Daily Times

A passer by witnessed two children in a squabble where one was threatening the other with hitting him in a way his mother would be grateful. Drawn by this interesting interchange between the two children the passerby could not help but ask how it was possible for a mother to be grateful if her child was hit. The intimidating child replied: “If I hit him on the temple his mother will thank God that his eye remained intact.”

After recovering from the immediate shock, we should be thankful that at least Ahmad Noorani is alive because the rest is going to be routine in a while. Pessimistically, if the past experiences are anything to go by, nothing will come out after viewing the helplessness on the faces of ministers. Because the unknown are now the well known in this country. It can be deduced that you are safe if you are within the perimeter of the barbed wire following the instructions closely.

We are also thankful that at least the attack on Noorani’s life has been reported, perhaps because he is a well known journalist and the incident occurred on the highway of the ‘safe city’ of Islamabad. Otherwise who cares about the routine because hardly a month passes by when one does not hear about such happenings involving journalists in the width and breadth of the country.

For more than a decade the society went through such extreme shocks that numbed its nerves pushing it in the basic survival mode where certain liberties, rights and other ingredients of civilised life have long been forsaken.

A textbook meaning or definition of security of an individual is ‘the state of being free from danger or threat’. But our state has done nothing in the name of security except instil a sense of perpetual insecurity. The entire society looks like a security installation!

If you have not visited your alma mater for the last five years, my advice would be to refrain from doing so to save yourself from the deep emotional shock. Your first sight will be a barbed wire circling the building and a further deeply disturbing visual would be a bunker type mountain atop or beside the entrance with a gun toting guard. Instead of expecting a smiling gaze as a former alumnus, you would be suspected at first sight then interrogated about the purpose of your visit.

It is time to do away with the policies that require a perverted approach of domestic political command and control or to reinforce control through policies of fear that brought nothing but social, political, economic and intellectual stagnation as well as international isolation

This barbed wire scene is not a hallmark of the educational institutions only, which constantly reinforce the psychological phenomenon to future generations that they are facing some sort of grave abstract threat to their lives. A rationale perfectly manufactured to uphold the ‘grave threat’ situation. But from courts to services providing entities to places of leisure, citizens are perennially confronting this command and control mechanism of security.

As the saying goes, ‘one accepts fever readily when confronted by death’. So far, it is not the worst choice as compared to death but it can be worse than death if it becomes a perpetual condition of life. Because it is tantamount to giving up life due to fear of death. Thus, we should be grateful that we are alive behind the barbed wire.

But the real elephant in the room is when the fear is articulated verbally. “Why is it happening to us? How long will it continue?” In a polity no phenomenon occurs in isolation, everything is interconnected. Even if dots are interspersed irregularly they will ultimately make some shape when connected. But that connection comes at a great dire risk.

About 15 years ago we went to that black hole constituting FATA to fulfil our commitment to our ally of preventing the meltdown of the bad guys through the proverbial porous border. But after three years the ally informed us that actually our men were behind the enemy lines. Oh no! They sneaked with such dexterity that now we have to chase and confront them in our villages and cities.

We did confront them at a huge cost to blood and treasury. However, again they managed to cross the border more meticulously only leaving few bodies of their foot soldiers. Even today they are giving us sleepless nights due to the fear of their comeback, necessitating the construction of cantonments, ubiquitous check posts and perpetuation of the extraordinary legal cover of ‘Action in Aid of Civilians Powers’. Though, Swat was declared a model of anti-terrorism war it was never restored to its pre 2006 era of sense of security without the barbed wire.

Zarb-i-Azab was initiated as a final blow with the full might of the state utilising every paraphernalia of the war against the bad guys. After the Zarb-i-Azab the same elements exhibited the same resilience. The five drone attacks by the US last October and the recent recovery of the kidnapped US-Canadian family indicated they were appearing in the Kurrum Agency of FATA.

One cannot correct one lie with hundred lies and one mistake with hundred blunders. Instead of muzzling the point of serious concern should be to introspect why neither reducing the country to a barbed wire polity nor the blood of our innocent people won us a good image among our allies in this war. Why does the world no longer bother to listen to our narrative that we as a nation cannot defend any more coherently?

Instead of making it an instrument or coerced to behave in a certain way, if only parliament had its due right to come up with answers to such questions by formulating, adjusting and monitoring polices. And if only the media were allowed to be a watch dog, perhaps Trump would not dare to give a 26 minutes long speech regarding the conduct of Pakistan. Neither would his secretary of state have wrapped the threat in diplomatic niceties of, ‘we will eradicate terrorism with or without your support’ nor the unknown would need to hit journalists on head.

It is time to do away with the policies that require a pervert approach of domestic political command and control or to reinforce control through policies of fear that brought nothing but social, political, economic and intellectual stagnation as well as international isolation. But, I am alive. So what if living without life!

The writer is a political analyst hailing from Swat. He tweets at @MirSwat

Published in Daily Times, November 2^nd 2017.