Source: ET
We have yet to learn how to grieve as a nation the thousands of names and the unnamed.
If we stopped for a second to make the pain register, perhaps something unimaginable would happen to us as a people. Perhaps, for now, because it is so unbearable, our grief has been stoppered in the collective consciousness. Perhaps if we actually looked into the chasm of loss, we would make it stop.
In this newspaper we tried our best to chronicle the price Pakistan is paying for the quotidian of terrorism and violence and words often failed us in the face of this indescribable time we are living in. But as the year ends, we wanted to stop and make you stop for even just one visual second to say to them, that yes, even though you are gone, and we are numb from the battering, we acknowledge your names before they are swallowed. Before they slip away and are replaced by fresh ones on these pages.
The algebra of evolving terrorism
For the 365 days of 2012 the newspapers were studded with statistics on terrorism. Reader fatigue is understandable. But as we lurch into the New Year in Pakistan, it is worth taking a closer look at them because there was a 25% drop in terrorist strikes, which some consider an improvement.
Muhammad Amir Rana, the director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, has kept an eye on the graph: Around 7,000 people died in 2011. In the year that just ended, about 4,700.
That was the ‘good’ news. The magnitude may have subsided slightly but the mark has sharpened. The agents of destruction have changed the rules of the game – their targets are more specific now. The crowded market places are slowly being replaced by an A-list of enemies.
This is why, in 2012 we saw more Bashir Bilours, Malala Yousufzais, Aurangzeb Farooquis, Birgitta Almebys, SP Hilals come in the line of fire.
More than a third of the 1,480 terrorist attacks were assassinations, according to data collected by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
It was not like this post-Lal Masjid in the summer of 2007 and till the end of 2009 when the general population bore the brunt. That two-and-a-half year period is a reference point for those tabulating and interpreting the trends because it included the deadliest months for Pakistan when attacks went up an unimaginable 154%.
Fortunately, it has been consistently winding down since then.
There were 3,816 violent incidents in 2009, 3,393 the year after. It continued to dip: 2,985 attacks in 2011. In the year that just ended, it was marginally, but still lower at 2,082.
There is an explanation for these changes.