In the general flow of terrorist acts around the world the one country that gets short shrift is Pakistan. So close is the perception globally that it harbors militants and fringe groups that when violence is visited upon it there is a sort of shrug off the shoulders.
That does not make the pain of the victims any less and they are not combatants but civilians caught in the crossfire. And their loss no less an agony than anywhere else in the world. The attack by a motorbike suicide bomber in the small town of Mardan which took 23 lives is just the most recent in a spate of Taliban sponsored acts of terror that go largely unnoticed.
If not unnoticed they do not grab the attention and blur in the public mind. There is very little global condemnation and memory at best is fleeting.
When you consider the appalling fact that in the past decade 27,000 civilians have died in terrorist assaults in the country you realize what an enormous price is being paid for the tolerance shown in the beginning by opening doors to extremist groups.
Those who pay that price and it is an open bottom line with no one knowing where the next blast comes from are actually people who have no idea why they form these statistics. They are just common folk doing a day’s honest work and largely apolitical.
There have been accusations that the media does not cover the acts of violence in eastern countries like they do in the west. This is essentially not true. The coverage is there, it is just that in some mysterious fashion, it does not get read and it does not impact.
Creatures of conditioning as people are they look upon these acts in mayhem as expected and part of the normal scheme of things. That blind spot has to be removed and the world has to recognize that as much as Pakistan may have erred in allowing extremist groups to proliferate in the early years the ongoing killings need to be addressed and some sense of security and safety be restored to the people especially in the northwest provinces.
Unless some major steps are taken to protect the people and block the supply routes for arms and explosives these acts will not end and the death toll of the innocent will keep increasing. And no one is a winner in that war.
