Banned, again

So useless has the government been at identifying and tackling terrorism threats that it has now adopted just the one technique to thwart attack in lieu of actual intelligence. For the fourth time this year, the government decided to inconvenience every citizen of Karachi and block cell phone services in the city. This, the government claimed, was necessary because it had information that there would be a bomb attack in Karachi today and that the bomb would be detonated by a cell phone. It defies belief that the government would have such specific information about a terrorist plot and yet be unable to break it up and instead have to resort to the drastic measure of banning cell phone services.

That this is, indeed, a drastic measure is something we should never forget. There is a tendency of accepting such intolerable curbs on our rights simply because it has been done so many times before. But such familiarity should breed contempt. The more the government tries to get us to give up our freedoms without complaint, the more we should resist. On top of that, there is simply no proof that these bans work. By now, terrorists know that the government is likely to block cell phone services at the drop of a hat, so surely they must have adopted other means to detonate bombs.

As for the specific threat in Karachi itself, unlike during Eid and the Ishq-e-Rasool day, there does not seem to be any particular reason for an attack at this time. Perhaps it is linked to the ASWJ rally or it may just be based on some random bit of intelligence that the government received. That, in itself, however, is just not good enough to inconvenience all the residents of Pakistan’s largest city and commercial hub. We may never know if an attack was planned but we can keep count of the number of people who lost their lives because they couldn’t call ambulances or the police for help.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2012.