Is Peshawar Tragedy Going to Change Anything in Denialistan?

Will this prove to be the turn­ing point in the war against extrem­ism and ter­ror­ism? At least, I am not opti­mistic.

They bombed the Meena Bazar in Peshawar, killing 101 and injur­ing over 200 peo­ple, many of them women and chil­dren. We blamed “Black­wa­ter” for the dead­ly attacks. They ripped through the Haz­ara town twice with­in a month, killing more than 200 and wound­ing over 400 Haz­aras. They unabashed­ly claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty but we put the onus on Sau­di-Iran rival­ry. They launched a brazen attack on Peshawar air­port and accept­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty in their trade­mark inso­lent and the­atri­cal style. We brushed aside their accep­tance and set on prov­ing the Jew­ish or Amer­i­can hand behind the attacks, thanks to the demon­ic and “un-Islam­ic” tat­toos found on the bod­ies of the ter­ror­ists. Their sui­cide bomber killed more than 60 peo­ple in an attack on a vol­ley­ball match in Afghanistan’s Pak­ti­ka province. We didn’t even care because those fight­ing in Afghanistan, we believe, are the “good” guys who want to “lib­er­ate” their coun­try from for­eign occu­pa­tion. They shot a 14-year-old girl in broad day­light. We first denied if the tragedy had actu­al­ly hap­pened and then declared the brave girl a “west­ern stooge”. They tore through the crowd at Wagah bor­der, killing at least 65 peo­ple. In a char­ac­ter­is­tic dis­play of jin­go­ism and thick-head­ed­ness, we (mis)directed our anger at India and howled “Allah u Akbar” and “Jee­way Jee­way Pak­istan” with even more fren­zy the next day. Yes­ter­day, their sav­agery and bar­barism took even their apol­o­gists by sur­prise. Hav­ing killed 126 peo­ple, most­ly chil­dren, they imme­di­ate­ly claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty. And in an incred­i­ble dis­play of idio­cy and para­noia, the con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists still man­aged to come up with some­thing: Mus­lims can’t do it. There must be a for­eign hand in it. A Pak­istan Tehreek-e-Insaaf par­lia­men­tar­i­an event went a step far­ther and blamed India for the bar­bar­ic attack.

Wel­come to Denial­is­tan! Yes, all this has hap­pened in the “land of the pure” and there are no signs of it com­ing to an end in the near future. Will this prove to be the turn­ing point in the war against extrem­ism and ter­ror­ism? At least, I am not opti­mistic. Here are my rea­sons:

Near­ly fifty one thou­sand (51,000) peo­ple have been killed in ter­ror­ist vio­lence through­out the coun­try over the past ten years. They have tar­get­ed peo­ple from almost every stra­ta of soci­ety: chil­dren, women, work­ers, edu­ca­tion­ists, politi­cians, sec­tar­i­an minori­ties, trib­al elders, sports­men, reli­gious schol­ars, intel­lec­tu­als, jour­nal­ists, secu­ri­ty offi­cials etc. From mosques, hos­pi­tals and shrines to schools, shop­ping cen­tres, pris­ons, and air­ports, almost all pub­lic places have been bombed or attacked. In near­ly all cas­es, the per­pe­tra­tors proud­ly claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty and vowed to con­tin­ue the “holy war”. Even in the most frag­ile and under-devel­oped soci­eties, blood­shed of this mag­ni­tude would have at least result­ed in the forg­ing of a soci­etal and state con­sen­sus to fight the men­ace of ter­ror­ism. In a coun­try with the world’s 7th largest mil­i­tary and armed with the world’s sole “Islam­ic bomb”, how­ev­er, this is not how things work. We have our own unique way of deal­ing with ter­ror­ism. Our first-ever counter-ter­ror­ism pol­i­cy was announced only this Feb­ru­ary, which means it is not even worth broach­ing the sub­ject of its imple­men­ta­tion now.

