A surreptitious foreign communication has slipped through the national defenses of Pakistan. It reached targets across the country through an unlikely channel, the education ministry.

The message was concealed in the rhyming couplets of an acrostic published in government-approved English language textbooks. Now they’ve got trouble, right there in Islamabad. Trouble that starts with P and ends with H. It’s a big brother message in verse form, targeted at 16 year olds.

And the Pakistani media jumped all over it.

The poem carries hidden in its lines a cipher that the education committees in charge of approving texts claim to have missed altogether.

The 20-liner titled, the leader, is that poetic form whose first letters of each line spell out a message. the acrostic is a ancient form of word play. Edgar Allen Poe wrote an acrostic. his spelled out the name of his cousin, Elizabeth.

in 2004 Pakistani subject specialists downloaded The Leader from the Internet. the poem went on to be approved by an unspecified number of committees, then included in an English-language textbook as an anonymous work.

It starts off:

P atient and steady with all he must bear,

R eady to meet every challenge with care,

and its first nine lines go on to spell out PRESIDENT

the ode continues with praise for an unnamed leader, and ends:

B racing for war, but praying for peace,

U sing his power so evil will cease,

S o much a leader and worthy of trust,

H ere stands a man who will do what he must

The whole adoring acrostic spells out PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH.