The Shabqadar massacre

In two deadliest suicide explosions in the history of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Friday morning as many as 90 people were killed and over 140 others sustained critical injuries at a FC training center in Charsada district. Majority of those killed and injured included the Froniter Constabulary recruits who were proceeding to their homes after a passing out parade held hours before. Tehreek -e- Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has owned the responsibility for the deadly explosions terming it response to the killing of Osama in Abbotabad operation.

As the day dawned on the nation for its elected political leadership and military top brass to assemble in an in-camera parliament session to go into arrogant American Abbottabad adventurism, it was struck by the horrific Shabqadar terrorist assault. And it was a gory massacre, heartlessly savage and tragically grievous. Some 8o innocent lives were snuffed out at once on the spot in two quick successive strikes, one donkey-cart bombing and the other suicide attack, the dead being mostly Frontier Constabulary personnel, 65 recruits. Another over 100 lay injured, at least 40 critically. An unpardonable sin it was against the sublime teachings of our noble religion. A contemptible a crime against the humanity was it, too. Yet the thugs were not contrite. The TTP has claimed the responsibility of this sinful carnage pridefully as if they had performed some noble deed. But going by our sacred faith they are sinners of the basest kind and will go to hell to burn in eternal fire. Whose men are they, anyway? They couldn’t be from us. They clearly are the proxies of the aliens who are out to hurt this nation in every manner and destabilise it. They kill for money at the behest of their foreign paymasters, though they cloak their murder trade with the deceitful cover of faith that could have nothing to do with the vile business they are indulging in so viciously. It is no hard to know whose proxies they are.The kind of weapons they use could only be available to a military, not to a criminal gang or mafia. The sort of training they manifest in their attacks couldn’t be within the pale of a thuggish outfit. Nor could the sort of planning they exhibit in choosing their targets and launching their attacks be a work of a group. It shows a high standard of professionalism that comes only to professional armies, not to ragtag militias or criminal gangs. And who gives them bundles of cash that they need to keep their shoals of murderers well-fed and well-paid? Who indeed are their masterminds, their handlers, their financiers, their arms suppliers and their trainers? Certainly, the administration knows it but keeping its lips sealed. But our woebegone and beleaguered people, particularly our tribal compatriots, too know. And they are talking. The wellsprings of this death dance on them they cry are located in our western neighbour from where a vile duplicitous refrain is constantly oozing out cunningly of our being double-dealers in the anti-terrorism campaign. And they know it at first hand. Our tribal cousins have seen how wades of cash, mounds of weapons and fleets of mountain vehicles have crossed over into our territory from across the western border over the years intermittently to infest our tribal areas and how foreign proxies have sprung up and proliferated in the region over the time. For some niceties best known to it, the administration is invariably hedgy, loath of speaking out the full truth, which surely is within the domain of its knowledge. At best, it names, hesitantly and sporadically, India’s intelligence agency RAW and Afghanistan’s spy service National Directorate of Security (NDS) as the fountainheads of this lethal murder trade on our territory. But our tribal compatriots say the godfather of this whole murder trade is actually America’s CIA. As it happens in such eventualities where for a common objective even sworn enemies gang up, they believe al-Qaeda may be involved as it too has declared war on us. But they point their finger at the CIA as the principal villain, arguing that the kind of cash, weaponry, war equipment, strategy, planning and training the terrorist thugs display in their possession couldn’t be within the means of al-Qaeda to muster up. At least now after this Abbottabad saga, the administration must break its silence and speak out the full truth. Too much is at stake; and too much of bloodletting have our people borne at the hands of foreign proxies. This cannot go on, as this alien-instigated terrorism poses a grave existential threat to us. Now the administration must expose the godfather of this bloody-thirsty terrorist infrastructure on our soil for the world to see.



It's the first major retaliatory attack since the secret raid on bin Laden's compound on May 2nd.