Pakistan Talks, Terrorists Act

The challenge of indiscriminate bullets and bombs in Pakistan's markets, universities, places of worship and police stations is not going to be defeated with verbal diarrhoea. Yet, that’s all the country can seem to muster in the face of this challenge. The problem is not that Pakistan is incapable of responding to this challenge. The problem is that too many Pakistanis, especially in government, seem to want to counter live bullets and detonating bombs with speeches about the ideological and existential nature of this threat. Tom Jones tells us to fight fire with fire. Pakistan’s generic response to this challenge seems to be to fight fire with spitballs.

What lies behind the obsession of right and left, progressive and traditional, liberal and conservative to collectively want to mutate this conflict into an ideological war that it is not? Perhaps it is the overwhelming instinct ingrained in an irrational public discourse.

Forget conceiving a viable response to the challenge, Pakistan’s national discourse doesn’t even have a widely agreed upon nomenclature to describe the conflict. Serious people, for example, would not use the word Taliban in every sentence, because the term Taliban is a deeply imprecise and inaccurate summation of the plethora of terrorists that the Pakistani state (among others) has helped gift to the Pakistani people.