Correction - people are retarded- all others and still large chunks of the public will swallow the next round of "Muslim brotherhood," "Pashtun solidarity," or "negotiate with Kabul" nonsense because ethnicity and slogans beat memory every time.
Memory, in this country, is optional. Ethnicity and the well-timed slogan are not.
The politicians and the usual television ulema barely break a sweat.They point at the fauj’s very real catalogue of blunders so that nobody has to dwell on the one continuous Afghan position on the border, or on the awkward detail that TTP is not some ancient twin of the Afghan Taliban but a post-2007 reaction that only grew real teeth once Kabul became a safe house again after the Americans left.
Public amnesia is the oxygen. Without a population that keeps forgetting 1996–2001, forgetting who rejected the Durand Line with Pakistani patronage still warm in the pocket, and forgetting that patronage was never control, the political class could not keep selling “dialogue” as strategy. It is not strategy. It is the same delusion, reheated, with fresh tarka.
The army’s stupidity is real, documented, and expensive. But the public’s cheerful refusal to hold a single consistent line on national interest is what lets everyone else enjoy"piece tu bara tight hai" .
Exactly. Btw, it's only going to get worse since people instantly react to tweets, Reels, and TikToks without verifying anything. Nobody waits for facts anymore. A 30-second clip or a random Twitter thread is enough for people to form an opinion, and by the time the truth comes out, the narrative has already been set.
I love how every counterterrorism operation is instantly termed as "Pashtun brutality," lmao. It's like the TTP's actions don't even matter anymore. The focus immediately shifts from terrorists to the state. It's also astonishing that in Hangu, the TTP butchered nine men and took hostages. Somehow, magically, the jirga elders contacted the TTP and got them back. I'm like, these fucking clowns know exactly who is who and who is doing what, but they'll still give credence to their ethnicity before acting civilized. They'll publicly claim nobody knows where the militants are, yet when they want hostages released, they suddenly know exactly which commanders to call.
It's a never-ending cycle. Militants regroup, the state launches an operation, social media declares it a war against civilians before any facts are established, political parties jump in to score points, and public opinion turns against the operation. Then the military pulls back under pressure, militants return stronger, and a few months later everyone asks why security has deteriorated again.
On top of that, PTI packaging anti-terror operations as failures, calling strikes in Afghanistan illegal, and parroting Afghan propaganda is the cherry on top. Instead of building a political consensus against terrorism, every operation becomes a partisan issue. You simply cannot fight an insurgency when half the political class is busy undermining the state's narrative while the other half is trying to conduct operations.
I genuinely feel like we're heading toward a major security crisis with deep paralysis because PTI won't change its stance and people oppose almost every operation before it even begins. You can't demand security while simultaneously opposing every action taken to establish it. Then stuff like Swat happens, girls can't go to school, businesses shut down, people are displaced, and everyone suddenly turns around and says, "Ab bacha lo humein." By then, the cost of inaction is far higher than the cost of acting earlier.
