AS Pakistan struggles to free itself from the scourges of militancy, terrorism and extremism that have characterised the past decade and a half, a reckoning of the cost is beginning to take shape.
On Friday, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan released its annual report for 2015, and a between-the-lines reading offers fair food for thought.
On the positive side, partly perhaps as result of the National Action Plan being implemented over the past year (the plan itself was formulated after the grotesque outrage that was the massacre at Peshawar’s Army Public School in December 2014), there has been a decline in the number of incidents of terrorism in the country.
The HRCP records 18 suicide attacks over the course of the year past, a 31pc decline as compared to 2014.
Similarly, the figure for the number of people who have died as a result of violence has also shown a 40pc decrease.
After this, though, the reading becomes grimmer: for example, 58 incidents of sectarian violence were reported during 2015, and mob assaults against religious minorities showed an increase.
Most worryingly in terms of the future course that Pakistan is beginning to set, some 2,108 men and seven women were killed during police ‘encounters’, a euphemism that masks out-and-out extra-judicial killings.
Given the traumatic experience of recent years, this country needs to think long and hard about where it wants to take itself from here.
The choice lies in either taking the easy way out — carrying out extra-judicial killings, implementing the death penalty and allowing closed-door military courts to try persons, including civilians and juveniles, in terrorism-related offences — or having the steel to think of the long term and urgently strengthen the judicial and police prosecution systems.
Without the moral authority of due process, the country is likely to find itself in the midst of a blowback that might prove even harder to counter than the current travails.
Much commitment has been professed by those in positions of political authority to plug the loopholes in Pakistan’s notoriously sluggish justice system, but evidence on the ground is largely noticeable by its absence.
Contrast this with the reality that unless justice is done, and seen to be done in a fair, transparent and accountable manner, the ranks of those who are disillusioned by the state, and who may be tempted to take up arms against it, can only swell.
Published in Dawn, April 4th, 2016