I AM several thousand miles away, but today I felt closer to Pakistan than I have in many years. Today I felt suffocated in a way I haven’t in many years.

I’ve tried for the last many hours to string together a coherent sentence on Peshawar and I have come up empty. I do not know the pain of the families or those children who watched their friends die before their eyes. And I cannot lie, I hope I never do. What I do know is anger.

Anger and Pakistan go hand-in-hand, for me. Sometimes it is mild anger, sometimes it is more frustration than anything else. Sometimes it is senseless, helpless, coiled deep within my bones. Today it is something more than that. Today my anger is resigned. Today, the only response I have is one too cynical, too cold for me to articulate.

It is easy to call the shooters and suicide bombers monsters. That they are is indisputable. It is easy to call monsters, monsters.

However, it is harder to ask ourselves where they come from. Do they come from within us? Did we create them? Are we the same?

I have no illusions as to the response to the Peshawar attack. Somewhere, the military will drop bombs and tell us they have killed more monsters. We will believe them, because we have no other choice.

Elsewhere, monsters will continue to thrive. In the form of a suicide attack, maybe in the form of a media that thrives on gore, death, destruction and the agendas of yet more monsters. Maybe in the form of draconian laws and ineffectual institutions. Or maybe in the form of petty politicians, who pick at the scabs of our tragedies and squabble over the charred remains of our country.

Aasma Mojiz

Nottingham, United Kingdom

Published in Dawn, December 19th, 2014