Terror and the human spirit

When terrorists attacked Karachi airport around the stroke of midnight on Sunday night, I was comfortably ensconced on seat 41A of PK 319, along with roughly 200 other passengers headed from Islamabad to Karachi.
Within an hour, we would land at Shaheed Benazirabad (Nawabshah) airport, along with seven other planes. Within three hours after that, all eight planes that had landed at WNS (the three letter code for the airport) were refuelled, and perimeter security at the airport had been heightened. PK 319 would leave Nawabshah at around 630 am, having bid adieu to roughly half the passengers, who chose to disembark at the airport, sans luggage, so they could get to Karachi by road.
The remaining 121 people, including 10 crew members, stayed on board and flew to Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore. That ended, for most of us, the ordeal. Alhamdolillah, we were among the lucky ones.
Over 30 families lost loved ones at Karachi airport, and scores more were attending to injured family members. However, the real object of the terrorists’ attack on Karachi airport was not the lives or bodies of the victims of the attack on Jinnah International Airport. The lives and the injuries and the immediate shock are incidental to the terrorists.
The TTP and its funders and backers, (among whom, there are, almost assuredly several international actors), isn’t interested in the body count that we so assiduously try to manage after an attack. The TTP and its backers and funders are interested in terrorising us, fragmenting us, frightening us, and most of all, isolating and starving us. They are engaged in a brutal and unrelenting long-term campaign to destroy Pakistan. Their greatest ally is not the hope that we are breakable. We are. But we were breakable long before Mangal Bagh or his Fazlullah were even conceived. Their greatest ally is the hope that our spirit is breakable.
Is it? Of this, there is reasonable doubt. Any defence lawyer worth his or her salt knows that in reasonable doubt, hinges the difference between life and death. In the fight against the TTP, the life and death of Pakistan hinges on the degree to which our spirit is breakable. The TTP wants to extinguish the fire that lights up hope and optimism in Pakistan. It has to be said that terrorists have made some really remarkable gains in the seven years since the TTP went into the wholesale business of murder and destruction of the Pakistani spirit. But does it have a real shot at winning? Reasonable doubt.
The big success of the TTP has been in exposing the weakness of our national institutions. Our executive can’t make decisions, and is scared. Our judiciary makes bad decisions all the time, and is also scared. Our military makes decisions without any accountability, and sometimes wastes the fearlessness, bravery and heroism of our jawans and officers. Our bureaucracy is mostly incompetent and savagely self-centred. Our political parties are one-man shows more interested in bequeathing power to those mens’ children than to developing solutions to national and local problems.
Every man, woman and child in Pakistan is a public policy expert because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how bad our state is at doing its job. The TTP’s terrorism and the supporting narratives within and beyond the religious extremism that the TTP feeds on have done more to expose our state than any country or group previously had.
But is bleak and unremitting darkness the only thing in sight for Pakistan? And does this darkness really reflect the facts?
Nawabshah is not an international airport. Its world class runway was built essentially to accommodate the PPP leadership’s appetite for quick in-and-out access to the party’s spiritual and political nerve centre in Sindh. Yet on the night of June 8 and the morning of June 9, that Nawabshah runway helped accommodate eight planes, including the Boeing 777 that I was on, a Qatar Airways flight, an Etihad flight and several other PIA and local airlines.
After each of our planes landed, the Nawabshah ground crew managed parking for each plane, and the planes were refuelled. The outer perimeter of WNS was secured with civilian and military security personnel. Similar measures were taken at all the airports in the country. Islamabad airport was a virtual parking lot that night. So was Lahore.
The TTP succeeded that night in setting a fire that looked much worse than it was. The irresponsible reporters, anchors and citizens that gleefully circulated false reports of several planes being set alight helped the TTP that night. But it didn’t matter. By mid afternoon the airport was open for business again.
The crew on PK 319 was a typical PIA crew. Two of the stewards on the flight described how they were hired (political patronage), another demonstrated limited competence during the less tumultuous part of the flight. When it was clear that a crisis was at hand, they stopped being PIA. They started acting Pakistani. It was something to behold. They handled passengers with compassion, and dignity, and class.
The Airport Security Force, the Rangers, the Pakistan Army jawans, the Sindh Police force, the ground crew at Karachi, and the citizens stuck in the planes and in the lounges. What heroes, all of them. The fighting sons of Pakistan that shot those terrorists dead, and those that lost their lives fighting for this motherland, heroes of stature that words cannot capture.
I’m not trying to romanticise the Karachi attack. It was horrible, and it was entirely preventable. Our national institutions, including intelligence services, need a complete overhaul. But did we need the Karachi attack to tell us this? Wasn’t the attack on Peshawar Airport, or the Bannu jail release, or the PNS Mehran attack, or the Sri Lanka team attack, or the FIA attack, or the Kamra attack, or the Marriott attack enough?
Do we really need another attack to understand that we have a broken set of organisations and institutions that cannot do their jobs? We don’t. We already know this.
Here’s another thing that we know and need to acknowledge. Even in the institutional and organisational wreckage of this nation’s hopes and dream, we are inundated with individual and collective heroism.
On a rare night of successive functionality, PIA disrobed from its usual dysfunction to become marginally competent. The ISPR twitter account went from being predictably tone deaf to being the archetype of message perfection. The Civil Aviation Authority social media feed became alive with spirit. Some politicians, especially those in Islamabad, doused themselves with shameful inaction, but others stayed awake with the nation, on site and trying hard, even if failing, at seeming to be in-charge.
Pakistan’s enemies want us to give up hope. They know we are unparalleled in our ability to self-criticise and reflect. What they don’t know is that, Alhamdolillah, this voracious appetite to criticise ourselves and our state is fuelled by the human spirit for betterment. The TTP and its backers and funders cannot break this spirit. In the days to come, they will try harder and harder.
We should not stop calling a spade a spade, and we won’t. But in the choice between Pakistan and dark, bitter and unending hopelessness, we will choose Pakistan. InshaAllah, forever.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.