the dominant player in online poker in America, simply cannot flout the law. It will stop taking bets from America, depriving it of more than two-thirds of its revenue at a stroke. Its investors are stunned, but they shouldn't be. The US department of justice has consistently warned operators that what they were doing was illegal. It was odds-on that protectionist politicians would go further.

It is unrealistic to think all PartyGaming's clientele in America will simply give up gambling. Many might, but the internet, as one of Leach's spokesmen admitted, is "too vast and too adaptive" to police effectively. It is relatively easy for the unscrupulous to cheat the system. For credit card transactions, an offshore gambling website could register as, say, an insurance company. It won't work every time, but when it does it might take six months for the authorities to notice.

America has not learned the lesson of prohibition, but the rest of the world, by and large, is more sensible. In Britain we take it as given that we can put a tenner on the 4.30 at Plumpton by telephone or internet. In France, even the state national lottery offers online poker, a fact that should ensure Brussels stamps on recent protectionist twitchings there.

Regulation must be the way forward, because the human instinct to gamble will not be reversed and it is too late to turn off the internet. Regulation means forcing the operators to come onshore, where they pay tax on profits and can be humbled into contributing to the cost of clearing up lives wrecked by addiction. That's how we treat Ladbrokes, William Hill, Gala bingo and our casino owners. By and large, it works.

The poker fad is fading, but the modern version of the game has been around for 200 years. It will survive the Senate.

nils.pratley@guardian.co.uk

But Bush is not alone in wanting to teach a thing or two to the rest of the world. He has placed one of his closest advisors -- the mild-mannered and professorial Paul Wolfowitz -- at the head of the World Bank. Having "taught" the Iraqis about the wonders of democracy and freedom, the former deputy secretary of defense is now teaching the rest of the world about good governance and ending corruption. Unfortunately, these are subjects he appears to know precious little about.

In the run-up to the World Bank and IMF annual meetings being held this week in Singapore, member governments have openly questioned Wolfowitz's anti-corruption agenda as a thinly veiled attempt to limit the reach of World Bank funding to countries favoured by the Bush administration. Under former President Wolfensohn, the bank managed to maintain its politically neutral status. Under Wolfowitz, all pretences are gone. Following the coming to power of the new Hamas-led Palestinian government, the World Bank's programme in the West Bank and Gaza ground to a standstill. Wolfowitz has similarly blocked loans to Uzbekistan and Kenya -- along with trying to block debt relief to the Democratic Republic of Congo -- citing corruption concerns.

Interestingly, Transparency International (a big fan of Wolfowitz) gives the same high corruption score to Iraq and Indonesia as it does to these three countries. Despite its low rating for combating corruption, Wolfowitz praised Indonesia's progress against corruption in his first major policy speech before the bank's spring meetings -- perhaps not surprising since his stint as US ambassador to Indonesia, 1986-89, is his only significant experience in a developing country and the one to which he alludes constantly in attempting to make credible his dubious development credentials, much to the amusement of the highly-experienced international staff of the bank. Also unsurprising, Wolfowitz is attempting to strengthen the bank's presence and operations in Iraq though little but a miracle could undo the devastation his ill-conceived war has wrought.

Wolfowitz has made the fight against corruption the cornerstone of his World Bank presidency. However, the way in which he has gone about it exposed a breach between his words and his actions that has made shareholders, clients and staff all wonder what he is really up to. In keeping with the Bush administration's preference for loyalty over expertise, Wolfowitz seems to suspect everyone except his small coterie of advisors. It is the same attitude that led to Paul Bremer heading up the provisional authority in Baghdad, and we all know what a disaster that was. Those he has brought with him are all Republicans, and mostly friends from the Department of Defense.

As for new hires, many are old acquaintances from the "coalition of the willing", including former Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ana Palacio and former Salvadoran Finance Minister Juan Jose Daboub. A year ago, he named Suzanne Folsom, an ethics lawyer with no experience in investigations and certainly no international experience, but nonetheless wife of a prominent Republican, as chief of the bank's anti-corruption unit. Since that time, very little has come out of the "Department of Institutional Integrity" except allegations of corruption against bank staff. Staff liken the atmosphere to that of a Stalinist regime: no one knows who will be denounced next, or when, for some real or imagined transgression. Wolfowitz has recently upgraded the Bank "Whistleblower Protection Policy", to make it easier for staff to report one another for suspected corruption. Very little protects staff from false accusations.

But what really has insiders steamed is the lack of "good governance" within the bank. While preaching to others the need for "transparency, accountability and [the] rule of law," Wolfowitz happily ignores all these strictures within the Bank. He and his advisors refuse to share information to the point that staff, the Board of Directors, and even borrower countries themselves, learn about decisions from the press before learning about them from Wolfowitz.

In a famous case, The Washington Post ran an editorial about Wolfowitz's intention to block debt relief to the Democratic Republic of Congo on the morning of the day he was to discuss it with the Board of Directors, causing directors to wonder how the Post was able to articulate Wolfowitz's position so clearly before he had shared it with anyone inside the bank. Further, Wolfowitz has managed to hire former cronies with barely a nod towards the bank's stringent procurement and recruitment guidelines. Their qualifications and functions largely remain a mystery. The Staff Association protested against the recruitment of Folsom, noting that, at the very least, the Bank's anti-corruption chief should be hired in a transparent and competitive manner befitting the position. One staff member complained, "It is difficult for us to tell a minister that he cannot hire his cronies on Bank projects when our own president does so with impunity." The Staff Association and the Board of Directors have also questioned the role of Wolfowitz's closest advisor, Robin Cleveland. Wolfowitz's pointed refusal to answer inquiries has further increased suspicion.

As for "accountability," many inside and outside the bank are wondering when Wolfowitz will take responsibility for the mess he made in Iraq. As is now widely reported in the American press, his rationale for going to war and his predictions about its aftermath were not only wrong, but were deliberately so. His chief spokesman, Kevin Kellems (former spokesman for Dick Cheney) is on record as having said that Saddam Hussein was sponsoring terrorist organisations, including Al-Qaeda, a "fact" that was known by the Bush government to be false well before the war. Cleveland is known as the mind behind Wolfowitz's assertion that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the country's reconstruction. She has now turned her attention to the bank's internal budget, castigating staff for their "fat-cat salaries" and luxury travel. Never mind the fact that Cleveland is quite happy with her quarter of a million dollar annual salary and had her boss get an exception for the bank's travel policy so that she could fly to the annual meetings in first class.

From many quarters it is to be hoped that the bank's shareholders will take a close look at the man installed at the head of their institution and determine whether he really is right for the job. So far, he has shown himself reluctant to practice what he preaches.

The writer is a political analyst resident in Washington.