Pakistan, Jan. 20 -- Islamabad's annual pollen season no longer arrives quietly. It floods emergency rooms, clogs outpatient clinics, and turns a city designed for wide boulevards and open skies into a public-health pressure cooker. Every spring, paper mulberry pollen fills the air in concentrations that physicians describe as extraordinary by urban standards, triggering allergic rhinitis, asthma exacerbations, and secondary infections that ripple far beyond allergy wards. In this context, the federal government's decision to remove thousands of paper mulberry trees has provoked an emotional backlash framed as deforestation. That framing is politically potent, visually persuasive, and medically incomplete.

This is not a story about Islam...