DESPITE the shock and horror caused by the suicide bombing at Benazir Bhutto’s triumphal return on Oct 18, I find the anger such an attack ought to have caused to be largely missing.

During the endless panel discussions on various TV channels, most participants qualified their condemnation by saying that somehow, the tragedy was caused by the PPP’s insistence on going ahead with the rally despite warnings.Talk about blaming the victim. I put this attitude down to the ‘Yes, but…” syndrome that first surfaced in the wake of 9/11.

Many Pakistanis then were initially in denial, blaming Mossad and/or the CIA for the atrocities in New York and Washington. Somebody even blamed the Japanese who wanted to get even for the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But even when people accepted that these attacks had indeed been the handiwork of Al Qaeda, they insisted that they were somehow justified by the suffering of the Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir and Palestine.

‘9/11 was a terrible thing,’ they would say. ‘But the Americans had it coming for what they have been doing to Muslims for decades.’ Mind you, 9/11 happened before the Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Nevertheless, many Pakistanis rationalised the attacks, thereby blaming the victims for the attacks against them.

The PPP is now being told that had it not been for the decision to take 18 hours to get to Jinnah’s mausoleum, the attack might have been prevented. Or, if Ms Bhutto had heeded Musharraf’s request to delay her return until the Supreme Court’s decision about the legitimacy of his re-election, the scores of her supporters who died might still have been alive today. Others say she should have accepted the government’s offer to fly her to the mausoleum on a helicopter.

What few people are doing is to condemn the butchers responsible for the attack without qualifications or reservations, and without any ifs and buts. The aim of all terrorists is to use indiscriminate violence to gain their objectives. In this case, their aim was to show to the whole country what would happen to politicians and political parties who challenged them.

Whatever her drawing room detractors might feel about Benazir Bhutto, they need to remember that in a sense, she is fighting their war. Over the last decade, the creeping Talibanisation of Pakistan has proceeded without any serious response from the government. It is almost certainly true that the Taliban first emerged during her second stint as prime minister, and were helped in their take-over of Afghanistan by the ISI and the Pakistan army. Gen Babar was her interior minister, and advocated support for this band of tribal zealots.

But now, she has come out strongly in her condemnation of extremism and terrorism in the name of religion, and should therefore be supported by all those who fear this virulent modern disease. Musharraf, despite his verbal attacks on this phenomenon, has failed in neutralising it. And as we have seen, a purely military response is both unacceptable domestically, and ineffective on the battlefield. What is needed is to evolve a solution that brings to bear economic, political and military tools to the task.

Clearly, the army is not capable of undertaking this complex job on its own. It has tried and failed. One of its current coalition partners, the Q League, is spiritually close to the extremists, as demonstrated by their dilatory and ambivalent approach to the Lal Masjid crisis. Members of the government not only had clerics sprung from jail for bringing in guns into the mosque complex, they wilfully dragged their feet on imposing the law for six months. Obviously, they would be unwilling to confront the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The other partner is the MQM, a party that, whatever its many other faults, is a secular organisation that has never played the religion card. But it is, and will remain, an ethnic party limited to the southern corner of Pakistan, and cannot play a national role. And as we saw from Nawaz Sharif’s attempt to ram through the 15th Amendment that would have imposed Sharia law on the country, making him the amirul momineen (or commander of the faithful), he is also ideologically close to a fundamentalist world view.

That leaves the PPP as the one party that believes in secularism, and can play a role in combating the onslaught of the holy warriors. The word ‘secularism’ has become a term of abuse in Pakistan due to its translation into Urdu as ladinyat or irreligiosity. This is close enough to ‘atheism’ to send politicians scurrying for cover. But it means no such thing. What it does imply is the separation of church and state on the grounds that citizens who do not believe in the official religion would face discrimination if that faith was the basis of the law of the land.

In many parts of the tribal areas, as well as in some settled districts of the NWFP, girls’ schools have been shut down after receiving threats from local fundamentalists. Video shops have been bombed. Barbers have been shut down. Ordinary citizens have been butchered on the charge of being ‘government spies’. Is this the sort of Pakistan we want to live in?

I have listened to many TV talk show participants belabouring the government for ‘fighting America’s war’. The accusation is that Musharraf is trying to fight the pro-Taliban tribesmen in the tribal areas at Washington’s behest, and in its interests. But surely, it is any government’s responsibility to control the national borders. Had Afghan tribesmen begun attacking targets in Pakistan, would we not have demanded that Karzai seal his border more effectively?

The reality is that, as argued recently here by Pervez Hoodbhoy, this is our war. How we fight it can, of course, be debated. Thus far, the tactics and the strategy have been flawed. But the fact is that like it or not, we are at war. If we are fighting our own people, we could call it a civil war.

And in any war, we need to use all our resources. But above all, we need political will. Currently, there is so much muddled thinking that we do not even accept the idea that in this war against the dark forces that confront us, we need unity in our ranks. Indeed, to judge from our columnists and TV discussions, we are in real danger of allowing the enemy into the gates while we go on saying ‘Yes, but…’