COST OF LIVES

COST OF LIVES
By malikrashid
The high level officials of US administration, have been asserting lately, the connections, Pakistani ISI has with the Taliban, and the threat of increased US strikes in NWFP, FATA, and Baluchistan is imminent.
The Pakistani military is likely to accept it as unwanted turn of fate and the politicians would not mind a cleanup that the Pakistani military could not accomplish. There could be ground strikes of special-ops to follow up on the drone fired missiles. Death and displacement of innocent civilians caught up in a war to erect and maintain US as the sole super power, will go up. The US officials do admit that the Taliban and other such elements were formed by the ISI with the US support and will.
The people in the region have paid dearly for the super war of the mightiest and the cleanup of the goons that war created. I hope each and every loss of lives and limbs and homes is properly documented so there could be a claim for reparations in an international court. Pakistani politicians must raise this issue with the US to get the victims compensated fairly.
As for the ISI, we still have to see if the military has any control over it or there could be a confrontation between the state and its very powerful spy agency. Though, the ISI is not solely responsible for the mess we are in. The Americans and the Saudis had played their parts in organizing, funding and weaponizing these elements that are categorized as the enemies of civilization.
Blaming the ills of today on ISI/US and Saudis does not complete the list of the accused. The corrupt politicians and military leaders were never behind in plundering and they found political strength from the political/religious parties that provided a religious/patriotic propaganda, and stirred religious and ethnic hatred to distract the people from real issues.
From the very beginning in 1947, religious versus secular and autocratic versus democratic, the questions basic to the formation of a state were vehemently crushed by the hammer of Islamic state for muslims. The so-called rationalist muslim thinkers like Maudoodi had a field day when Iqbals idea of a separate political identity for muslims of India materialized to become Pakistan. Though Iqbal had recommended a reconstruction of religion, fellows like Maudoodi took it upon themselves to contrive the state into a representation of continued Islamic spirit and history, as they saw it, perpetuating over 1400 years.
Political divide representing religion and patriotism, provided the cover to corruption and conspiracy of the rulers, and the penal code and justice system, the British left us with, was eroded by the ways of elitism and absence of democracy. While the mullas kept blaming all ills on the absence of religion in society, they could not find any knowledgeable solution to any known problems. Military dictatorships found natural allies in the religious/political elements, and fear of extinction against their big neighbour India, fuelled all movements. Military, the most stable institution in Pakistan, turns out to be the only institution alive. All resources were sucked in by the military which had the sacred and critical task of safeguarding the territory, but it took it upon itself, the task of governance and surrendered half of the country to India along with 96000 soldiers. That did not stop the military from taking over the country, again and again, and today, their creation, the ISI and the jihadis stand out against the Americans, trampling the peace and prosperity of a people, sending them to death and misery.
We have heard contradicting figures of loss of lives and property in Afghanistan, and there did not seem to be any mechanism in place in Iraq either to identify the civilian casualties. The number of Afghans who perished in the Soviet invasion were neither properly counted nor compensated. We hope the US and the world would come up with a plan to identify and compensate all civilian loss in Pakistan