While the western world frets over the falling price of oil and what to buy people for Christmas who already have everything, the cancerous Taliban we know so little about came unleashed in northwest Pakistan today and slaughtered 126 school children, severely wounding another 200.
“Today is a black day,” said Salman Yousafzai. His name probably doesn’t sound familiar. You know him, though. He’s a Peshawar journalist who spent about a month here in Aurora earlier this fall as part of a American-Pakistan journalist exchange program. Aurora Sentinel journalist Quincy Snowdon leaves for Pakistan at the end of January.
You know Salman because he is like so many in Pakistan that make the news here only when insanity boils over in the Middle East. He has a job, a family, a penchant for lame jokes, a great love for home-cooking, and more than anything, he’s driven to free his home from the relentless grip of terrorism and corruption that makes life not just difficult, but deadly. Like millions of others there, life in Pakistan for Salman is about fighting the good fight.
But not today. Today is about reeling from horror. Today is about rethinking a world that could produce this kind of cold, aching carnage. Today is about 300 children in Peshawar, the northwest Pakistan city that has been plagued by murderous criminals for years now.
When Salman was here, he told us gripping, horrifying stories of rampant kidnappings and blackmailing in his home town. His job is to cover the daily murders and hijackings that are a part of life in a city desperate for help to make the madness stop. Not only do denizens fight against sadists like the Taliban and other criminals burrowed into surrounding hills that push against even greater madness in Afghanistan, but they must fight the often corrupt police and military that’s supposed to protect them.
Salman said it’s common for police or military at checkpoints meant to keep terrorists out of the city to take bribes to let them in whenever they want. Each day, innocent people are threatened with kidnappings or worse, it’s a daily life of extortion for God only knows why.
But this. This is unlike anything Salman and Peshawar’s terrorized residents have ever seen. It’s unlike anything almost anyone has ever seen.
How could anyone — even Taliban, who have a deep-seated greed for unspeakable and irrational terror — agree among themselves to plot and carry out such a callous and monstrous plan against a school full of children?
For years, the leaders of Peshawar have begged the national government for credible, effective forces to prevent just such an atrocity from taking place. Today, after more than 300 children were gunned down dead or badly wounded, the prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, “rushed” to the town to show his support, news sources there report. If he actually supported the beaten victims of Peshawar, if any of us actually supported the people there, such a feat of madness couldn’t have happened.
But while the cameras focus on Sharif and the seemingly endless bloody bodies and wounded children, Taliban relished the carnage as some sort of victory. They murdered children who were considered “lucky” in Peshawar. The children were fortunate because they could afford to go to a school that actually had a school to go to. There were books and real teachers. There was a hired security to keep them safe from madness like this. Less “lucky” are the tens of thousands of Peshawar children who go to “school” in the streets, where a teacher might have one book to hold in front of an entire class for instruction. These children are ripe for random acts of terror.
But not today. Today, they went home unharmed. Their parents will probably keep them from school for weeks, maybe even months. Would you send your child to school after such a heinous act?
And in that way, the Taliban wins. With the blood of more than 300 children, they’ll keep tens of thousands of children from learning to read, to name the planets, to discover that there’s a world beyond Peshawar that worries about its weight and Christmas lists, rather then worrying about being kidnapped or killed.
But not today. Today, the world will ache for Peshawar, and some will even talk big about helping the area clean out terrorist vermin. But the price of oil will slide or spike, we’ll be upended by finding out that coffee or diet soda is killing us, and Peshawar will be left to itself to fight against an army of evil we can only read about. And dozens of children will die. Just like today.
Thanks Mr. Perry for writing on this and for your kind words. There are no more elders, no more “next”generations, and no more youngsters to feel their growth and their present. No one seems safe. Sandwiched among the deadly hunger game among crony capitalists, both decorated and not; and their proxies. Who else would have even thought of plotting for this massacre? and who else would have survived the wounds of the last forty years, Is that not enough? Is their any limit?
Pakistan has been funding and protecting the Taliban for years. That is who they deploy against India on their eastern frontier. This is what you call blowback. Hopefully Pakistan will wake up and cleanse their country of this evil.
Americans should consider this attack (occurred at a school on a military base) and the Beslan attack. Our southern border is wide open. Remember this when you consider security at our schools.
Yeah that southern border to Pakistan has always been trouble. What aboot the northern border which seems like a much easier border for terrorist to cross. So much fear mongering.
You are an imbecile.
You’re a fear mongering a hole.
Just ignore him.
Good point ez. Fear mongering is right.
Good article, Mr. Perry.