“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent — Isaac Asimov. In happier times, when this writer used to travel in the Northern Areas (now Gilgit-Baltistan), it was not only the spectacular mountain scenery that was inspiring, it was also the easy friendliness of the people and the immense sense of peace and harmony that prevailed. In Hunza, for example, as recently as the mid-1980s, it was claimed that the last crime of violence had occurred more than 50 years before. Back then, there had been a scuffle between a deserted husband and the man with whom his wife had eloped, in which the latter fell on some rocks and was injured. “How foolish!” the villagers said, “Why did they have to fight? He should simply have demanded a few goats as compensation.” Happier times, indeed! Today, these lands of Shangri-La (Kohistan, Chilas, Gilgit, Nagar, Hunza, Skardu, Shigar) are blood-drenched battle zones between gangs of sectarian warriors. This frightful change began during the violent regime of Ziaul Haq, with its infinite appetite for encouraging the worst, when sectarian extremists were armed and sent into Gilgit, and the spiral of violence began to turn and grow. These developments aligned Gilgit-Baltistan with what has become customary in the rest of this country. For, from Kohistan massacres and FATA insurgencies in the north to the murderous street battles of Karachi in the south, from the Lahore bombings in the east to the killing of Hazaras, settlers and the native Baloch in the west, this entire country is replete with extreme violence. Violence, it seems, is the Pakistani way. Here, unrequited lovers throw acid on erstwhile objects of their passion. Friends quarrelling over a meal at a teashop end up shooting one another. On TV, one heard two bearded gentlemen debating which particular transgressions would render a person liable to be murdered. My goodness! Such a preoccupation with killing…revenge…violence. One would think that men who claim scholarship in the word of God would speak to us about His Mercy, His Benedictions and His Infinite Love. So, it is about Islam, right? Or, rather, about the twisted pseudo-Islamist narrative being promoted since the Zia years? Alas, would it were that simple. The point is that these violent attitudes are not endemic in Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, or so many other Muslim countries. No, they are a distinctive, almost a defining feature of Pakistan. And they had their beginnings before even Zia or the Taliban. Start at the very beginning, with the cycles of violence and counter-violence that accompanied Partition, most notably in the Punjab. The new nation state of Pakistan was born with the forcible eviction of over twelve million people both ways and the “khoon ki holi, aur aag ki barsat” (festival of blood, rain of fire) that left perhaps two million dead. A quarter of a century jolted along, through two wars and three coups d’etat (Ghulam Mohammad, Ayub, Yahya), climaxing in the 1971 military massacre in Dacca, which triggered a civil war, a third war, another ten million refugees, another million dead, an alleged one hundred thousand rape-induced pregnancies, further division of the land. After this, there were yet another four coups d’etat: Bhutto, Zia, Musharraf and Musharraf again. Let us look particularly at the illegitimate regime that began its career in July 1977 — that of Ziaul Haq. This regime (in which, as a matter of record, both Yousaf Raza Gilani and Nawaz Sharif had served) unleashed outright scourges upon the people: heroin, the Kalashnikov culture, reactionary perversion of the legal and penal systems, violent religious bigotry, the eclipse of humane discourse, extremism, sectarian violence and ethnic violence. The Zia years also saw Pakistan initiate the war in Afghanistan — now the longest running armed conflict since the 14th century anywhere in the world. Worse, this war has fanned international terrorism as well as suicide bombings and religion-based militancy that have swept across our land. And yet the Zia government was only one, if the worst, example of the kinds of governments we have had. Such is the opportunism of our social and political leaders — that dark era became the longest uninterrupted period any regime has yet enjoyed, brought to its fiery end almost by happenstance. Alongside all this, we have suffered multiple assassinations. Liaquat Ali Khan, Dr. Khan Sahib, Shaheed Suhrawardy, Hayat Sherpao, Samad Achakzai, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, Ziaul Haq, Ghulam Haider Wyne, Azim Tariq, Hakim Saeed, Murtaza Bhutto, Akbar Bugti, Benazir Bhutto, Imran Farooq, Salmaan Taseer, Shahbaz Bhatti…not to mention journalists like Mohammed Salahuddin, Daniel Pearl, Hayatullah Khan, Musa Khankhel, Wali Babar, Saleem Shahzad, Murtaza Razvi. The list is not exhaustive. Where does one begin to grieve? The daily toll of the dead and the missing in Balochistan? In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa? The unending ‘target’ bloodletting of my fellow Karachites? More than 35,000 men, women and children murdered all over Pakistan? Where will the grieving end? This is a nation born in violence and it continues to remain in a state of violence. It could be argued that other nations have also had their times of trouble: China of yesterday, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan today, Vietnam of the late 20th century and even Europe of the great, wrenching wars. But consider that all of these have also had their periods of relative calm, social progress and governmental legitimacy. This has not been true of Pakistan. Ours is the kind of body politic where no prime minister has yet completed a full term — not even, it seems, the present one. Where five heads of government have been killed, not to mention scores of lesser political fry. Where, in one regime, the apex court was attacked by rowdies and where, in another, the chief justice was physically manhandled and roughed up. Ours, it seems, is a culture of hyper-macho posturing, at all levels and amongst all categories of persons. These are supposedly the many values that have been drilled into us, perhaps since the days of the ‘Martial Race’ claptrap of the British Raj. The continuous florescence of violence here is the result of our history of false narratives and fantasy identities. Is there a way forward and away from these deadly spirals? Yes, wake up. And tell the truth about all those murders, those pointless wars and the origins of bigotry, intolerance and violence that have more and more become a Pakistani characteristic. Tell the truth. And, yes, the truth shall make you free. The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet