The rest of the world may be familiar with a colonial mud-walled Tank as the place where a Lieutenant Governor of British Punjab, Sir Henry Durand, fatally hurt himself while passing on an elephant under a gateway in 1870, but for us in Pakistan it is nothing but a tank filled with human blood.
Over the last year or so the city of Tank has suffered successive waves of bloody violence, resulting in widespread deaths and destruction. It has come under brigade-level attacks by private armies of warlords and fanatics. Even the long spells of curfew have failed to help restore peace and tranquillity in and around the city.
The latest attack on the house of Khyber Agency Political Agent, Ameeruddin Khan, in a village near Tank, however, would stand out as an example of extreme savagery. Over a hundred heavily armed marauders invaded the official's house on Wednesday night and killed 13 persons who included two women.
The injured included two school-going nephews of the political agent, who was not present at his house when it came under a massive attack. The assailants used rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and assault rifles during their operation that lasted for over an hour.
As to who perpetrated this heinous crime, at first the fingers were pointed in the direction of Baitullah Masood, a militant commander of Waziristan. But he has denied his involvement. Some people say the killings could have been a sequel to the sectarian rivalry involving political agent's brother Mufti Attiqur Rehman, who lives in Karachi and styles himself as a 'pir' and has a number of followers.
Mufti Attiqur Rehman is also publisher of a weekly which is said to be generally slanted against Talibanisation, which is spilling over from tribal areas to Tank and other settled districts. There could be other versions, we do not know yet. But, certainly, the NWFP is currently caught in a vortex of murderous violence. Only a fortnight back, on May 15, a deadly bomb blast killed 21 and wounded a lot more in the heart of old Peshawar city.
On April 28, Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao miraculously escaped a suicide-bombing attack at his public meeting in Charsadda which claimed 23 lives and injured 45. In January, 15 persons including a police DIG were killed in another suicide bombing attack in Peshawar city.
And in between, scores of terrorist incidents took place in the province including a rocket attack on the residence of the leader of opposition in the National Assembly, Maulana Fazlur Rehman.
NWFP is singularly unlucky in facing such terrible incidents of violence, but the situation in other parts of Pakistan is only slightly better. Violence is equally rampant in Quetta. What happened on May 12 when Karachi, the country's largest city, witnessed unprecedented mayhem that left over 40 people dead. The polarisation in polity may be gauged from the fact that the government was not prepared to launch probe as to what had happened.
Given that severe political polarisation is already underway, in the wake of reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and is likely to accentuate in the run-up to elections, there is a need to give a serious thought to the problem of ubiquitous violence. Of course some of it is chronic, sectarian-based and some of it is triggered from abroad, but a considerable part of it is indigenous and, therefore, amenable to control.
For that the government has to be pro-active because maintaining law and order is its primary responsibility of the government. It should prioritise the issues that incite violence and tackle them as students do arithmetic sums and not by shooting from the hip.
The government should also build bridges with the opposition, shedding hubris if that stands in the way, by enlarging the commonality of interest. All this has to be done because at stake is not the prestige of a single individual or the government but the future of our country, the country called Pakistan.