Daily Times Editorial Jan 1, 2013

Happy New Year? The outgoing year 2012 proved a real annus horribilis for Pakistan. Terrorism, targeted political and sectarian killings, breakdown of law and order and the rise of violent crime, the energy crisis that has grown from just electricity and taken into its fold gas as well in the middle of one of the coldest winters for some time, all this is compounded by an economy seemingly in free fall and arguably on the verge of meltdown. All this, despite being worrying, would still be acceptable if 2013 promised something better, but that is a tall ask. As though things were not bad enough, December 30 saw one more dastardly bombing of a bus in Mastung, Balochistan. The bus was carrying Shia pilgrims on their way to Iran. Twenty were killed, 25 others injured in the fireball the bus was reduced to after, reportedly, being struck by a car bomb along the highway. This is by no means the first such incident. Previous such massacres had given birth to tall claims by the security forces that in future all such buses would be accompanied by a security detail. This latest incident indicates that such claims were either hot air in the first place or fell prey to the usual inertia that all government authorities, but dangerously the security forces too, are prone to. This is precisely what the terrorists rely on. Lapses and gaps in our security arrangements are what they wait for. The result is predictable, as in Mastung, for which the Jaish-ul-Islam has claimed responsibility. But no one knows if such tragedies will shake up what appear to be the indifferent authorities to the mayhem terrorists are wreaking in general, and the specific targeting of Shias in particular. The Shia Hazara community in Balochistan, centred mostly on Quetta, has virtually given up on Pakistan, given the blood, gore and pain that has been and continues to be inflicted on them. Is this what a responsible state looks like? The security forces in that province seem too busy in carrying out brutal military operations in the interior of the province (e.g. Mashkay, where villages have been destroyed, including women and children) and continuing with their kill and dump policy of extra-judicially eliminating all dissidents. Since they operate without any control by the elected politicians, whether at the Centre or in Quetta, there is no one, not even the Supreme Court, that can restrain them from this suicidal course. The wisdom that the province’s troubles stem from long standing political and rights issues and need a political solution has yet to sink in into the impermeable minds of the military establishment. If the Shias are feeling under siege in today’s Pakistan, other minorities are not far behind. Christians, Hindus, Ahmedis, all fear for their lives and properties in a country its founder envisaged as a protective haven for all minorities, religious and denominational. How far we have travelled down the road away from Mr Jinnah’s vision. If there is one factor we can isolate that is the mother of all factors that have led us to this pass, it can be summed up in our megalomaniacal intervention in Afghanistan since the last four decades. This project has given rise to the misconceived and mistaken policy of nurturing, arming, supporting jihadi extremists, an endeavour that has predictably come back to haunt us with a vengeance. The sooner the enterprise of projecting power in the neighbourhood, whether in Afghanistan or against India in Kashmir is done away with, the better the chances that the country may over time be able to scotch the Hydra of terrorism and return us to a peaceful, prospering state and society at peace with itself, the region, and the world. But this needs a courageous, committed leadership, waiting for which may be risky if you hold your breath.