After the slaughter at the Sakhi Sarwar shrine near Dera Ghazi Khan last week, it has come to be known that other such bloodbaths are in the offing. One of the two suicide bombers arrested at the target site — a 14-year-old teenager — has divulged that as many as 400 young suicide bombers, among them Uzbeks, Tajiks, Arabs and Punjabis, are being trained in Mir Ali in North Waziristan (NW). He has also expressed remorse for his intended actions and has asked for forgiveness from the families of those killed in the attack. This is the kind of news that should send wide-scale alarm bells ringing all the way to the capital and Rawalpindi. The militants are using the most impressionable and easy recruits to make their murderous presence felt in the country with almost daily suicide bombings wreaking havoc upon the citizenry. The boy also claimed that during his own two-month training spree in Mir Ali, he was given the impression that he would be leading a mission against the ‘infidel’ NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. The would-be suicide bomber has said that he had no idea he would be used against civilians in his own country. This is a classic example of the complete brainwashing that the militants are doing to our uneducated, unsuspecting and poverty-stricken youth — prime pickings for the likes of the Taliban. Pakistan is in desperate times, a fact that is reflected by this youth’s confession. As many as 400 brainwashed youths means as many attacks on the country. Our establishment has been using Taliban proxies for too long now to conquer the endgame in Afghanistan but have failed to see that those who have enjoyed safe havens here are the same elements that are training our youth against us. We do not need to wait for American drones and pressure to come and rescue us from this self-inflicted plague. What we need is to start the job wholeheartedly ourselves. A full-throttle army operation in NW is the need of the hour, without any strategic depth considerations. Furthermore, this confession has proved that these recruits are nothing more than lost souls who, given the right rehabilitation and psychotherapy can be reinstated into society by a government that seeks to provide them with welfare and not abandonment. *