An Angry Rant in the Wake of Quetta Attack

We’ve seen this happen before: terrorists barging into our institutes, slaughtering our people and leaving behind a trail of bodies that deserved a longer life and a better farewell.

The wailing families, the traumatized survivors, the heart wrenching obituaries…we’ve all seen them before.

We’ve seen politicians take to the media to condemn the massacres; we’ve read their insubstantial statements and heard their half-hearted claims to avenge the departed.

We’ve seen hell break lose over and over again; hoping, praying desperately for lightening to cease from striking again.

However, 15 years since the first terror attack in the post 9/11 Pakistan took the lives of 16 Christian worshipers in Bahawalpur on 28^th October 2001 there has been no refuge from death and misery for the Pakistanis.

Last night’s attack on Police Training Center Quetta is a continuation of this tragic tradition that Pakistan has found itself observing every month for over a decade.

Thus, as a citizen who has lived in survivor’s guilt for the better half of her adult life I feel – for lack of a better word – wholly frustrated.

The angry, incoherent trail of my thoughts wants to paint this post with profanities. But that would be disrespectful for the lost souls whose last few moments on earth were filled with incomprehensible terror.

And so I will restrict myself to demanding what my government owes me and every citizen of Pakistan: an immediate out from a life of impending heartbreaks because this is NOT okay. This repetition of catastrophe is not okay. This rhetoric of a “reduction” in terror attacks is not okay. Over 60,000 innocent lives later there is no room left for empty condemnations and useless policy statements! I refuse to buy arguments that start and end with pointless excuses in the name of “complicated geo-political reality”, “strategic assets” and “strategic depth.”

The death and destruction must end and it must end NOW. The entire government machinery, including all the political parties and the civil-military bureaucracy will have to rise above institutional politics, internal rifts and a reactive foreign policy to give its hapless citizens the rebate that they deserve otherwise neither the collective “leadership” nor its words are of any use to the Pakistanis.