Pakistan, or more importantly the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a religious nation, is being torn apart by … religion. Lawfare’s Rishabh Bhandari and Cody M. Poplin report on just one facet of the deliberate disintegration:
Monday’s [bombing] victims were not a random assortment of civilians waiting for medical care, but instead represented Quetta’s liberal elite. More than 200 lawyers had congregated to mourn the murder of Bilal Anwar Kasi, the president of the Balochistan Bar Association, who had been fatally shot earlier that day. A number of journalists had also arrived to cover Kasi’s death when the bomb detonated.
One surviving lawyer Barkhurdar Khan lamented that an entire generation of lawyers in Balochistan—Pakistan’s poorest province and the home of a deep-seated insurgency—had been wiped out. “Everyone who has given me a lift home is dead except for one person,” Khan said. Lawyers throughout the country boycotted court proceedings on Tuesday. …
But lawyers and judges are not targeted solely out of revenge for their role in prosecuting and sentencing terrorists. Instead, Pakistani society is witnessing a systematic attempt to undermine the integrity of its judicial system, drive courts from restive areas, and implement the Taliban’s own form of rough but relatively efficient justice in areas it seeks to control. A Pakistani Taliban spokesman said following an attack three months ago, “Pakistani courts give decisions against the laws revealed by Allah” and suggested that undermining Pakistan’s court system is a central component of establishing a state under the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia law.
It’s not hard to apply the lessons learned from the behaviors of the English Royal family to the plight of Pakistan today, as I detailed in this Pillar (see the section on English History) but has no doubt been done much better elsewhere: as the members of the various sects fall to fighting with each other, their small differences become magnified by the lens of Faith, and a nation which one might think should exist in easy harmony and solidarity has, instead, become a victim of the trivial differences of humanity. Each sect exists to climb to power, and then to direct its fruits to its members, buoyed by the certain faith that God is on their side. So are barbarous crimes sanctified, so do the winners fall to fighting amongst themselves, as God backs each individually, and so do the innocent fall to the sacred knife of the righteous, the power hungry, the lost.
American fundamentalists, who weep for more power of their own, should soberly assess this lesson from the far side of the world, and perhaps placing God on the sidelines while they reassess how they select leaders and what will serve America best. Even as a secular nation we have a bloody religious history, and we’d best hug our secular, tolerant nature tighter as we continue our tightrope walk.
