One feels that the more people understand who benefits from violence, the better chance we will have to control it.
ISLAMABAD: This is in response to the article “Acts of terror and economic cost” (September 22). Mr Junaid Zahid presents a partial argument as evidenced by today’s Peshawar bombing. Mr Zahid posits that Pakistan has suffered from participating in the war on terror, to the tune of $40 billion, in the form of lost growth over the past decade. The inference from reading the argument would be that not participating in it may have been more useful. Is this really the case, is the war on terror only a foreign imposed war?
Governance, in no short measure, is the ability of the state to control violence. In today’s Pakistan, the extremists aren’t merely just extremists. They engage in crimes such as extortion, kidnappings and more. Nor are they a single group. Despite this, surely the state with nearly three quarters of a million strong police and army can control them if it wants. One remembers that India controlled the equally troubling Sikh uprising in the 1980s with the police alone, led by a Sikh IG. However, not only has the violence grown in Pakistan but so has crime and it has become increasingly lucrative. One wonders why two successive governments, at the centre and in the provinces, have offered only platitudes and lip service while nearly 60,000 Pakistanis, including many servicemen, have been murdered. The question is, who is benefiting from the continuing violence? One feels that the more people understand who stands to benefit from the violence, the better chance we will have to control it.
Dr Adnan Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, September 24th, 2013.
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