Re: Why many Pakistani-Americans aren’t sending flood donations home
If you have been keeping in touch, and I assume you do, with the news of late, you will have heard, what with wikileaks and all, about the ambivalence, to put it mildly, about Pakistan’s “efforts in helping US forces taking down the terrorists.” For example, your own Prime Minister, Mr. Cameron, last month had some unflattering and unambiguous words to say in Bangalore about Pakistan’s role in the war on terror.
Also, Pakistan is “taking down the terrorists” not so much to help another country as for its sake, even survival. The country that faces the gravest existential threat from terrorism is none other than Pakistan itself. And Pakistan needs to eradicate terrorism to protect the lives, if not the way of life as we know it, of its own people. Just yesterday a terrorist blew himself in a mosque with a pro-government preacher in wana, killing 26 people and injuring 40. It was Pakistanis who were killed. When militants explode car bombs in a meena bazaar in Peshawar, killing 100, mostly women and children shopping for cheap jewellery and toys, it is also the Pakistanis whose lives are lost. When the state negotiates and bends over backwards to appease these barbaric animals, as it did in Swat, and they thank the state by holding floggings, and banning female education, preventing 40000 girls from attending school,it is the Pakistanis who suffer.
And if those places appear distant and far away, remember what happened in Moon market in Lahore and the Data darbar recently because of Pakistan’s failure to eradicate terrorists from society.