A Piece of the Piecemeal: Peshawar is Paris

Pashtun people are now in the third generation of this war – unprecedented in their historical context, a new condition, in madness such is difficult to recall in memory, one in which innocent blood is consistently mercilessly spilled in the name of rabid ideologies. For the last ten years, Peshawar is as Paris was in the night on Friday – a scene of human slaughter. These rabid ideologies have in the same merciless way soaked every place of social gathering in Peshawar – church, mosque, market, school, and even the tombs of the most celebrated of the Pashtun poets. This is an entirely new condition, and now a global one, which gives every authenticity to the statement of Pope Francis, who has referred to the Paris attacks as “a piece” of the “piecemeal third world war”. There is no doubt that lack of vision and vested interests had induced Western governments in past to play their part in the creation of the Jihadi Frankenstein during the notorious cold war era, when the world lived in continuous fear of a third world war. It is also a plain fact that the so-called Muslim world is ruled by oppressive regimes and intellectually highly backward establishments, while vast tracts of these countries also overrun by radical militants officially called “non-state actors”. In such a sorry state of world affairs, it cannot be overruled that the menace of rabid ideologies cannot plunge world into a third international war. What is required is perhaps more wisdom and science in governments rather than the vested interests of states and state-elites, or perhaps common people would have no place left on earth to feel safe and secure from the terror of radical ideologies.

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