Daily Times

We thought we had it bad when rough estimates portrayed that as many as 50,000 Pakistanis have been killed in the so-called war against terror over the last decade. However, the reality is far worse than we could have ever imagined. A Nobel Prize winning group consisting of international physicians’ organisations has just released a study titled ‘Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the War on Terror’ and the figures revealed in it are utterly devastating. It states that more than 80,000 Pakistanis were killed in Pakistan from 2004 to the end of 2013, less than a decade. In further alarming statistics, around 1.3 million people have been killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, the conflict hot zones of the world. These are conservative estimates with the tally much likely to be higher than what has been mentioned in this study. The time to bury our heads in the sand is long gone. If anything, the blood spilt of more than 80,000 of our innocent countrymen must mean something; it must become the catalyst to awaken us out of our apathy where the war against militancy is concerned.

Speaking of war, the war on terror has had its many detractors here in Pakistan. It has been said time and again that since 9/11, we have been fighting the US’s war, that we have been forced to become a part of this theatre of the macabre because the US said: “You are either with us or against us.” That may be true to a certain extent but the bloodshed and conflict we see on our soil today is the result of decades of nurturing militants, giving them free reign over our tribal areas to help in our interventionist policies in Afghanistan. We are the ones who differentiated between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Taliban, giving sanctuary to those militants who were aiding us in our adventurist policies in our neighbouring country. It was not the US holding a gun to our heads and forcing us to keep such snakes in our own backyard; that was all down to us.
The hand that rocked the cradle is now bloodied and bruised and we have only ourselves to blame. It seems we have failed to learn any lessons though with our Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif pledging full support to Saudi Arabia for its military adventure in Yemen. It seems 80,000 dead is too little for our policymakers who believe we can afford to open a powder keg of full blown sectarian strife in our country too. Instead of Pakistan uniting against the terror scourge, instead of minorities, Shias and Sunnis standing shoulder to shoulder to beat back the fire of militancy, we seem once again ready to make the situation a whole lot worse. *