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What we have sitting in powerhouses of capital is not made of stuff that can differentiate between right and wrong

As the days pass, it becomes clearer and clearer as we read and listen, that the inadequacies — a mild way of putting the dysfunction and inability to think — of this government are not going to dissipate in any way in the wake of an incident that should not only have shamed them (but then, there is no shaming the shameless) into some sort of positive activity but rendered at least temporarily their one-track (self-preservation) minds into just a wee bit of clear thinking.

Sadly — nay, tragically — it seems that the prescience evidenced in, just to take one example, this publication in the immediate aftermath of the hail of bullets was and remains justified by the whingeing and whining emanating from a blank civilian leadership and its allies and opponents between whom some realistic cohesive consensus should have come about. But, no.

Parliament might not as well exist. The reaction of a bemused prime minister and his tuft-hunting cronies was to hand over the sorting out of the terrorist scourge to a score of committees, a more than pathetic decision. On the urgings of the army chief, in anger tempered with some mortification one must suppose, we had a spate of hangings of convicts involved in long gone attacks upon the military. Then we have from our dear leadership and the others haggling over the setting up of military courts presumably at the instigation of the functioning military, vows, promises of intent, some of which are truly unsettling such as the prime ministerial statement that it will be he personally who will supervise the implementation of the NAPping plan — he will ensure that at ‘bedtime’ we are told by our free media no nasty home truths, only fairy tales.

Anyhow, as for prescience, on December 17, “the morning after”, came an editorial on these pages which said it in its ending exactly as it is: “Pakistan has a notoriously short memory … for incidents such as this. They quickly fade from the headlines to be replaced by whatever the sound bite of the day is. The national mindset remains unaltered, the paradigm impervious to reality … and expressions of resolve made today disappear with the dawn of tomorrow. Past experience suggests that the massacre in Peshawar will go exactly the same way, quickly shuffled down the national agenda as addressing the root causes of the problem requires some hard questions being asked and answered — honestly answered. Possible?  Little more than a definite maybe, we opine.”

There is no ‘definite maybe’. The short memory is what all want, they don’t want hard questions and they certainly can get no honest answers from anywhere. The quicker it all goes away the better, the easier on the mind. Particularly when it comes to any of the leaderships it has been this country’s fate to endure. Truth has never been a palatable substance, because the truth has almost always been bitter and demeaning.

On December 18, again on these pages, Chris Cork told us to “cut the crap”, and knuckle down to a few hard facts. We need to be ready for more horrors because unlike to governing classes our terrorists — he named them, the Taliban whom the government still balks at naming, they are terrorists, militants, even miscreants, but Taliban is difficult to enunciate — are professionals with determination and long-term plans unlike our amateurs who preside over a nation of ditherers, a nation which cannot bring itself to forge a national mindset, to revolt against politicians of all hues who are out to destroy it, and to forcefully bring about an end to total mis-governance — a nation of masochists, and worse, even closet sympathisers beset with bloodlust.

We are into a new year, and we need to be filled with foreboding, because what we have sitting in the powerhouses of the capital and its environs is not made of the stuff that can differentiate between right and wrong, or good and bad.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 3^rd, 2015.

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