“Furthermore, I am of the opinion that Carthage should be destroyed.”
These were the closing remarks of Cato the Elder, the famous Roman statesman, in next to every speech of his. He, amongst many others, was of a hawkish disposition towards Rome’s ancient rival Carthage. So he and his lot would end all speeches, whether they were on matters of irrigation or land revenue, with these lines.
Much like a noted Pakistani news publication would attribute even the fatalities occurring as a result of motorcycle one-wheeling to our failure to build the Kalabagh dam.
In our ill-fated republic, we have had many reverse-Carthages. All our speeches seem to end with an affirmation to save them.
There was Kashmir, not ours to begin with — in de jure, de facto terms — that we had to protect. Later on, it became our nuclear installations that we had to protect. These installations were, ironically, constructed to protect us, not the other way around. But the public seemed to buy this theory. Even after the Navy Seals attack that took out Osama bin Laden, with egg on our face, regardless of which way you look at it, the defence high priests sat and assured the Pakistani public that our nuclear installations were always going to be safe.
Running through the various reverse-Carthages was, of course, the threat of qaumi saalmati, a tool meant to hit any political presence outside the mainstream with.
It appears that the new national reverse-Carthage is the CPEC route. Of late, any incident of a terrorist attack is perceived to be an attack on the much vaunted economic corridor that will run through the country and supposedly change our lives.
So integral has the project become to our scheme of things that it takes precedence over the very lives it is going to better.
Now, every sentence after a terrorist attack includes, in addition to the usual arsenal of pet-phrases, the line that the neighbouring powers are doing this because they are jealous of the CPEC.
The media seems to buy this theory completely and without question. One wouldn’t expect much from a media that thought Mahmood Khan Achakzai was seditious when he merely pointed out the failure of the security agencies that led to the Quetta attack.
So unquestioning is the mainstream media, that no one brought up how an attack in Quetta and Friday’s incidents in Peshawar and Mardan are related to the CPEC.
These two provinces have been crying themselves hoarse that the corridor route should be the original, “western” route. That route makes more sense strictly geometrically and the resulting development will also act as a silver bullet for a lot of the ills that plague these provinces. The western route has all but been foregone for the eastern one. Yes, they are building a bit of a dirt track and calling it the western route, but it’s the eastern route that has all the bells and whistles.
All the attacks seem to take place in areas far removed from the CPEC to begin with. Yet the mainstream media refuses to do much by way of questioning.
Here’s an allegorical tale: two brothers inherited a goat. How to split the animal up was the conundrum. It was finally decided by the elders (no points for guessing which one of the two brothers these elders were partial to) that the elder brother would get the milk. And the younger brother would get the pellets of shit.
We know, in the federating units, who’s who. Now no one is begrudging the elder’s milk. Hell, it would even be okay if the younger got no milk; he’s known to be hardworking and would try to manage on his own. But the pellets of shit have got to go.
