Shattered freedom

The images of Pakistan Day decorations lying stained with blood as a suicide bomber blew himself up at a police station in Lahore’s busy Allama Iqbal Town area, just as celebrations to mark independence began across the country, says a great deal about the shadows that hang over the country’s freedom day this time round. Nine people, including two policemen and a woman passing by, were killed and many others injured. The compensation announced immediately by the Punjab government cannot of course take away the pain of families who have lost loved ones. Their grief will last many independence days to come.

As before, the police appear to have been the key target for the young, bearded bomber who abandoned his vehicle at a traffic check point and then ran towards a police station in the area. The bombing, which instantly took the joy out of Lahore’s usually exuberant Independence Eve celebrations, as terrified people retreated to their homes, is being linked to recent militant arrests in Jhang. Others of course believe it marks the implementation of the threat made by the Taliban in Swat to take their war to other parts of the country. Reiterating this warning, they have said that more attacks could take place on Independence Day events in other places. The threat posed by militancy hangs low over all our major cities. No life is safe; even the right to mark a national holiday has been snatched away from people.

The two most recent bombings, in Peshawar where 13 people died in an attack targeting a PAF bus, and now in Lahore, come as a reminder of the need to act against militancy. Of course authorities will argue this is already happening, with fighting underway in many parts of the northern areas and reports of arrests coming in every now and then. But the sad reality is that such efforts are largely futile. There can be little real hope of wiping out militants by bombing village after village. Indeed, each time a militant fighter is killed, the anger fuelled within communities by these deaths leads to others picking up guns, grenades and rocket launchers. The aerial attacks that the US persists in carrying out further aggravate and complicate the situation. This is not to say of course that militants should be allowed to rampage without restraint, burning schools, motels and shops in their maddened frenzy. Indeed they must be punished for their crimes and their presence ended. But a far more holistic and cohesive strategy than the one currently being employed needs to be devised to achieve this. The cycle of bombing followed by deals that militants have no scruples about breaking serve no purpose at all, and act only to prolong the crisis.

The time has come to call an all-parties conference on the militant issue. Unity and a common strategy must be built. The only hope of ending militancy is to engage people of the affected areas in the cause, not by threatening them with dire consequences if they back militants, but by offering them the development and a chance to fulfil dreams that any state should be able to offer citizens. The carrot and stick must be used intelligently together ensuring militant leaders are dealt with under the law while people are offered incentives that can bring them over to the side of the state. The policy employed at present, of ‘clearing’ areas of militants by driving them into surrounding regions, and then ending the military action, seems inherently flawed. Inevitably, as has happened in Swat, the militant leaders simply bide their time and then return into a situation where local residents whose homes and lands have been damaged by bombing often harbour greater anger than before against government forces.

In the aftermath of a rather sombre Independence Day, all these issues must be thought through, new tactics devised and the problem of militancy approached from a new perspective. Only then can there be some hope of ending the bombings that have devastated cities and inflicted a terrible death on far too many people over the past few years.