A question of ideals, not security

Even in the most elite of hotels and accommodations where politicians and the intellectual elite are in attendance, the security protocols are laughable. I know exactly when security personnel are at their least effective, taking long prayer breaks and being slow in taking charge after a change of duties. Everything oscillates between two extremes — on good days, I get a rough body search when there is a beep at the security gate, and on bad ones, the security gate isn’t working because of a power outage and the body-search team is more interested in staring at the Shahrukh Khan lookalike who just walked in instead of carrying out its duty. On good days, my identification check and the Q&A session at entry points take 10 minutes and on other days, the guards are feeling too hot or too cold to stand on duty so they let everyone pass. The point I am trying to make is, there is no escape from human error or boredom. No amount of training or security funding can wipe out the small or even large gaps in the alertness required by security personnel to prevent a terrorist attack.

As is evident from the Bacha Khan University attack in Charsadda, the onslaught from the terrorists’ side is relentless. They have such a vast canvas to spurt blood on — there are so many crevices they can sneak through despite there being seemingly beefed up security across the country. They prefer targeting children and young adults who are pursuing education so that they can cultivate fear in their hearts in place of idealism and the growth of ideas. They fire at point-blank range so these students go to the next world silent and without the will to protest their education may have instilled in them. Numerous attacks have followed the one on the Army Public School. No amount of fortification around schools can make them impermeable.

In Charsadda, the attack was orchestrated under a thick blanket of fog enabling the perpetrators to strike undetected like thieves. Such tactics are typical of all religiously-motivated terror — there is no honour in the war being perpetrated by terrorists. However, they are not the only ones that lost the plot when it comes to the teachings of Islam. As a country we have lost the plot too. The Punjab IT Board recently came out with a game depicting the APS attack. How do you score against an enemy that has already finished off 144 little souls? The government has instructed schools to mount higher boundary walls and install guards with more menacing-looking weapons. It even provided teachers with weapons training. We released feel-good videos about taking revenge from terrorists by proposing that we educate their kids. You just can’t go to war against evil actions; you have to go to war against the idea.

We hate to admit it, but there have been so many boots lost on the ground in Operation Zarb-e-Azb. We are also losing the war on archaic tribal ideas prevalent in society at large as was made evident by the boy who was paid homage for cutting off his hand and presenting it on a plate to a cleric who accused him of blasphemy. We are not going to win until we figure out the answers to the big questions.

We need to state this unequivocally: Pakistan was not created in the name of Islam; Jinnah, as its founding father, was a liberal who believed in everyone having access to the highest offices of this country regardless of their faith; and we cannot exclude any sect from the realm of Islam. We need to stop using our soil to cultivate covert wars; we need to cut down on unaccounted defence spending; we need to reform our curriculum and we need to also stop teaching our kids that we can only define our identity by creating and recreating an enemy.

We can open up trade routes with China and the grand markets of India and elsewhere, but if we don’t transform our intellectual ideals, the prosperity will only fuel hate and exclusivism instead of levelling the playing field for the marginalised. The youth bulge we boast about can easily end up being a malignant tumour for the country. In any event, there is no such thing as foolproof security. What we need to do is fortify the progressive values of humanity, scientific thinking and critical analysis. We need reform, not take revenge.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd,  2016.

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