On 24th April at around 1700 hrs that I took this picture of my two sons responding to their faith faithfully at the lawns of Orange Lake Resort at Khan Pur in KPK that they were surprisingly followed by other children while I read the book “Directorate S”, on my kindle that Honourable Col. Tahir Butt carried for me as a gift all the way from England. I will be eternally grateful to him for the gift
While on our way back that I got the sad news of a bomb blast in Swat resulting into high number of casualties that was vociferously condemned by the locals that the administration attributed to be a mishap than any terrorist attack that left me wondering have we lost our faith in our law enforcers and their honesty and sincerity to guard ordinary citizens and rule of law as opposed to them being suspected for safeguarding rule of the few that if true is a serious development as faith once shattered is neither ever followed or easily regained something that I never wish for any institution of my beloved homeland.
Meanwhile, I would take the liberty to reproduce the excerpt from this very book published in 2018 by a renowned American scholar and academician Honourable Steve Coll who if bluntly honest about the facts as he researched by him as opposed to what media propagated to the West regarding the wild East inhabited by beasts than humans capable to harmoniously co – exist in peace, is then a food for thought to our national conscience.
For many Americans and Europeans who have lived and worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after 2001, it is frustrating to hear discourse back home holding that Afghanistan and Pakistan are lands of “warring tribes”or “endless conflicts.”The historical record belies such clichés. Independent Afghanistan was impoverished but peaceful and stable, untroubled by radical international violence, for many decades of the twentieth century, prior to the Soviet invasion of . And for all of Pakistan’s dysfunction, state-sponsored radicalism, and glaring economic inequality, it remains a modernizing nation with a vast, breathtakingly talented middle class and diaspora. If the army and I.S.I. did not misrule Pakistan, in alliance with corrupt political cronies, the country’s potential to lift up its own population and contribute positively to the international system might today rival India’s. The region’s “endless conflicts”are not innate to its history, forms of social organization, or cultures. They are the outgrowth of specific misrule and violent interventions.
They reflect political maneuvering, hubristic assumptions, intelligence operations, secret diplomacy, and decision making at the highest levels in Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington that have often been unavailable to the Afghan, Pakistani, American, and international publics. This is the story of Directorate S. By Steve Coll
