Black September

As 17 members of a single family are buried after the bombing in Peshawar on September 29, the response of political leaders across the spectrum borders on the criminally negligent. Twenty died when a bus was bombed on September 27 and 83 died in the church bombing on September 22. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have claimed the killing of senior army personnel in Swat on September 15 and posted an online video to back up their claim. Countless people have been wounded or disabled for the rest of their lives and truly, this month will be remembered as a Black September. At the very least, the public might expect a forthright condemnation of those who carried out these attacks, yet all that we hear are prevarications and mealy-mouthed semantic gymnastics from men who appear to have had their spines removed. Half-baked conspiracy theories are bandied about along with a prize-winning fatuity from Imran Khan who tells us that the culprits are ‘enemies of peace’. The TTP are openly contemptuous of the politicians who they are currently making blood-boltered fools of, and have reiterated their preconditions for talking to anybody about anything. The initiative lies entirely with the terrorists and long ago left the hands of government, provincial and federal.



It should be blindingly obvious even to the most myopic and tin-eared of politicians that the state is being bled dry by a minority bent on its destruction. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, they are getting closer to that goal by the day, and the rest of the country stands paralysed, looking on in horror, as the tsunami of blood washes over them. Only fools make the same mistake over and over again, failing to learn from their mistakes, and talking to the Taliban has never ever produced a durable solution that has lasted beyond days or weeks. Talking to them now when they have the state by the throat and utterly feeble is going to get nowhere either. Talk when that position is reversed perhaps, but if Pakistan is to go anywhere other than into the palms of a gang of medieval butchers, it needs to start fighting back. Surrender is not an option.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2013.

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