Not enough

Faced with killers of children, we vowed to change. Yet have we?

Before the horror of December 16, we associated the day with shame: when the borders of Bangladesh were carved in blood, and the state acted in ways amoral and unforgivable.

But the shame of 16/12 gave way to shock 43 years later: horror in another time, another city, another country. Faced with killers of children, the kind that set teachers alight, we vowed to change. Yet have we?

To fully answer that question will take years, books, and stat reports. But with the distance time provides, what happened in Peshawar that day has only turned starker.

According to Rahimullah Yusufzai sahib, Naik Altaf belonged to the army’s Engineers Corps, “but he defied rules and jumped two walls to race to the school to rescue the students despite being warned by soldier guards to stop or face fire. He eventually lost his life.”

It is much easier to talk of these men — heroes in the face of unimaginable cruelty — than it is to talk of the children. Uzair Ali, we now know, shielded his friends’ bodies by throwing himself on top of them. He was shot 13 times, but saved their lives.

Uzair was 15-year-old, the same age as Aitzaz.

Today, politicos of every stripe are on the airwaves, telling us their sacrifice won’t be in vain. But what country demands this sort of sacrifice from its children in the first place? May we not try they never have to?



The state diagnosed the disease with a 20-point National Action Plan, when our rage was still fresh. A year later, it’s time to take stock.

To start with the pluses: Operation Zarb-e-Azb was ramped up in North Waziristan, and the country is far safer for it. Terror attacks have shot down across the country, and General Raheel Sharif’s portrait adorns the backs of trucks (which we haven’t seen since the Ayub days).

There are also signs, if tiny, that the state is treading gentler in Balochistan, amnesty over aggression. While this may be a drop in the ocean for what the province needs (mid-term chief minister changes not being one of them), any less would be a nightmare.

In Karachi, the Rangers have brought an uneasy peace to the city; no longer is it in the grips of 2013’s crazy crime wave. The Sindh government cries overreach, and tussles with the centre. The solution stares everyone in the face: if Qaim and Co are indeed fed up with the Rangers, they best be the alternative. To best be the alternative, they require reforming the police. As the lords of Larkana are uninterested in reforming the police, it follows that the Rangers will continue bursting into buildings. A cycle we call ‘ceding space’.

Across the border, Pakistan is at last trying the charm offensive. After much pouting, Narendra Modi has shuffled over to the table. As to the other border, more than one foreign correspondent ran with the same opener: that when Ashraf Ghani touched down in Islamabad, he’d already been briefed by the hawks at home not to smile. Yet when he found himself lost in the reception — a 21-gun salute, the prime minister, and all three service chiefs — even Mr Ghani couldn’t help it.

But flashy receptions do not fresh relations make. At great cost to himself, Mr Ghani has reached out to Pakistan. Having seen all manner of gents from Hafizullah to Najibullah, chances like these come across the Durand once a generation. After torpedoing the first try, it’s time Islamabad embraced Kabul as a vital part of the peace.

On matters less tangible, optimism is returning to the country, if shard by shard. This past August 14 hit higher notes than many such Independence Days, when so many were busy hiding under their beds. After much dark, there is hope.

Even taking the positives together, though, none of it is enough.

When it comes to Pakistan’s response to Peshawar, three major facets are often trotted out: the return of the death penalty, military courts, and intensifying the Zarb-e-Azb blitz.

With the death penalty, executions have soared, and with it, bad press abroad — yet the vast majority of these executions are not terror related. As for military courts, it was promised again and again that this was a red-button tactic limited to two years: in that time, the civilian justice system could catch a breath, and build the capacity to convict terrorists on its own. Said reforms have come to nothing.

Nor is the operation’s success cause for complacency: many of the militants have swarmed over to the Afghan side of the border, and will return the second the state slackens (again, the answer lies with being closer to Kabul). Zarb-e-Azb, it also bears repeating, is a hammer to beat the bad guys with, rather than curing what creates them. To quote a quaker: for a crisis of spirit, we need an answer of spirit.

Because far from the mountains of Waziristan are the plains of southern Punjab, curdling with poison. While the centre rages over the alien ways of NGOs, it may want to look at our sectarian charities instead: infecting the land with a strain far less local — and it’s time we cut out the cancer.

Meanwhile Nacta, our be-all and end-all for counterterror, ended before it began. The thorns around madrassa reform too draw as much blood as before, while the mindset that murders our minorities is neither banned from the internet, nor penalised via mosque microphones.

So while the country is now violent with the violent, it fails to mend its soul. It fails to clean up its police, it fails to fix its judicial system, it fails to disinfect its young minds, it fails to create a counter-narrative that holds the hearts of our society.

And time is running out.

A great man once said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Tomorrow marks a year since Pakistan was broken. May we promise the rest of our children strength. And in the new year, may we put the pieces of ourselves back together.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 15^th, 2015.

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