On the American drone attacks and possible military incursions into Pakistan, like the operation to get bin Laden, I am reminded of an incident narrated to me by a very dear elder, Sayeed Hasan Khan. He recalls it was during the freedom movement around 1946-47 when he ran into a woman sweeper in a street of Lahore.

On the one side there was a freedom rally going on and on the other the woman (a Christian lady) was carrying on with her work unperturbed, rather disinterested in the goings on. Khan Sahab asked her: ‘So aren’t you for freedom? Aren’t you going to join them?’ She replied in chaste Punjabi: ‘Saade kolon azaadi mangde ne. Assi vi nahin deni’ (they are demanding freedom from us; we ain’t going to give it). She controlled the freedom from or subservience to the British as much as we do today the American military raids on our territory, as we tell them: ‘We won’t allow you to raid us again’ and that ‘Drone strikes are unacceptable’.

We’ve come to this pass because of our disconnect with reality as the world knows it. It is as follows: ‘There are terrorists on our soil who are of grave danger to us, to the state of Pakistan, as well as our neighbours and the West. The terrorists are of many nationalities but they also include a large number of Pakistanis — from the tribal belt to the jihadi boys raised by Pakistani sectarian and terrorist organisations in Punjab and elsewhere. Their mentors and the masterminds behind terrorist tactics were patronised by the CIA and the Pakistan Army back in the Afghan Jihad days as an instrument of foreign policy to force the Soviet Union to end its occupation of Afghanistan.

‘After the Soviets’ withdrawal, however, these guys indulged in mutual warfare to start the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, to which end the Americans offered little support, but Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE continued to help them. Once the Taliban established their writ in Afghanistan, Arabs, Chechens, Afghan and Pakistani jihadis vowed to liberate other occupied Muslim lands, including Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia. While one superpower was defeated, the other remained as the backer of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands; India was seen to play a similar role in Kashmir as did Russia in Chechnya, and the Serbs in Bosnia, so together the US, Russia, India, Israel and the Serbs became the  target of their wrath.

‘The aim also was to establish a Taliban-style dispensation in Pakistan, which they later tried to do in Swat. They’ve attacked the Indian parliament and Bombay with a view to scuttling efforts to better India-Pakistan relations — a growing worry to the world as the region remains a nuclear flashpoint. There are people in Pakistan today who still run jihadi training and brainwashing camps and sympathise with al Qaeda. They will try to work their way into Pakistan’s security apparatus to possibly lay their hands on nuclear weapons. Therefore, they’re of much graver and immediate threat to Pakistan, first and foremost, and must to be neutralised. Pakistan should help the US do it.’

And now the perspective of those who run Pakistan: ‘The Americans used us to bleed the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan and then abandoned us. The global and Pakistani terrorists, now pushed into Pakistan by the American and Nato forces in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 world, are a threat to Pakistan only because the US is pushing us to fight its war. Once the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan, and Pakistan stops playing in the hand of the Americans, the people of the West and India call terrorists will be of no threat to us anymore; therefore, we should just wait for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

‘These same people will go back to being a friendly presence in Afghanistan which will help contain Indian influence there. We’re deeply hurt because fighting America’s war, we’ve borne the brunt of totally avoidable acts of terror unleashed on our cities and which have resulted in the killing of many, including a leader like Benazir Bhuttto. We do not want to antagonise them any further and our policy towards them should be to live and let live so that they stop targeting us.’

And this is where the disconnect lies. If we as a state are tolerant of terrorists who will spare us for extending that favour to them but who will be free to plan and attack targets in other countries, then other countries will have to do something about them directly. India may not be able to do this, but the US can and we have little defence against it. This is where US drone strikes come in, and diplomatic rows with India intensify dogging the prospects of any détente and peace in South Asia.

We have yet to learn what we should and should not tolerate in our midst. I hope we don’t learn the hard way like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did. Rousing nationalist sentiments against the US hardly serves the purpose at a time we should be fighting the battle of our own survival against those who kill and maim in the name of Allah and bring both Islam and Pakistan into disrepute.

—The writer is an editor with Dawn