Last Tuesday, I predicted that Pakistan was going to begin to experience a full-blown civil war in response to the school shooting there, and we can see that they are off to a good start with this:
Pakistan plans to execute around 500 militants in coming weeks, officials said Monday, after the government lifted a moratorium on the death penalty in terror cases following a Taliban school massacre.
Six militants have been hanged since Friday amid rising public anger over Tuesday’s slaughter in the northwestern city of Peshawar, which left 149 people dead including 133 children.
After the deadliest terror attack in Pakistani history, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ended the six-year moratorium on the death penalty, reinstating it for terrorism-related cases.
“Interior ministry has finalised the cases of 500 convicts who have exhausted all the appeals, their mercy petitions have been turned down by the president and their executions will take place in coming weeks,” a senior government official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
A second official confirmed the information.
Of the six hanged so far, five were involved in a failed attempt to assassinate then military ruler Pervez Musharraf in 2003, while one was involved in a 2009 attack on the army headquarters.
Naturally, the government will start killing those who it already has in its custody. They will do this as much as possible under the cover of law. But they will soon exhaust their supply of captives and have to go out into the hinterlands to create more corpses. They have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of terrorist sympathizers to choose from. They will have no trouble with that even assuming, incorrectly, that they will be maintaining some kind of discrimination in their reprisals.
The offensive against longstanding Taliban and other militant strongholds in North Waziristan and Khyber tribal agencies has been on going since June.
But a series of fresh strikes since the Peshawar attack, in which dozens of alleged militants were killed, suggest the campaign is being stepped up.
Police in the port city of Karachi said they killed 13 suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban members Monday evening.
“The police killed 13 suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban members in an encounter at the outskirts of the city near Super Highway,” senior police official Rao Muhammad Anwar told AFP.
Of course, the terrorists will strike back. That’s what they do. And the cycle of violence will grow.
My feelings on this are very mixed. I am so angry with the people, including some in my own government, who have nurtured this radicalism, that I really have trouble having sympathy for them. I deplore violence of every type, which is precisely why I am so pissed off at the Pakistani government. Yet, if they are now serious about addressing the global calamity they have created, I can only hope for their success. And, yet, the methods they will use are horrible to contemplate.
No one in their right mind intentionally creates an enemy that you cannot negotiate with. But these lunatics managed to do just that.
And my own government is complicit on every end of it, from helping to create the problem to making sure to exacerbate it every single day.
Pakistan may be able to crush the monster they created, but it is alive and flourishing in Iraq, Syria, and in many parts of Africa. All I see is the prospect of a lot of people getting killed, all because of the pursuit of one of the most nihilistic and short-sighted policies in the modern history of man.
They all – Jew, “Christian”, Muslim, Mormon – bow down to the same damned dog.
Facing the greatest crisis we humans have ever faced, Anthropogenic Atmospheric Disruption, we stand at a cusp, an evolutionary iteration. But if we don’t put these adolescent fairy tales to explain away the dark, keep the bed dry at at night and justify sex with children… if we don’t stop bickering over whose imaginary dog has the bigger dick, we won’t survive at all. End of the road, way of the dinosaurs… extinction.
A clear and present danger to my grand-children’s future.
As I sit here and read that link, I can’t help but wonder how many people in this country will look at this, nod approvingly and silently wish for some of the same kind of “justice” here in this country. And the ironic thing is that I came here just after reading about Mythbuster’s Adam Savage judging the new “Humanists Ten Commandments” contest from the ReThink crowdsourcing project by Atheist Mind Humanist Heart. Very depressing timing.
“All I see is the prospect of a lot of people getting killed, all because of the pursuit of one of the most nihilistic and short-sighted policies in the modern history of man.”
Which nihilistic and short-sighted policy would that be? We have so many to choose from!
Abandoning secular education in favor of fundamentalist indoctrination spread by the Saudi’s to keep their own fundamentalists at bay?
Cheerfully arming any and all merely on the basis of being ‘Anti-Soviet’?
Pakistani Intelligence happily ganging up with the Taliban because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and they were sure they could control them?
By the time we got to the point of CheneyBush lining up to gang-screw the pooch the poor thing had already been done to death…
“Pakistan may be able to crush the monster they created, but it is alive and flourishing in Iraq, Syria, and in many parts of Africa. All I see is the prospect of a lot of people getting killed, all because of the pursuit of one of the most nihilistic and short-sighted policies in the modern history of man.”
Started under president Carter and Brzezinski to crush the communist regime imposed by the Soviet Union on Afghanistan. The US got a little blowback …
Oh wait, Pakistan taking a tough stance on one of the many, many terrorist organization? I doubt it.
○ Umar Mansoor mastermind of Peshawar school attack: Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)
○ India shocked by Lakhvi’s release, mastermind of Mumbai massacre
○ US Prisoner Exchange Angers Afghanistan: Releases 5 top Taliban leaders via Qatar
Given what the global powers that be have made of the global economy, just exactly what is is worth stopping a war for anymore? Is there any hope that the killing will indeed stop? And hope that the infrastructure that has been destroyed will ever be rebuilt? And hope that any country has any other interest in the emerging corporate feudalist age beyond the aggrandizement of its ruling class?
The Republicans are an enemy that one cannot negotiate with. To a great extent they created this enemy by falling in behind a militarized Pakistan and looking the other way while Pakistan built a bomb. I guess the logic was that it counterbalanced China or some such nonsense. Russia, China, India, and Pakistan make a nuclear quartet. If those nations plus Israel renounced nuclear weapons and rapidly built down their arsenals, that would be a historic moment. Instead, we have people ramping up the war crazy.
But many parts of Iraq Syria and Africa don’t have nukes. Pakistan does.
We can see the same crap happening in Turkey, where Erdogan is using his concern about the peshmerga stop him from going full-tilt after the ISIS jerks. He is going to be soon in the position of Pakistan, who were basically backed into a position of supporting the lunatics by one baby step after another.
In one crisis after another, the operative model is the “boiling frog” situation. I am right now in a legal situation in which I am a consultant. I cannot say anything about it, save the following: the situation began as a small issue, and basically before the persons knew it, it was bigger and bigger and bigger, and they never caught up. This is the situation with these fanatics in many places – a little teensy compromise soon leads to 150 dead children in a school, and no one could see it coming inside. Outside, no one can understand how the idiots could not see it.