It started with the first century Jewish Zealots-Sicarii and was employed by Hassan as-Sabbah’s Hashashins. The targets, and the victims, are random, innocents and non-combatants. It has been used by nationalists in the struggle for independence and secession and by religiously inspired groups for fighting what they perceive as holy wars. It has changed the way we do air travel and governments monitor us. It rocked Pakistan during the reign of sectarian terror in the 1990s, but that is overshadowed by the more than 30,000 lives lost during the last decade. We all know what terrorism is.

I.

In the introduction to her acclaimed book, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, Jessica Stern feels it necessary enough to lay down a simple thesis that seems difficult for many naïve people in the politically charged atmosphere in the West, especially the US, to understand. That to understand and study the resentments and grievances of the people involved in terrorism does not mean one sympathises with that cause. Her struggle to be able to empathise and understand the world from the eyes of the terrorists she interviewed is perfectly understandable. She describes terrorists not as people who do “wrong” but people “who commit atrocities”. Her study included interviews of militant anti-abortionists and right wing cults in the US, violent militants in Palestine, Indonesia, Pakistan, Israel and across the religious and international spectra. A New York Times review of the book noted that “nothing she finds leads the reader to suppose that any of the religious faiths is inherently more prone to violence than the other.”

II.

Early morning on November 19, 1995, two Suicide Vehicle Born Improvised Explosive Device (SVBIED) attacks struck the Embassy of Egypt in Islamabad. Carried out by the Ayman al-Zawahiri lead Egyptian al-Jihad terrorist organisation, it was the first suicide bombing in Pakistan and the casualties included an Egyptian diplomat, Egyptian security guards and Pakistani policemen.

In the years to come, hundreds more would follow, mutilating Pakistani civilians and security personnel.

III.

In at least four cities, lawyers recently lead funeral prayers for Osama bin Laden. These were the very same black coats who led a secular movement of restoration of the Chief Justice and removal of a dictator barely years ago. The floor of the National Assembly and the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Assembly have become tainted with the recital of prayers for Osama bin Laden from the members of the JUI-F (whose Taliban and al Qaeda sympathising leader has himself survived two recent suicide bombing assassination attempts). On May 2, one TV host and his guest looked visibly distraught as if they had lost a dear one in OBL. A mass murderer was transformed into a hero by many. They face no legal troubles for such actions.

The ideological leader of mass terrorism being praised and glorified in a country where T-shirts with his face were popular before crackdown in early 2002, should not be surprising. After all, most of us did drop a five- or ten-rupee note in the donation boxes that various “jihadi tanzeemen” used to bring out after Friday prayers or put at the local grocery store during the ’90s. Not only were we funding terrorism back then, it came around and bit us in the back finally. As you sow, so shall you reap.

IV.

Victimisation can lead to paradoxical gratitude. Those who carry out a heinous act by ensuring availability of only the perpetrator’s perspective and exhibiting the ability to kill at will can in some cases create circumstances where victims not only develop sympathy for the perpetrators, but express dependence and loyalty with them too. Named after a 1973 bank robbery-hostage incident in Stockholm, this psychological phenomenon has captured the imagination of media across the world, especially after heiress Patricia Hearst’s abduction and subsequent participation in the activities of the left wing militant Symbionese Liberation Army.

The victim-captor relationship need not be restricted to one in a post-robbery or kidnapping hostage taking scenario. It can, perhaps, be extended to a far bigger scale. I would hypothesise that a large section of our society today suggest from a Societal Stockholm Syndrome and our captors are the alphabet soup of terrorist organisations. Fear and terror have instilled a hope survival mechanism and rationalising the actions of terrorists is no longer an oddity.

A large percentage of our population is collectively sympathising with them, trying to defend their actions as some sort of response to global oppression and ill-advised policies. In their desire to express opposition to the global war on terror, what they deem to be persecution of Islam, the policies of the United States, the “west” in general and people they blame for the shambolic state of affairs in Pakistan, we see unelected politicians, self-styled analysts, columnists, anchors and darlings of the idiot-box go to unimaginable lengths and nearly defend the activities of the purveyors of evil and destruction (although the far left wing can be often seen sympathising with the terrorists in their narratives of imperialism too). The right wing bend of the media is more than self-evident, and in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden, he was labeled as a saviour, a freedom fighter and liberator by many opinion writers across the country. It was as if Osama was not the most recognisable evil man to have lived after Adolf Hitler, but a noble, pious man fighting for good. The memory of the thousands murdered by al Qaeda could not have been mutilated in a worse fashion.

