Daily Times

Can you imagine Jews crying over the death of Adolf Hitler in the Second World War? Or envision Americans sobbing after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, their enemy number one, and the leader of al Qaeda behind the 9/11 attacks? And if they did, would their behaviour be considered normal? Absolutely not. In a matter of less than a few hours, hundreds of conspiracy theories would have emerged from the Muslim world holding the CIA responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers and declaring Hitler as a Mossad agent way before the creation of Israel. The dots would have been connected perfectly and the holes would have been filled with irrefutable evidence.

However, this form of bizarre attitude in which the whole nation is saddened over the death of the person responsible for the indiscriminate killing of thousands of fellow citizens is permissible in Pakistan. Not only that, this behaviour is religiously justified on all television channels, unabashedly professed in newspapers, morally encouraged in private meetings and publicly approved in our country, a state where the definition of sanity has been reversed to insanity. Here the heroes, from Nobel Prize laureates to Oscar winning filmmakers, are deliberately made controversial by the defenders of faith, and the most wanted global terrorists are exalted as the champions of stability and peace.

In the normal world outside Pakistan, the death of such a murderous person would have been celebrated as a national victory and as a moment to stand united against the atrocities of his cowardly organisation that indiscreetly slaughtered women and children, destroyed the shrines of the saints — who kindled the flame of Islam in the hearts of people — and attacked the peaceful worshippers in mosques during prayers. However, our leaders are committed to do just the opposite. They are determined to let the morale of Pakistanis down by their sheepish attitude and are engrossed to convert the occasion of exultation into an incident of public embarrassment, as if Hakeemullah Mehsud was a hero fighting to protect the state rather than being at war with it.

To be honest, after the US drone strike that killed him last week, Pakistan, finally, had a rare opportunity to talk to the terrorists from a position of strength, an occasion where we could hit them even harder with a surprise assault. But both our political leadership and military elite failed to seize that opening in their favour.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the civilian administration spent most of its time wooing the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to prove its innocence and non-collusion, just like an old man cajoling his young and beautiful bride, while the army kept mostly quiet. With the current administration in Islamabad along with the ruling political alliance in Peshawar, we, in fact, should not have expected anything better, more realistic and more aggressive. Their avidity and credulity to propitiate the banned terrorist organisation was to most Pakistanis who believe in their country as a nuclear-armed sovereign state with a powerful military apparatus, without a doubt, embarrassing, representing a defeatist mindset.

Although we realise that political parties have to keep in mind the sensitivities of the general public and have to be watchful about the religious sentiments of their voters, they still cannot be dictated to by a terrorist organisation. Under any circumstances, calling the most successful drone strike after the assassination of Baitullah Mehsud as the “death of peace” is not only inappropriate and insensitive, it is also humiliating for people who have lost their loved ones in the suicide attacks by the TTP. Before we make such heartless statements in public, we always have to ask ourselves: who was Hakeemullah Mehsud? Was he Abdul Sattar Edhi, Malala Yousafzai or Mother Teresa, and was his organisation called the Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital Trust or International Red Cross, established to help the poor and needy people?

Similarly, the Pakistan army — instead of just condemning the non-serious statement of Munawwar Hasan, Ameer of Jamaat-e-Islami — should have come forward with an unambiguous statement that if one of its generals on active duty can be targeted by the TTP after the negotiation process has been started, then they also reserve the right to strike back. And if the TTP are going to make the chief of the army staff their next target, even when the prime minister has announced that he wanted to end this war through peace talks, the Pakistan military as a professional organisation would not succumb to these threats, and would utilise all its resources to eliminate the terrorists, which may include sharing intelligence with the allies and helping them identify the enemies of the state. Our nation would have understood their point of view without any hesitation, as people know very well that the TTP itself has never followed any rules of engagement in the past, and has continued to kill more Pakistanis in churches, markets and mosques without any reluctance and/or remorse.

Had the TTP been serious in negotiations at any point, it would have first announced a temporary suspension of its terrorist activities and then conducted the dialogue till both the parties concluded either to resume fighting or stop it permanently. But, they did not. Instead, they kept on befooling the whole nation with their vicious assaults on the one hand, and continued to send encouraging signals to the government on the other to proceed with the talks, a strategy that was working well for them for the last few months. Their last message — for all of us to wake up from our deep, self-destructive and pathological sleep — is the nomination of their new chief, Mullah Fazlullah. There is still time to wake up!

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com