Let’s move to our for­eign pol­i­cy then. Over the past three decades, our secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment has relied on Islam­ic mil­i­tan­cy as a means of achiev­ing its strate­gic region­al goals. In the post‑9/11 peri­od, our secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment kept on sup­port­ing the “good” mil­i­tants to bleed Kab­ul and New Del­hi. How­ev­er, as has been the case with almost all their pre­vi­ous strate­gic adven­tures, this pol­i­cy back­fired and the Franken­stein turned vicious­ly on its mas­ter. Even the loss of more than 50,000 lives and dam­age worth $100 bil­lion did not desist them from pur­su­ing a dis­crim­i­na­to­ry pol­i­cy regard­ing ter­ror­ism. Although recent­ly the secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment has osten­si­bly act­ed against some fac­tions of the Afghan Tal­iban, it does not appear to be a strate­gic shift in their pol­i­cy towards all non-state mil­i­tant groups. At least, Jamaatud Dawa’s recent show of strength in Lahore and the lev­el of state sup­port it received — which was right­ly termed by the Indi­an for­eign office as “main­stream­ing of ter­ror­ism” — do not sug­gest so. Sim­i­lar­ly, the secu­ri­ty agen­cies at best seem to be obliv­i­ous of the alarm­ing­ly grow­ing influ­ence of sec­tar­i­an out­fits in Balochis­tan.

Turn­ing to the soci­ety, ours is a place where the staunchest oppo­nents of these bar­bar­ians are dubbed as Amer­i­can mouth­pieces, dol­lar-khor or lib­er­al fas­cists. It is a soci­ety that can­not even ensure the secu­ri­ty of its own chil­dren and yet wants a lone 14-year old girl to set­tle the score with the West­ern world and appre­hend their lead­er­ship for the wrongs in Iraq, Pales­tine and Libya. It is a soci­ety that hates the strongest sym­bol of resis­tance to the Tal­iban — Malala Yousufzai — and loves their biggest apol­o­gist. The apol­o­gist, who is the most pop­u­lar leader in the coun­try, thinks that the Tal­iban just ‘want to lib­er­ate the coun­try from the Amer­i­can War on Ter­ror and that is it. He even pushed for estab­lish­ing a Tal­iban office in Peshawar. And yet there are not even the slight­est signs of remorse or regret on his face today. On the con­trary, his lev­el of self-right­eous­ness and self-belief as the sav­iour of the nation are like­ly to grow in the com­ing days.

Final­ly, let’s pay atten­tion to the biggest myth that many Pak­ista­nis sub­scribe to i.e. Mus­lims can­not kill inno­cent Mus­lims. Pak­ista­nis have yet to come to terms with the bit­ter and stark real­i­ty that the per­pe­tra­tors of the Peshawar tragedy were Mus­lims. No only this but they are even will­ing to sim­ply dis­miss the ter­ror­ists as for­eign agents. They do not realise that no ide­ol­o­gy on earth can be pow­er­ful enough to moti­vate some­one to kill school-going chil­dren except reli­gion. They turn a blind eye to a rich his­to­ry of Mus­lims killing and slaugh­ter­ing each oth­er, all in the name of God. It is this dan­ger­ous­ly facile and delu­sion­al world­view of our soci­ety as a whole that makes me pes­simistic about our resolve and abil­i­ty to fight ter­ror­ism. Unless we break this myth and come out of our world of denial, we should not even think about coun­ter­ing ter­ror­ism.

The mil­i­tants are organ­ised and are crys­tal-clear about their objec­tives and indis­crim­i­nate in their tac­tics. We are divid­ed, polarised and con­fused about both our goals and tac­tics. The mil­i­tants are adap­tive, cre­ative and mean busi­ness seri­ous­ly. We are dis­loy­al, inept and inca­pable of seri­ous intro­spec­tion. We have learned not to learn from the past. The very fact that Maulana Abdul Aziz — the Burqa Avenger — was invit­ed by many TV chan­nels for analysing the tragedy speaks vol­umes of our infi­nite capac­i­ty for stu­pid­i­ty and non­sense. Our mem­o­ries are short. We will mourn the tragedy for three days and then every­thing will be back to busi­ness as usu­al. I see no light at the end of the tun­nel. I can see only unend­ing dark­ness.

Car­toon by Sabir Nazar