In the words of India’s famous cop KPS Gill, who oversaw the fight against insurgency in Punjab:

“It is nonsense to talk about the ‘will of the people’ under the shadow of the gun. There is, in fact, a "societal Stockholm Syndrome", a pattern of submission, resignation, acceptance and eventual justification that becomes a necessary survival strategy under extreme, lawless and pervasive threat. Terrorism – even by small but well-armed, and especially externally supported groups – has the capacity to produce, in large masses of men, a widespread belief in the futility of resistance and a loss of faith in the state and its agencies and their ability to protect life, liberty and property. These patterns of thought gradually create a denial among the people of their own fear, and an increasing justification of the terrorist cause. However outrageous the extremist demands may be, the "logic" of these demands begins to find sympathetic echoes among the people, the media and the "secular" or "moderate" leadership as well. Gradually, this is also translated into an increasing willingness to provide, at least, non-terrorist support to the activities of the terrorists – feeding, harbouring, sympathetic bandhs, dharnas and protests, the creation and operation of Front Organisations that take up the "cause" of the "human rights" of arrested terrorists, etc. To believe that these are the acts of a free people, willingly undertaken, is to utterly and completely misunderstand the very nature of terrorism”

This was stated in the context of India, ours is somewhat different, the scale of terrorism far wider, and there are little concerns about human rights abuses as far as handling terrorism is concerned – although that is not a thought that should be cherished either.

V.

Ten years into officially joining the War on Terror, and nearly two decades into fighting domestic terrorism of various kinds, we have public debate in the newspapers and vocal electronic media being defined by an assorted group of people who insist that terrorism can vanish by the simple act of declaring the war is not ours to fight. After the over-abused slogans of “corruption” and “the government has failed”, the most common term on our televisions and in our papers has to be “this is not our war”. It is a populist means of appeasing the sensibilities of the ones who are lied to and fed misguided narratives, both by the state and the media itself. When was the last time anybody witnessed a sensible, rational, well-articulated and factual debate on terrorism on the media? Have you ever seen a documentary or an extended report on any terrorist group active in Pakistan? Rarely any newspaper report has ever divulged into the operational details of various terrorist organisations uncovered by intelligence and during interrogations. The fact is that these don’t sell. Informed debates on terrorism that show the depth of the cancer of terrorism, the spread of extremism and the inner demon within are not easy to swallow. They challenge the inherent assumptions we have about our society and especially the sensitive topic of religion. From Hizb-ut-Tehrir to Zaid Hamid followers, one can identify a broad base of youngsters who end up sympathising with and acting as apologists for those who commit mass murders.

What has happened is that we have developed a disease of blaming others for our own problems. We have nearly become a public hostage to terrorists. Our public debate on counter-terrorism is occupied by calls of declaring that the war is not ours and ostracising ourselves from the global alliance against terror. Still unable to grasp the extent of radicalisation in our society, we give primetime coverage to apologists who sometimes even say that the terrorists are just misguided people who can be talked to. The history of talking, friending and negotiating with Abdullah and Baitullah Mehsud is available to those who want to read (XI Corps Commander, Lt Gen Safdar Hussain famously declared in 2005 that Baitullah was “not a rebel but a patriotic citizen and a soldier of this country”).

A darling of the television (however little his vote-bank and non-existent assembly seats he may have), Imran Khan organises protests against drone strikes which he blames as the single biggest reason for the spread of terrorism. That might be an arguable statement but to tarnish the memory of the deceased by saying that "suicide bombings are a tool of the weak used to attack oppressors” cannot be justified. In just one sentence, he converted mass terrorism that kills hundreds when a 14-year-old fed tales of hate blows himself in the middle of market into a tool of liberation that the persecuted have in their righteous struggle. Was my class fellow Ghazan Khan an oppressor? Were the hundreds of young children killed in attacks across markets cruel tormentors?

I would like to believe, hope, that 30 years from now, we would have achieved the goal of establishing and maintaining peace in our country. What troubles me however, is that we might still be debating whether it was “our war” or not and we would still be unsure about who killed our people, and why. Perhaps “whether it was our war or America's war?" will be as divergent and hotly debated a question as "Did Jinnah want a secular state?". That, for me, will be the greatest tragedy of the age of terror, that we will have lost thousands of lives and suffered immense economic and social losses but might still not be able to identify the evil that struck us and why it did.

Introspection is a difficult thing, especially in inward looking societies but a mangled history that apologizes for evil is difficult to digest as a future that might hold for us. The canonisation of Osama bin Laden, of Abdul Rashid Ghazi, of the living, Sufi Muhammad, Hafiz Saeed, Masood Azhar and their likes is a frightening thought, but it is the reality.

*Societal Stockholm Syndrome was first hypothesized and explained in the case of women suffering from captivity borne sympathy towards men in “Loving to survive: Sexual terror, Men's violence, and Women's lives” by Graham, Rawlings and Rigsby.

Shahid Saeed likes to read history and tweet at @shahidsaeed