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| India-Pakistan |
| Footnotes from ‘war on terror’ |
| 2015-01-03 |
| [Dawn] A NEW narrative is in the making, that the fight against terrorism has been compromised because of civilian failures. That it has been lost so far is seared into our consciousness with the blood of 140 children. It is said that massive trauma can lead to partial or full amnesia. The emerging narrative seems to be counting on that. While the army support for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s and the Kashmire mujahideen in the 1990s and their mutating into local Taliban is often lamented, the pallbearers of that era are now relevant only as prime-time TV fodder. What needs more scrutiny is what happened in the early years of this round, the initial days of the ‘war on terror’ from 2002 to 2006. This was the time span when the problem of Taliban terrorism was nascent, manageable and not so widespread. Since then, it’s become terminal. We are now told we need military courts because civilian courts have freed terrorists. The conviction rate of terrorism cases has been abysmally low and prosecution lax — no arguing with that — but the TTP top hierarchy has never been brought to court. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |