Pakistan’s Next Top Terrorist

As an ambitious but embittered schoolchild, I was always curious about how other schools chose their student leaders. It seemed so foreign to me that they had elections to vote them in. Dependent on the popular vote – and, as everyone knows, popularity is everything before 18 – students in other schools would launch full-on political campaigns in the tenth grade. I mean bake sales, car washes, dubious external corporate funding, backbiting, name-calling, rumormongering, bold speeches and flimsy promises. It seemed so much more fun than what happened in my school at the time, a prison-castle where all the prefects were chosen by a principal who only spoke in coded, revelatory anecdotes like a reincarnation of Confucius.

In retrospect it makes perfect, circular sense that the premier boys’ school in Pakistan didn’t think that participating in the electoral process mattered for “future leaders” (and you wonder why democracy hasn’t “developed” here). I’d taken for granted that such is the case all around the country. I realized just how wrong I was when I saw coverage the other day of the election of the next “Head of the Pakistani Taliban”. (I think it should be a game-show called “Pakistan’s Next Top Terrorist”.) All our news outlets, hell, all the world’s news outlets were running cycle after cycle of the many runners-up that were poised to take the crown from Mehsud. It all seemed a little Miss World to me, and I briefly imagined the Final Five contenders walking up and down the rocks of Waziristan as they went though the Kalashnikov round, won points for beaded braiding and rounded up the competitive evening with a talent completion (mass murder, decapitation, grenade volleyball, whatever takes your fancy).

In the comparatively short time since I returned to this country, the Pakistani Taliban have gone in our popular imagination from a fringe offshoot of a neighboring problem to The Crisis Of Our Lives. They have become a basis for spectacularly unintelligent politicians to show their cowardice on the national stage again and again. But still nothing prepared me for the reaction that we had (by “we” I mean leaders and population alike) to the killing of Hakimullah Mehsud.  Call me naïve (I’d rather you call me beautiful) but I didn’t immediately figure out how it was a bad thing that someone had finally put an end to a man that had a bounty on his head, was an enemy of state and society and had not only killed dozens of citizens but vowed to keep doing it.

I chose not to address this in my last column, distracted as I was by the wonders of Rohtas Fort. It seemed a case of national cognitive dissonance so obvious as to require processing time. On my way back, the friend I was travelling with interrupted our conversation of Mughal pasts and murky futures to ask: “Does everyone really think it’s a bad thing he died, or just that he died in a drone attack?”

The answer: I don’t know. I seriously haven’t a clue how to predict the mood of a country that is so obviously a case study for Stockholm Syndrome. Mehsud was responsible for countless murders in Pakistan. He was a man who even bombed the funerals of his victims, to finish off whatever it was he couldn’t complete the first time. He had been openly, decidedly and vehemently against the very state whose sovereignty we claim his death violated.

I just want to put it out there that while the Americans had a bounty on Mehsud’s head, so did we. We were prepared to shell out $600,000 for information leading to his capture or death, something I think we quietly ignored once he actually died. It’s the most obvious indicator since Osama bin Laden was found here that we are not wholly committed to defeating the Islamist terrorists.

Are you having an aneurism yet?

Probably not. Some of you probably buy into Imran-I’m-so-smart-I-fall-off-cranes-Khan’s puerile attempts at ingratiating himself with his vote bank by suggesting that’s its not the Taliban killing us that’s the problem (silly billy!). No, actually, it’s the Americans who constitute the singular reason why we are being massacred. All the Pakistani Taliban want is peace. When the Christians are massacred in their churches, it’s the Americans that “forced” the Taliban to do it. When the Shias are pushed out of buses and executed on highways, it’s the Americans who “forced” the killers’ hands. When the Taliban bomb the shrines of Daata Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore and Abdullah Shah Ghazi in Karachi, they do it because – somehow – they’ve been “provoked” by “American foreign policy”.

[quote]The nation is acting like a housewife who believes her abuse is not only deserved but self-inflicted[/quote]

The nation is acting like an abused housewife so emotionally scarred that she believes her abuse is not only deserved but self-inflicted. The truly devastating thing is: a lot of people really believe this c***. Other than Imran Apologist Khan, a man called Chaudhry Nisar has been the biggest proponent of publicly attacking the Americans for ruining a peace deal that would, in his mind, have yielded flowers and rainbows and handshakes.

I have three things to say about Mr. Nisar. One: his argument is stupid, short sighted and unconsidered. Two: his entire immediate family are American citizens, something he first denied and then begrudgingly blamed on his wife when pressed for details. (In the interest of fair play, I suggest he either shut up or move out.) Three, and vastly more important: someone needs to tell him that toupees can age naturally if you pay them some attention. It’s getting terribly difficult to take him seriously with that mop of deep noir cascading over snowy sideburns.

But fear not, for at the end of an exhaustive search, we have a winner: Mr. Fazlullah is Pakistan’s next top terrorist. Fazlullah had polio as a child, is against any modern vaccine for the disease, ordered the hit on Malala Yusufzai that made her famous and him infamous and is said to enjoy long horse rides in the mountains. Fazlullah also had a man and son shot for not wearing their shalwars higher than their ankles. This is the latest head of the organization that we – and Imran Khan and Chaudhry Nisar – think wants peace.

It’s always bad to be on the wrong side of history. But it’s worse to be 1,000 years behind the right one.

Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter