Peshawar bleeds

TheNews
There was a depressing, appalling, familiarity about the news that a car bomb had exploded in the busy Khyber bazaar area of Peshawar around noon on Friday. Friday; a time of prayer and peaceful reflection and celebration of the Muslim faith across the country, but seems to be the favourite day for those whose deadly business is to terrorise us. At the time of writing there are at least 42 dead and 54 injured with an estimated twenty of those injured being in critical condition. The numbers of dead and injured will inevitably rise. Rescue services are calling it the 'worst blast we have ever seen'. Interior Minister Rehman Malik was swift to condemn the atrocity and said that the long-promised operation in Waziristan was 'imminent'. Local business men speaking on private TV channels spoke of their frustration and anger at the way in which their lives and livelihoods were being destroyed and of their desire to leave the city as attempting to carry on business was pointless – and carried with it an unacceptable level of risk. There is understandable confusion about the type of device that caused this carnage, but the opinion seems to be that it was a suicide bomb, probably carried in a car which may have been moving at the time of the blast and the Khyber bazaar may not have been the intended target.

There will be entirely predictable statements that there has been a security lapse or failure and this that or the other agency has failed in its duty to protect the public. The bombers should have been spotted at any one of the numerous checkpoints that ring the city. Intelligence should have been better. CCTV cameras should have recorded them…all will be cited as a failure of the systems set up to protect the citizenry. All will miss the point that NWFP is a war-zone, not merely the site of what may euphemistically be termed an 'insurgency' – but an area where a fully-fledged war is being fought. It is a war fought by combatants who in one case may have signed the Geneva Convention on the conduct of warfare but have little care for it; and in the other the Geneva Convention is something they have never heard of. Civilian casualties are as much a part of the war in NWFP as were the thousands of refugees who died when the Allies firebombed Dresden in the Second World War or the civilians who were fried to a crisp in Hiroshima.

This is a war being fought with a ferocity that is increasing by the day and short of putting the entire city on lock-down there is probably little the civil or military authorities can do to stop the carnage. Realistically, there will be intelligence successes that we may not hear about, and operations that net the bombers and terrorists, but there will always be one that gets through. Such is the nature of warfare. This is a war that we cannot afford to lose no matter the attrition. It is our war, no matter how it gets 'dressed up' for political purposes. Ours to win and ours to lose. Now is the time for us to stand against the bombers and the gunmen, to expose them, reveal their dark plots and evil designs. More of us will die doing so, but stand we must.