More of the same
It was a morning like any other mornings in Lakki Marwat: a police officer, DSP Javed Iqbal, was targeted and killed in a roadside bomb blast while performing his anti-terrorists duties in the city. Javed Iqbal belonged to Mingora city in Swat. His body was dispatched to his hometown after a while.
It was an evening like any other gloomy evenings of Swat in those days: the city was mourning the death of one of its valiant sons who had embraced martyrdom in Lakki Marwat in the line of duty that morning. People of the city gathered to pay their last tributes and attend his funeral prayers. It was when the last rituals were about to conclude and the police were preparing to offer the slain officer a gun salute, that a suicide bomber blew himself up beside the coffin. The blast killed 55 more innocent people including one of deceased officer’s two adolescent sons.
This was eight years ago – February 29, 2008, to be precise. This practice of targeting some well-known figure or figures and then chasing the wounded persons to hospitals or the dead bodies to graveyards has now become old. Even a layman can tell that this can be a ploy the perpetrators to move in for the real kill. Going through Dera Ismail Khan, Quetta and experimenting with it virtually throughout the length and breadth of the country, they have perfected this practice into an art form now. The story of ‘soft targets’ is equally old. The fact of the matter is, that – barring exceptions – the holy war in KP and FATA has been fought mostly through the so-called soft targets.
Fine. Everything is fair in love and war. So, if the religious (or whatever fighter) thinks it is justified to attack hospitals and graveyards to maim the suffering humanity in sickbeds and blow up the already blown-up bodies of their fallen brethren – let them do it.
But how would one explain the country’s chief executive telling the nation on an umpteenth such atrocity (Quetta, August 8, 2016) that ‘Terrorists are using innovating [sic] measures by hitting soft targets and one must respond in an advanced coordinated way”?
We have been hearing since time immemorial that Balochistan is at the center of attention of all the forces that want to harm Pakistan. Restarting from the death of Akbar Bugti, Balochistan is passing through a situation of unrest with the military and paramilitary forces virtually running the show there. But the COAS said in Quetta soon after the mass murder of more than 70 lawyers that “Having been defeated in KPK, terrorists [are] shifting focus to [Balochistan]… Is an attempt to undermine improved security in [Balochistan], specially targeting CPEC”, as DG ISPR quoted him in a series of tweets.
One just fails how to put in context these statements of the country’s top 2 bigwigs; whether they don’t know the ground situation or this is just another way of diverting people’s attention from their respective failures? The first can’t be the case because if not the PM, the COAS is certainly not a person who can be said to be ill-informed. Later statements/discussions proved these two statements to be just opening shots of diverting the debate to that particular pattern to in order to bring it into conformity with the prevailing narrative regarding national security and the enemy’s conspiracies to annihilate Pakistan.
No wonder one is exposed to the endless repetition of words and phrases that we are used to since the start of this ‘war against terrorism’; “martyrs”, “sacrifices”, “enemies’ designs”, “hidden hand”, “failure of the enemy to frighten us”, “the armed forces ‘ determination to fight the war till the last terrorist is eliminated” and the government’s “resolve to offer more of the citizens for sacrifice on our way to glory” – or till the last Pakistan drinks the cup of martyrdom (Jaam-e-shahadat), whichever comes first. And the verbosity goes on. . .
And look at the show of unity and the unwavering desire of the people to get killed at the hands of an enemy which it has so far failed to even recognise or to understand his real objectives. Only one thing is clear; such moments of great sacrifices brings more unity to us, proves us more resilient a nation. It is only when so many of our people die that we demonstrate to the nation we are all ‘one’. All our leaders make a beeline after the COAS lands at the site of the occurring and our political leaders across the spectrum start mimicking the same words one after the other.
We need bloodshed of our people at regular intervals so that Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif, Asif Zardari and Raheel Sharif, Mubashir Luqman and Hafiz Saeed, Meera and Sirajul Haq show unity and agree on something; throwing away all their political and non-political differences to the wind. Just for the sake of the nation. And, congratulations, the PM presided a high level meeting on Tuesday and has called an even ‘higher’ level meeting for today (Wednesday) to discuss the country’s security situation and the progress made so far in NAP implementation. Such blessed moments don’t come your way every day; it sometime takes months to sacrifice so many people in one go and be united in self-pity.
What we have seen since yesterday is more of the same that we have been forced to see since long – despite changing so many governments, prime ministers and army chiefs. What we are going to see during the next few days is also very predictable; high level meetings, forming investigative teams at different levels, discussing the event for some days, claiming to be sharing the grief of the affected families and standing with them shoulder-to-shoulder, etc. But then the attention of the media will diverted to some new happening and its agenda will be changed; so will change the attention of the people. They will start forgetting their country, the war that its soldiers are fighting, and the sacrifices that its people are offering. And then we will need another great moment of sacrifice. And move on we will, by the grace of the Almighty.
What will change and what have already changed are the fates of the more than 60,000 families that have lost someone or those unrecorded number of families that have someone crippled, languishing in some dark room of the house. More so the sacrificial number has also changed a bit as we have now 70-plus more added to the famous 60,000 figure; it is now 60,071 or something like that.
What has changed for Balochistan is that it has lost cream of its society with that one single stroke. They were from a segment of society which is considered to be always at the vanguard of democratic struggle; those who raise their voice against injustices and against human rights’ violations. The province is deprived of valuable educated people, who are comparatively hard to come by there, and the conspiracy, according to the PM was against CPEC; he has no doubt in his mind that the enemies are after the project, and the COAS agrees with him. What won’t change will be the pattern of the actual perpetrators not getting caught, brought to justice and the conspiracy or the conspirators exposed. Instead the people of the province – the victim of these atrocities – will be exposed to ‘special combing operations’ now and the intelligence agencies will be empowered, as per the directives of the Chief – to ‘go anywhere in the country to target anyone linked with these terror acts’.