More of the war
No use feigning surprises here. If the self-styled warriors of the faith aren’t above blowing up mosques where the faithful pray, sometimes even on Eid, attacking them when they’re breaking their fast doesn’t beg belief either. The numbing frequency with which these attacks have taken place has tightly compartmentalised the reaction of the public at large. For those who didn’t lose a loved one in Nowshehra’s Thursday bomb blast, the streaming information would have been transmitted in a very mechanical fashion: 14 killed, 22 injured, bomb disposal squad says it was a 10 kg device planted in a bicycle at a hotel in Risalpur Chowk that went off after iftar time. Off to the next TV channel.
Within a couple of days, however, a militant group will claim responsibility for the attack but by then, even the limited quantum of attention that our TV audiences would have paid to the incident would have tapered off. So when the next time there is a discussion on the war on terror on the airwaves or in living rooms, there can be an emphatic reiteration of the talk-to-them-narrative. Rather than pointing out to these simple souls that the state has been there, done that when it comes to negotiating with the terrorists, perhaps it would be better to question the inherent wisdom, nay, morality in talking to those who wouldn’t think twice before killing innocents. The Meena Bazaar bomb blast in Peshawar (casualties mostly women and children) could be excused – the populace outside Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad being children of a lesser god – but there hasn’t really been a sea change in opinion when Lahore’s Moon Market was torn asunder or Ashura blasts in Karachi.
The Republic has its work cut out for it. It is going to be a long slog of dismantling the networks of the terrorists, clamping down on their centres of indoctrination and closing their channels of finance. For all of this, both the media and what passes off these days as civil society need to be behind the elected government of the day.