It is perhaps time to count those who suffered torture and either died as a consequence of that torture or were deliberately killed by the law enforcement agencies that operate in the name of the state.

This report card of torture and body count must begin from the day the country was created but it must take into account the recent wave of extrajudicial killings that persistently take place in different parts of the country under different pretexts. They are done at the behest of police, mostly in the name of police encounters, and also by the paramilitary forces, be they Rangers or FC.

There are some that qualify as ‘extrajudicial’ because you can actually see the physical body that was deprived of life. Others don’t even make it to any data sheet and remain in a domain that is strangely opaque: they go missing only to reappear in gunny bags or are killed in state operations against terrorism.

The latest case of torture and death in custody is obviously that of the MQM worker Aftab Ahmed in Karachi, since we do not yet know who killed Khurram Zaki, the rights campaigner, a few days after him. Somebody posted on Twitter, "Let Aftab Ahmed’s brutal killing be the last". Our Special Report today is a reaffirmation of this wish, to restate how quick fixes like these only backfire and brutalise that particular segment of society instead of promising any reform.

We note that there is little data available on how rampant this cycle of violence is. But whatever is available only confirms that this is no solution. In Karachi, for instance, where all the stakeholders decided to restore peace to a dysfunctional city by whatever means, the number of target killings decreased in the same proportion as the extrajudicial killings increased. Those with some vision predict that this is not a permanent way out.

Yes there are problems in the criminal justice system that includes both the police and the judiciary. But that calls for a reform of another kind. The impunity for killing of hardened criminals, nationalists, political opponents, militants of various kinds outside the legal domain is not just inhumane, it is counterproductive as well.

In order to bypass the hurdles characteristic of the regular judicial course, we in this country have created special laws and parallel systems and then misused them endlessly. The latest in the series was the setting up of military courts and the approval came from the country’s parliament.

In our Special Report today, we have tried to assess the futility of internal investigations for both torture and extrajudicial killings. We have also seen how Pakistan has gone back on its international treaty obligations and expressed reservations on many of them, except when it was forced to withdraw them to gain preferential status (GSP Plus) with the European Union.

Let Aftab Ahmed’s brutal killing be the last.