Our Faustian bargain

… it continues

The warden is away and the inmates are ruling the roost. In the aftermath of the public declaration of interest by senior figures in the US government of a settlement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, there appears to be a wait-and-hold period in the offensive against the scourge within Pakistan. Subsequently, the militants have been on an incessant rampage over the course of a week, the latest being the bomb blast in the Khyber Agency yesterday, which has yielded a casualty count of 27 people, with many more injured. They have also, it is presumed, have had time to regroup following the easing up of the pincer movement of military action and drone strikes against them.

It is not known where the loss of innocent lives figures in the grand calculus of our security establishment. Since the beginning of the war against terror, which was way overdue and should, ideally, not have been at prodding of the US, the Pakistani security setup has pursued a dual policy of strikes and appeasement. This has had disastrous consequences. In the Waziristans, for instance, it has yielded the complete annihilation of the once large number of anti-Taliban lashkars. In Swat, in another instance, the militants only controlled the Matta sub-district when the army was called in for action by the provincial government; by the time the government was all but forced into a peace deal, the militants were controlling the whole of the district!

It’s like the mental puzzle game of trying to get the fox, the hen and the sack of grain across the river and our home-grown Clausewitzes are insisting on getting the sack of grain (or strategic depth, if you will) across first. What happens to the hen, our great unwashed, is something they cannot be bothered with.

The operation was successful, many a myopic doctor has claimed, but the patient died a painful death. What leverage in a post-American Afghanistan do we need that is worth letting the militants tear asunder our very social and national fabric?