FROM the very first time I heard about the tragedy in Islamabad, I’ve had a nagging notion.

It is not just the image of the slain district judge being pursued to his chamber where he was shot in cold blood. It is not even the image of Fizza Malik standing proud at her graduation; echoing the feelings of all recent law graduates that stood in her place a mere year ago.

It is the realisation that my own life, and the lives of so many lawyers I know, could have been snatched away just as easily. After all, so many of us have travelled to the same court in Islamabad, appeared before Mr Rafaqat Awan, and stood with the same pride when we finally graduated as lawyers.

This realisation leads to the obvious question as to what differentiated us from them, so that we are alive today, while so many other lawyers perished in the smoke-charred remains of the attack on the Islamabad district courts earlier this month. The answer is so simple, and so bleak, that I’ve had to reconcile myself to the fact that there are no logical alternatives: it is simply that on the days when we were in Islamabad’s courts, the militant groups, TTP or its offspring, weren’t in the mood for bloodshed.

The government, the ministers, whoever in the world is supposed to be responsible for our well-being, keeps sweeping this fact under the rug, but that hardly seems to be enough for us not to notice the glaring bump in the rug that is slowly becoming harder to walk around.

The current status quo is that whenever any lawyer goes to court, he must do so in the hope that the militants will not be looking to flex their trigger finger. Because if they are, clearly we cannot rely on the government to protect us — a government which has never taken the time to train its police force; a government so focused on its Punjab-centric policies that it can ally itself with sectarian monsters; a government so utterly oblivious that, in the attack’s aftermath, it asked the TTP to do something about it.

If any nation wishes to prosper (and shattering frivolous records does not imply prosperity), it has to cross a basic threshold: it must protect those most likely to make a difference. Imagine for a second the premature death of Martin Luther King when he first took a stand.

Our track record is abhorrent when it comes to Malala, to Mukhtaran Mai, but most importantly it is so when it concerns our judiciary.

Why would any district or sessions judge wish to refuse bail to a terrorist when he knows his compatriot in Islamabad was hunted down in his chamber? Why would any high court judge confirm a terrorist’s sentence when he knows his fellow judge in Karachi had his convoy obliterated just because a jihadi felt like it? And why would any young child of Pakistan want to make a difference as a lawyer when he can’t be sure whether he will be gunned down before he even has the chance to receive his licence to practice in the mail?

Our quality of life cannot be dependent on the whims of terrorists. We should not have to go to work fearing that today some radical will wake up on the wrong side of the bed. The government owes us that much. But there seems to be no concern for the fact that the police as an institution is neither adequately equipped for handling such an attack, nor that our courts are barely given priority in the security hierarchy.

All one needs to do to strike any of the courts in Lahore is arrive there in a black suit and tie. It is almost guaranteed you won’t be checked.

The solution to our roll-of-the-dice existence is to overhaul the institutions responsible for the security of our people. The police must be paramount in this chain along with our intelligence agencies.

I am not so naïve as to hope that it turns into a model for the world to follow overnight. Lon Fuller once talked about the morality of aspiration, a sliding scale towards excellence that all states should strive for. I am merely asking the government to make our security institutions a priority.

This can be achieved if the government pumps more resources into security rather than into its latest record-breaking ego fest. Until our national priority becomes the protection of our people, we will never prosper. No matter how many times we blame the rest of the world; it will always be as Cassius said: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

The writer is a lawyer.