The people of Pakistan and, indeed, the world have been horrified by the recent Taliban attack targeting schoolchildren that has taken place there. The editors of the Washington Post remark:
It was, as President Obama said in a statement, a “heinous†act that underscored the “depravity†of the Taliban, who deliberately targeted children in the first through 10th grades at a military-sponsored institution. No hostages were taken: The attackers’ sole aim was to murder as many youngsters as possible. It was the bloodiest terrorist attack in Pakistan since 2007, one that was meant to derail modest but real progress by the army and government in fighting extremism.
However, their closing statement:
Tuesday’s horrific attack should prompt Pakistan’s leaders to take steps that are still needed to effectively defend the country. Prime Minister Sharif and his army commander must cooperate more closely; the prime minister should beef up a new counterterrorism authority and draw the military into it. Gen. Sharif should deliver on his words in Washington by acting against all extremist groups, including those that have conducted terrorist attacks against India.
The slaughtered children in Peshawar underline a truth that Pakistan’s elite have been slow to fully accept: Islamic jihadism poses a mortal threat to the nation. The best response to the atrocity would be for the army and government to join in an uncompromising campaign against the terrorists.
reminds me of nothing so much as one of those cartoons that used to appear in the newspapers caption “How many things can you find wrong with this picture?”
Let’s list a few. Pakistan isn’t a nation. It’s a place on the map set aside for Indians who demanded religious monoculture. Here’s Pat Lang’s decription:
Pakistan was always a bad idea. It is an artificial state created out of the flanks of the equally artificial British Indian empire, a state summoned into being on the basis of Muslim aversion to a shared existence with the Hindu kuffar. British weariness and exhaustion after the trauma and bleeding of the two world wars set the stage for the creation of a country based on an IDEAL of religious communal exclusivity.
Long ago I read a description of Pakistan that rang true to me: Somalia is a country without a government; Pakistan is a government without a country. The Islamabad government doesn’t even really try to bring the northern or northwest portions of the country (the seat of the Pakistani Taliban) under its control and never has. The southern and southwestern parts of the country have been engaged in a simmering civil war against the Islamabad government for decades. In other words about half the country either ignores the Islamabad government or is in rebellion against it.
Worse yet, Pakistan is a nuclear-armed government without a country.
There is strong evidence that the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, has been supporting the Taliban. That puts us in the surreal situation that the dollars we pay the Pakistani government to allow us to continue fighting in Afghanistan go to support the Taliban whom we are notionally fighting. The drone war we’re waging in Pakistan is mostly against the Pakistani Taliban which doesn’t threaten us but does threaten the Islamabad government.
The Pakistani Taliban isn’t a cohesive group. It’s an agglomeration of radical Islamists. The slaughter of schoolchildren should serve as a reminder that violent radical Islamists are hostis humani generis—enemies of humankind.
Update
The editors of the Wall Street Journal come closer to the mark:
There is no silver lining to a calamity of this kind, but perhaps this is an opportunity for Pakistanis at every level of society to realize that they will not be safe from terrorism until they stop colluding with terrorists of any stripe, including those fighting for the “liberation†of Indian-held Kashmir.
That means treating the democratic governments in Kabul and New Delhi not as adversaries but as allies in a common struggle, which could usefully begin by rooting out the terrorist hideaways in Pakistan that support the Afghan Taliban in its own barbaric campaigns across the border. It’s worth remembering that the ultimate Islamist goal is to gain control of a state, preferably nuclear-armed, and Pakistan is the most vulnerable and obvious target.
