As an exercise in the macabre, if one were to mine our country’s history for our most despondent year, it would have to be ‘09. It would make for a longer discussion than this space to argue how it was much worse than what ‘71 could possibly be. In that fateful year of 2009, the country faced its highest spate of terrorist activity. Obviously, within said incidents, the bulk of the brunt was borne by the Pashtun belt. Within the Pashtun belt, it was the then (and in all but name, now) tribal areas. But if one were to zero in on the city that was hit the hardest, enough to change its collective psyche, it would have to be Peshawar itself. The city saw no respite, with a bomb blast almost every other day.
In the aftermath of the terrible blast yesterday at the Police Lines Mosque, for the people of the unfortunate city, there is a foreboding sense of doom, of a return back to that dark era. The rising death toll, hospital officials fear, just might rise into the triple digits. Our hearts go out to the families of the deceased and also to those that are injured.
The nation’s political class is busy playing the musical chairs of power, while the nation’s bloated, overfed security establishment is the master of ceremonies of said game. Both are to be blamed for ignoring the rising tide of terror, but it is the latter that should be blamed more than the former, many times over. The security establishment was once accused of playing a double game in the war against terror, a charge that it used to not only vehemently deny, but it also used to cast aspersions on journalists who would report on the alleged double game. After the ascent of the Taliban in power in Afghanistan, the security establishment giddily jettisoned the denials of such a double game, with the former chief spymaster going to Kabul, uttering his now famous “everything will be okay.”
Well, things are far from okay. The havoc that the state has wreaked on the people of Afghanistan has to be paid with interest, unless there is a huge policy shift. With the country’s entire political class up in arms (at varying degrees, depending upon political expediency) against the security establishment’s ingress into politics, the time is also right for there to be a collective, across-the-board condemnation by the political class of the establishment’s policies towards the Taliban. There needs to be a zero-tolerance policy towards militancy of any ilk, regardless of where the said militants profess to take their fight.
The people of Pakistan deserve better. The people of (all) neighbouring countries deserve better.
