Look at this picture, this is a child labeled as IDP (internally displaced person) living currently in a make shift camp without proper basic living conditions e.g. food, water, sanitation. He doesn’t have fear in his eyes, even though it could well be that his family died during air raids by his own country’s air force or shelling by army tanks of his nation’s army or if spared by all that then by a drone attack of our biggest ally or may be they survived but this kid still must have seen a lot of carnage and so would have all the other kids of his age around him. We are fighting this war for a some time now and it seems to be in the pipeline for a few more so we are talking about a whole generation being raised in such conditions with atrocities being committed all around them. To me it seems like we are running a Taliban production center ourselves or at least the final product is quite ready to be installed with radicalism or Islamic fundamentalist ideas. But even putting that aside for a moment this does raise some questions, the answers to which all of us don’t know but have every right to demand from god knows who. May be even god wouldn’t know since he sure would be keeping his distance from all this utter stupidity going on in our land; after all that’s also politically correct.

Coming back to the questions that are very basic;

• What is the prize we are after? What are we fighting for, and whatever the desired end is does it justify the means?
• Who are we fighting against? Are we waging a war on our own people to make our country a safer place, that is perplexing and an oxymoron in itself. Who is the enemy, is it an army of people and how many people do we have to kill before we conquer whatever we want to conquer or is it an ideology that we want to tear down through a military solution.
• Who is our leader in this war? The one person who will stand up and say this is where we are and this is where we want to be as a nation and that is why this is a war of necessity, a struggle for survival and people of this nation could follow suit of the leader.

How do we want to progress as a nation in future or maybe we don’t even want to be one nation, as mentioned by some that we are just an ideology of a few leaders from the previous century?

An army alone cannot win a war unless the nation is supporting that war and at the moment most of the answers to the above mentioned questions by a common man on the street are that we are just fighting this war to please America, Taliban are actually agents planted by Ra (Indian) and Mosad (Israel) and our leadership will do whatever Americans will tell us to do. So speaking on behalf on the common man – who is dying everyday on the street – basically we don’t see it as our own war and the people running this country are so downright indifferent to everything that we fail to see that our cities have practically become war zones, more and more people find it difficult to eat two times a day, educational institutes are non-functional and the ones that are open are under constant fear of an attack. Not to mention that there are very few operational schools left in FATA and Swat regions especially for girls, since everyday there is another one destroyed; so there goes educating the mothers of tomorrow.

This week I saw all over the news that a fashion show was being defined as defiant and bold to still take place during the current wave of terrorism, well is it being defiant to hold an extravaganza within protected buildings and display midriffs and cleavages while men, women and children are dying elsewhere in the country or is it being indifferent. Defiant are those young girls in Swat and Quetta who still go to school today in search for a better tomorrow even though they know their being is at risk. Being defiant would be for us to stand up now and ask our leadership to take stock of the state of affairs in the country, to ask them to start thinking about the long-term repercussions for the country before taking actions, being defiant would be to ask those living in fortresses to come out and feel the pain of the common man; being defiant would be to tell the militants that we as a nation are not fundamentalists and their brand of Islam is not accepted in this country and finally being defiant would be to tell everyone in the world that we can take care of our own affairs albeit, this isn’t what we have been doing in the past.

I shall not dig into details of what our previous leaders did and what threw us in this abyss because this has been one of the prime reasons of our failure as a nation “being stuck in the past”. I think its about time that we start to find out answers before its too late and as one of our respected bureaucrats puts it “a sad end to a beautiful dream”. One thing is for sure whatever the answers are; there is no foreseen end to this war and no border within the country can be defined for militancy; we have already seen southern Punjab to be stated as the new nexus of terrorism and we are witnessing suffering in almost all parts of the country. Although many have said before and I’ll also mention that the current strategy and economic deterioration are only fueling radicalism instead of wiping it out, we might kill a few in Waziristan but another few hundred will be born elsewhere and in the end innocent are being martyred everywhere and our ways of life are being changed whether we like it or not; life sure isn’t getting beautiful.