Adaner Usmani

All told, one has to credit the AI researchers for being uncompromising in their denunciation of army abuses. This has always been the honest liberal’s central virtue: unremitting defense of everyone’s right to have rights. Years ago, in his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon observed acerbically that those who never tire of talking of Man seem to have no qualms murdering real men “everywhere they find them.” The recent report by Amnesty International (AI) on human rights abuses in northwest Pakistan—promptly branded a ‘pack of lies’ by the Pakistani military—is a testament to the enduring truth of that indictment. The military’s much-ballyhooed 2009 offensives against the Pakistani Taliban were accompanied by very public grandstanding about the Pakistani state’s mission in the tribal regions. The task, we were told, was historic: to seize and civilize a region that had been captured by villainous obscurantists. Barbarians had amassed at the gates. “60 miles from Islamabad,” screamed the New York Times, and in counterinsurgency ‘expert,’ David Kilcullen’s frantic assessment, the country risked total collapse. Famously, even elements of our progressive intelligentsia threw up their hands and fell in line, entrusting the ‘battle for civilization’ to GHQ. Three years later, […]