Pick-and-mix outrage
Twenty-five Pakistani soldiers were bound, gagged, brutally tortured, and killed in cold blood in two mass slayings in a week. Their naked mutilated bodies were dumped in ravines. Most of them were shot more than 40 times each at point-blank range.
Fifteen of them were abducted by 30 Taliban militants in a brazen pre-dawn attack on a guarded fort in Tank on December 23, in which one soldier died and several others had to retreat and hide. Their mutilated bodies were dumped in the Shewa town of North Waziristan last week. Taliban had promised in a statement after the raid that they would “cut these soldiers into pieces” and send them to their commanders as a New Year gift. They have delivered on such promises in the past, and publicly released video tapes of teenagers beheading unarmed men like animals.
Another 10 soldiers were abducted from an outpost in Orakzai in a late night attack on December 21 by more than 100 Taliban militants who killed 13 other troops in the raid. Their bodies were dumped in a gorge and found on Monday. A Taliban spokesman said bodies of 10 troops were left there as part of an exchange of corpses that reporters said had been negotiated by tribal elders.
An army that claims it is ready to take on the world’s only superpower to protect its soldiers is on its knees against the Taliban. Opinion makers and organisations who had orchestrated the circus following the tragic death of 24 troops in an unintended NATO attack on Salala border post on November 26 are simultaneously talking about negotiations with the Taliban who have killed twice as many troops and policemen since.
The 25 soldiers who were tortured, murdered and defiled by the Taliban were given less than a 10th of the air time given to those who died in the November 26 attack. There was no outrage in the newspapers, no televised funerals in flag-draped coffins, no emotionally charged reports on the families they have left behind, and no TV anchors and self-proclaimed guardians of Pakistan’s honour frothing at the mouth over the brutality. There were no claims of violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and no demands to defend the country and its army’s ghairat.
Our troops who lay their lives to protect us are to be honoured and mourned only when it suits the agenda of those in charge. Our territorial sovereignty is violated and our national honour at stake only when our invisible government wants to arm-twist the US into giving us more aid and weapons and agreeing with our plans for the future of this region.
The Taliban, who are the lynchpin of those plans, are not to be fought, resisted or even questioned. Our national narrative is very flexible in dealing with them. When they kill us, they are funded by the US. When they kill Americans, they are soldiers of Islam. This is “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary”. This is ‘Doublethink’, from George Orwell’s dystopia 1984.
And while our invisible government is busy manipulating public opinion to exploit brutal killings of its citizens and soldiers for political goals, it has failed to see a gaping hole in its future plans for the region.
The major problem with Pakistan’s doctrine of strategic depth is not the simple trade-off between space and time. It is that the lawless territory Pakistan wants to withdraw into – in order to sustain an initial thrust from India and launch a counteroffensive – has quickly expanded southeastwards to an extent that it threatens to eat up our country, our culture, our trade and our military. The very civilisation that they had wanted to protect is now at risk.
The writer is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He tweets @paagalinsaan and gets email at harris@nyu.edu