The unanswered massacre |
ON winter mornings in Peshawar, some mothers still wake before dawn, not because they must, but because sleep no longer obeys them.
School uniforms remain folded in cupboards, untouched since 16 December 2014. Lunchboxes were packed once and never opened again. Fathers who walked their children to the gates of the Army Public School now walk to graveyards instead, if they survived long enough to do so. Many did not. Grief hollowed them out, hearts failed quietly in the years that followed.
That morning, gunmen entered APS and murdered 149 people, 134 of them children, in Pakistan’s deadliest terrorist attack. Classrooms became execution chambers. Eight hours passed before control was regained. By then, the country had crossed a moral threshold from which it has never fully returned. The nation responded with fury and resolve. Military courts were revived. Operation Zarb-e-Azb was intensified. The National Action Plan, a 20-point framework to eradicate extremism, was announced with rare political unanimity. The language was absolute: zero tolerance, no distinction between good and bad militants, never again. Militarily, the response was forceful and, by several measures, effective. Between 2014 and 2017, official figures claim more than 3,400 militants were killed, over 800 terrorist hideouts destroyed and tens of thousands arrested. Independent conflict databases confirm a sharp decline in large-scale terrorist attacks after 2016. These gains came at a steep cost, nearly 500 Pakistani security personnel killed and thousands wounded.........