LEGEND has it that Mughal Emperor Babar camped overnight on the Grand Trunk Road on his way to Kashmir for the summer. The next morning, as he saw the natural spring-fed pools and orchards before him, he uttered a spontaneous "Wah!" in appreciation of the idyllic setting.

The name stuck, and today Wah is associated with images of its cool, crystal-clear springs and its formal Mughal garden. Unfortunately, if Babar were to pass by Wah today, he would not want to spend an instant there: the nearby Dhamra River is running a sickly orange, while white powder drains into it from an adjacent marble works, and a huge hotel-cum-petrol station is coming up on the river bank. All day long, intermittent explosions can be heard as the surrounding hills are blasted for rocks to crush into aggregate for construction as well as for nearby cement factories. However, these blasts have to compete for attention with the loud cacophony created by pressure horns used by buses and wagons as they hurtle between Rawalpindi and Peshawar.

Thus do we destroy things and places we should preserve and cherish. Like a barbarian horde devastating everything in its path, we are systematically playing havoc with the natural beauty and the historical sites we have inherited. Nothing is sacred, nothing sacrosanct. While the Taliban deliberately destroy masterpieces, we do so through neglect and blind avarice. At the end of the day, the manner of destruction matters little; the fact of it does.

Any civilized society seeks to care for its patrimony and pass it on to the next generation undamaged and unspoiled. It does so not just for altruistic and aesthetic reasons, but for straight commercial ones as tourism now plays a major role in the economies of many countries fortunate enough to have inherited the remnants of ancient civilizations. We in Pakistan have been richly blessed with ruins going back thousands of years.

From the prehistoric site being excavated at Mehargarh to the complex Indus River civilization to the highly cultured Gandhara period, there is an almost unbroken link with the distant past. In the subsequent period, we have the early Muslim culture culminating in the magnificent Mughal empire. Finally, we have the architecturally fascinating colonial buildings. All in all, this is as enviable an archaeological inheritance as anybody could hope for.

In terms of natural beauty, we have stunning mountain ranges, forests and lakes in the north; the rugged moonscapes and fabulous beaches of Balochistan; the bounteous plains of Punjab; and the ecologically rich mangroves and lakes full of migratory birds in Sindh. Few countries the size of Pakistan can match it in terms of the sheer diversity of natural features.

And what have we done with this amazing wealth? Like a spoiled child surrounded by expensive toys, we have proceeded to take a hammer to everything of value and beauty. While other countries with a fraction of our attractions draw millions of tourists who spend billions of dollars, we have managed to acquire such a negative image abroad that foreign governments issue travel advisories to their citizens to stay away from Pakistan.

Quite apart from the dangers and lack of facilities tourists face here, our archaeological sites are crumbling from sheer neglect. A prime example is the plight of the ancient city of Moenjodaro: despite receiving millions of dollars through a Unesco appeal, the unique site is threatened by salinity. Plastic shopping bags blight our mountains and our beaches. Archaeological sites are plundered at will, and some of our finest Gandhara statues are now abroad. Apparently, shards and artefacts from the millennia-old site at Mehargarh are now finding their way to antique shops in London and New York. The few tourists who do visit these shores complain of being harassed and gaped at by locals. Our killjoy laws and hypocritical social mores combine to make a visit to Pakistan a holiday from hell: foreigners accustomed to a glass of beer or wine with their meals cannot figure out why they should be denied these minor pleasures when they are quite prepared to pay for them. And given our lack of any kind of night life, they have nothing to do in the evenings.

Returning to Wah, my earliest memories of that once-magical place that so entranced Babar go fifty years back when I was taken there as a young boy by my parents. I can still remember the large fish gliding through the still, crystal-clear water of the small lake formed by natural springs. Until a few years ago, you could still catch mahsheer in the nearby Dhamra River. No more, alas. As nearby factories (including the Pakistan Ordnance Factories located a couple of miles away) release their noxious effluence into the atmosphere and the nearest body of water, the whole area is slowly dying. Until a few years ago, stone crushing plants were chewing up priceless Ghandara remains in Taxila valley itself, barely five miles from Wah.

Perhaps one reason I am so indignant at what is happening to, in and around Wah is that over the years, I have spent many memorable weekends there, enjoying my old friend Kamran Shafi's warm hospitality. Many is the time we turned up from Islamabad on a hot summer day and plunged into the chilly pool to cool off, bringing our refreshments into the water with us. In winter, we have spent many a convivial evening before a roaring wood fire. But conversations are frequently punctuated by the ubiquitous pressure horns from the motorway a stone's throw away.

While the government is so intrusive about so many other things, it has adopted a supine, laissez-faire attitude to all those busily polluting the air and the water. When Kamran wrote a series of articles against what was happening around him in a newspaper, an environmental inspector from the Punjab government finally turned up to ask what was bothering him. Annoyed, Kamran asked him to take a look around. Big mistake. In his place I would have practically written the man's report. In any event, no official action of any kind has been taken. Amazingly, the owner of the hotel under construction just by the bridge has built a wall in the river itself, thus diverting a stream of water towards a span of the bridge. When the river is high, the safety of the bridge could well be compromised, but nobody has asked the owner to stop.

The environment and our cultural heritage have been accorded the lowest possible priority by successive governments. For them, raising revenue is the be-all and end-all, and by allowing the unhindered exploitation (and consequent defilement) of our resources, they think Pakistan will achieve a higher level of development. Our leaders have never grasped the fact that by permitting individuals and companies to destroy our rivers and our coastline, our mountains and our lakes, we are losing something priceless and irreplaceable.

A few years from now, what will we tell our children when they ask us what happened to their inheritance?