December 19 , 2014
When Cowardice Knows No Bounds
Contrast the courage of Malala with the cowardice of the Taliban. Just a week ago the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize was eloquent in her acceptance speech when she described Taliban attacks on schools and students: “I had two options. One was to remain silent and wait to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed. I chose the second one. I decided to speak up.”
What do the Taliban do? They hide in the shadows, conspire in the darkness and attack innocent children. Six months ago the Pakistan Army launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb against the Taliban in North Waziristan, successfully destroying Taliban hideouts and killing 1800 terrorists. As much as the government should have been prepared for revenge attacks it was not, and no one had thought that it would be on a school. On December 16, seven men, reportedly in army uniforms and speaking a foreign language, set fire to the vehicle they had driven in and then stormed a school, where most students belonged to army families. They went on a shooting spree from the auditorium to the classrooms, 145 people were killed, 132 of them children.
16-year old Shahrukh Khan was in the auditorium and recounted: “One of them shouted: ‘There are so many children beneath the desks go and get them’”. Shahrukh said he felt searing pain as he was shot in both his legs. He decided to play dead: “I folded my tie and pushed it into my mouth so that I wouldn’t scream. The man with the big boots kept on looking for students and killing them. I lay as still as I could and closed my eyes, waiting to get shot again. I will never forget the black boots approaching me – I felt as though it was death that was approaching me.”
The outrage in Pakistan and internationally has been deep. During a prayer vigil prominent civil rights lawyer Asma Jahangir said. “Those who refer to the Taliban as brothers are one of the Taliban”. She has cause to say this. For decades politicians in the Pakistan government have waffled in their approach to the Taliban lending a blind-eye solely to shore up their own power bases.
Pakistan has paid a heavy price for participating in the war on terror: at least 50,000 Pakistanis, civilian and military have been killed since 2001. The Taliban have mounted bold attacks like the one at Karachi airport on June 8, 2014, another at a Karachi naval base in 2011, many on Christian, Shia and Ahmadi minorities, the Islamabad Marriott; and the list goes on. It was actually the attack at the cargo terminal of Karachi airport that ended the talks between the government and the Taliban and precipitated Operation Zarb-e-Azb.
Pakistan’s army is one of the most competent in the world but fighting an invisible or chameleonic enemy is very difficult. Terrorist attacks at airports and military institutions require a good deal of inside information, and that was evident in essentially all the high-profile attacks of the Taliban.
With Malala and the Taliban at either extreme there are numerous political and religious hues in Pakistan with a very troubling radicalization of a segment of the population. Economic disenfranchisement, anti-Americanism, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the killing of one million Iraqi civilians in the war on terror, the WMD propaganda and brain-washing all contribute to this turn to extremism. This radicalized segment orchestrates terrorist attacks or carries them out. Their relative anonymity makes their identification difficult, if not impossible.
Since August 2014 government critics Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri have held multiple sit-ins which have attracted tens of thousands of people from all walks of life. I remember the sick feeling I would get looking at the teeming thousands and how these sit-ins were the perfect crucible for a terrorist attack. Interestingly, no attacks occurred at all. In his anti-American invective, Imran Khan has inclined toward the Taliban, but the cleric Tahirul Qadri issued a 600-page fatwa against suicide bombings and terrorism in very clear terms. So it is clear that terrorist attacks have to be orchestrated and enabled by a willing segment of the population.
The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought the Kalashnikov and heroin culture to Pakistan. The easy availability of guns and a series of corrupt governments have armed and addicted a population. De-weaponization of the population, proper gun licensing and a money-for-guns exchange program should be an immediate priority of the government. Every Pakistani needs to understand that terrorism is Pakistan’s most critical issue and unite urgently to combat it. Individuals and groups involved in suspicious activity need to be reported. A few minutes must be devoted in each Friday sermon to condemn terrorism.
Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said: “The smaller the coffin, the heavier it is to carry it. And we’ve been carrying smaller coffins today, more than a hundred small coffins.” The Peshawar massacre is Pakistan’s worst tragedy and can be the tipping point in its fight against terrorism. The heart-rending scenes of young deaths must move a nation to resolve to never let this happen again.
(Mahjabeen Islam is a Pakistani-American family and addiction medicine physician. mahjabeen.islam@gmail.com)
