Bullies & Appeasement

The Mullah of Swat, who had created the the defacto Emirate of Swat by controlling the villages, with the help of his private army, has disappeared.

He vanished, when the military started to deploy in Swat.

When will this government learn that bullies, who thrive on intimidation, threats and force cannot be appeased unendlessly?

Pakistan's end as a sovereign state, should it happen, will not happen with a bang, as most fear, but with a whimper. The offical policy of appeasment has seen the writ of the government become even a more vulgar joke than even the one about the constitutionalism in Pakistan. Terror flourishes in a vacuum and when the government is too scared to enforce it's authority and is too busy and eager to make peace, with the bullies, from a postion of weakness; it will always be the ultimate loser.

Appeasement is a discredited policy and in the last century alone, appeasement cost the lives of nearly 50 million people. Terror and those who practice it and preach it and encourage it, cannot be appeased. Terror and its executioners have to be confronted and defeated and the menance of terror, will not be defeated with mere speeches and hopes of reformed behaviors on the part of the terrorists.

Pakistan is a frontier town in the Old West of the American movies and like those lawless towns, the writ of law will only and eventually be established by defeating and severely punishing those who break it. Bullies in Pakistan have to be confronted, because basically they are moral cowards and when confronted with stark Hobbesian choices, will favor self-preservation over their so-called principles.

In the twenty-first century, as the world moves onwards ahead, Pakistan is a witness to the Age of Feudalism. The nation is being divided up into small parts of private fiefs, with their own writs of personalities. Islamabad can be rightly blamed for this situation, because in Islamabad; the seat of power has always been a more important consideration than the writ of the state.

Evil prospers not because good men do it, but because they do nothing to stop it and this was said nearly three hundred years ago by an English parliamentrian named Edmund Burke.

This same thought was repeated by the Reprsentative of Rhode Island, on the midnight of July 3/4, 1776, when he voted in favor of the independence of the American colonies. He knew that the people of Rhode Island, who had elected him, did not favor independence and he, loyal to the wishes of his constituents, opposed the declaration of independence. He opposed it despite the incidents of Concord and Lexington, but in the end; he said some times the elected leaders of the people should act against the wishes of the people, if they believe that the people are wrong and their wishes, will generally cause more harm than good. If they so believe, he told John Adams, then they have a right to vote their conscience and not according to the politics of the those who elected them.

In other words, history judges those as statesmen, who defy the conventional wisdom because they believe it is wrong, when all others around them do not and history judges those as politicans, who act according to conventional wisdoms because they do not have the character to stand up against what is patentally wrong.

In this land of opportunism, only Justice Rana Bhagwan Das, who voted "his conscience" stands apart and stand together in the proud line of justices in Pakistan, who voted for the law over expediency.

All these justices, who put Pakistan first and the supremacy of the law above all else, were all non-Muslim justices.

Do we, in Pakistan, have men and women of conscience, who can stand up against the conventional wisdom and oppose bullies and their terror methods?

First, let us answer this question and then maybe, we can then answer the question of how to restore the writ of the state in Pakistan.