MAY the horror that visited Peshawar last Tuesday be the last such tragedy to visit any parent, any family at home or abroad. It’s pointless to say now if the Peshawar nightmare could possibly have been averted.

Equally, it is incumbent on each of us to pause and ponder how we got here; to ask if the steps to hell can be reversed; if somehow the takfiri ideology and the narrative can be countered; in brief if the battle for Pakistan’s soul can be won.

After helpless grief of the kind many of us have not known; after crying our eyes out; after reaching out for our own children as much in a desperate quest to ensure they are OK as much as in our own need to find comfort, reassurance in their embrace; and of course after our inability to even imagine (for we can’t ever) the pain of the Peshawar parents and our collective guilt at having let them down so badly, where do we go?

We await the findings of a committee which our leaders formed the day after the nightmare. The committee will take a week to share its wisdom with us on how terrorism is to be battled and, if at all, defeated. All major political parties with members in parliament are represented here so what this committee says ought to represent the national consensus.

While the civilian leadership opted to deliberate by committee and take its time, the military leadership immediately boarded an aircraft and took off for Kabul to seek the cooperation of the western neighbour in dealing with terrorist leaders based there as they were the ones who reportedly directed the school carnage. (The army also made claims of killing dozens of terrorists in punitive action on our own soil.)

For far too long, we as individuals have learned to find comfort and solace in muted protest.

There was nothing wrong in either response as the challenge is multifaceted and, therefore, will require the collective wisdom of all the institutions, civil and military, to tackle. But, if you ask me, the response of some incredibly courageous civil society members seemed the most appropriate and effective.

After Maulana Abdul Aziz of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid seemed reluctant during media appearances (yes, many are asking why is the media giving airtime to extremists without even robustly challenging them) to condemn the insane mass murder of the Army Public School students, these brave citizens organised a protest at his citadel.

This is the most effective and appropriate response simply because if there is any hope at all of winning against the purveyors of hate speech and toxic ideology, the fight will have to be taken to them whether it is in the mountainous Waziristan or urban Islamabad, rural southern Punjab or the bustling metropolises of Karachi and Lahore.

Yes. For tell me how are the perpetrators of the school massacre different in their mindset to those who shot at and grievously wounded a 13-year-old Karachi student and killed her father because they deserved to be put down as per the dictates of the shooters’ takfiri ideology?

How proud, how civilised we considered ourselves when we were able to whisk away to safety, out of reach of the lynch mob, another teenager, this time in Islamabad because a crooked ‘man of God’ had falsely accused her of having blasphemed.

Whether it was the Peshawar Church blast that killed nearly a hundred Christians, the relentless targeting of Shia Hazaras in Balochistan, attacks on and mass murder of Ahmadis in Lahore gathered in prayer, our (official) outrage, if that, has lasted perhaps as long as it has taken for the victims’ spilt blood to dry.

Ask the families of the Kot Radha Kishan victims how they felt when their loved ones were being torn limb from limb before being pushed into the kiln or those whose entire bastis were burned down by angry mobs elsewhere in Punjab or ask what tragedy befalls a Hindu family in Sindh when their kidnapped daughter is forcibly ‘converted’ and married off to her tormentor.

For far too long, we as individuals have learned to find comfort and solace in muted protest; the state has either looked away in criminal dereliction of its duty or worse still has been complicit in the perpetrators’ crime because of some misplaced (and now boomeranging) notion of strategic national interest.

One hopes this atrocity that claimed so much of our future makes us devote every intelligence resource/asset, every law-enforcement officer who isn’t directly involved in physically fighting terrorists to spread out in the country and document centres of hate speech and ideology.

Let us show our resolve to battle extremism by reforming the system that many believe has now become incapable of delivering justice and by enacting laws whose grip the perpetrators of hate feel and fear. Most of all, let there be no confusion in any mind that this is an existential threat.

The government and the army alone cannot deal with it even if they get all their priorities right, repent in abandoning their follies. Even if they come round to the view that nurturing those who visit terror on other countries — no matter how just and deep-rooted our grievances against these may be — is tantamount to allowing freedom to those who torment our citizens whatever their caste, creed and/or gender, it may not be enough.

The government will do well to have open lines where we, the citizens, report any hate speech we witness, particularly where it’s being peddled in the name of the divine, for many perpetrators of the madness that wounds us today believe they have divine sanction. Let the state award exemplary punishments to those who will not desist.

Unless this happens we can park our optimism and our future wherever we like but there’ll be no safe refuge for it. We’ll just live, or is it limp, from one atrocity to another.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn December 20th , 2014