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.