Heavy is the heart that carries the burden of witnessing the murder of an innocent. And when it comes to children, even the most hardened of us are forced to step back and re-examine the brutal narrative that we, as members of the society we belong to, have spun — even if it was inadvertent.
December 16 is a day when I, as a Pakistani, and one who is very proud to belong to a nation of courageous and resilient people, can only bow my head in sorrow while my heart bleeds.
Am I not, as part of the society that has consciously or inadvertently — by not taking concrete action to oppose the germination of the horror, which bred and nurtured the darkness, manifested in the twisted ideology of the Taliban — responsible to some extent for Peshawar? Are we all not responsible for the travesty that unfolded, horrified, shocked to the core and repelled by the very baseness of the mindset that had conceived and perpetrated such a sin?
I, for one, am struggling to justify the attack on the Army Public School that led to the martyrdom of 132 children as a reprisal attack for the Pakistan military’s operation in North Waziristan.
An objective and analytical appraisal of the attack would list the usual factors: Attack on the most vulnerable of ‘soft targets’; maximum impact achieved; shock a government already shaken by the political sabre-rattling of the opposition since August to pull back the troops and desist from extending the ambit of the operations etc. But it is hard to be objective in this case.
Targeting children is the most reviled of all tactics. Even in war, it is the children whose vulnerability and loss is the hardest to deal with. And this comes at a time of relative peace in a country whose military operations against the Taliban and affiliated indigenous and foreign militants in the far-flung frontiers of the tribal agencies have been similarly pushed to the deeper recesses of the minds.
It is the army that is waging the battle — but for most of us every soldier lost in the operation is but one sad statistic. Do we ever put our busy lives on hold and step in his family’s shoes — as a wife, a son, a daughter, a mother — and empathise with the heart wrenching loss and not being able to find closure?
The only consolation, if any, might be derived from the fact that he died an honourable death, but who was he defending the country from? Ironically, he is defending the very soil that stands sullied by his own countrymen, who, by a strange twist of fate, are now on the other side of the fence.
It was on September 1, 2004, that a school in Beslan in North Ossetia witnessed a similar tragedy. More than 300 people including 186 children were killed. It was Beslan more than the Moscow theatre siege and the train suicide bombings that changed the narrative for the Chechen independence movement.
Blaming the Russian troops for the resultant violence that erupted and led to those tragic deaths by the Chechens could not justify their actions. The Chechen nationalists and freedom fighters had become terrorists. The glorified suicide attacks of the Black Widows for avenging the deaths of their families paled in comparison to the horror of Beslan.
Pakistan now has its own Beslan. This is not an achievement, but a day of shame. The government is not to blame and neither is the military. In fact, the heaviest losses have been borne by the military so far. We owe whatever security and stability we enjoy and often take for granted to them.
Millions of my countrymen and women should instead reflect on a trait found inside each one of us. It is the tendency to apportion blame on anyone we oppose at any given time and understand our own role in shaping the discourse of terrorism in society.
Are we as a nation ready to condemn and label the Taliban as ‘non-Muslims’? Do we have the courage to do this? What we do have in plentiful is the cowardice to label an individual from a minority sect as a non-Muslim and turn our faces away when rabid zealots are let loose on alleged ‘blasphemers’?
I do not recall one politician who has the courage to stand up and speak for those accused of blasphemy. Those that do are killed. And we go on with our puny little lives, basking in our discussions on ideals and political maturity. Do we ever reflect and think how Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) would have treated non-Muslims? The Prophet’s (PBUH) life and treatment of non-believers speaks volumes of his tolerance, compassion and generosity, the very traits that endeared his worst enemies and turned them into his most ardent followers.
As for killing any human being, Islam clearly has no tolerance. A Muslim is not one who has the audacity to utter the Shahada (the proclamation of faith) and spray bullets into cowering children in a school.
In the wake of the Peshawar tragedy there are some who are optimistic about the reawakening of Pakistan’s collective conscience and a surge of public ire at the Taliban and their terror tactics.
They want to now earmark the tolerance periphery for terrorism. This for me is the tragedy. We allowed Peshawar to happen because we did not have the courage to say “Enough” before. Our politicians steeped sin-deep in their vested interests have never coalesced in supporting the military operations or condemning the Taliban.
Posthumously, the announcement that the military would now extend its operations to root out militants in Khyber Agency shows resolve on the part of the army and the government to extend the operation. This is good news. Public consensus for taking out the militants is high at this time and people would expect nothing less.
The fact that the Afghan Taliban have condemned the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) attack in Peshawar speaks of a divergence in policy and possible divisions in their support chain and this is good news for both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Disrupting the TTP and the Afghan Taliban’s nexus at this juncture will be beneficial to both Kabul and Islamabad.
How unfortunate that it took the haunting images of the little slain victims in their coffins to coalesce a nation previously divided over supporting militancy or any operation against the militants that for some carried a stench of following the western diktat. This is not the West’s war, it is Pakistan’s and until the time we take charge and fight back, each and every one of us, we shall continue to see worse tragedies.
Faryal Leghari is a former deputy editor Opinion of Gulf News and is currently studying diplomacy at Oxford University.
