To be fair, it is easy to see where this rage is coming from. These attacks have brought terror to the doorstep of the classes which had long divorced and insulated themselves from our very system of politics and governance. Over the years as our governance has declined, or failed to keep pace with our society or economy, all of us learnt to become individual, sovereign republics. We send our children to private schools, get treatment only in private hospitals, have our own security in gated communities, never need to use public transport, even own our own diesel gensets to produce power, and in many parts of the country, arrange our own water supply, either through our own borewells or tankers. Then we suddenly get hit in one area — physical safety, law and order — which is still entirely in the hands of the government. Knowing how thick-skinned our politicians are, and believing all the most horrible stereotypes about them, we see no possibility of changing them. So we now look for desperate measures: compulsory military training, conscription, NSG for every city. The armed forces, we say, are the only institution that can bring about this change. Pakistan has been owned by its army since its creation and see how much worse its law and order is, how the country suffers from daily terror attacks by its own, and how large swathes of its territory are nothing but extension campuses of its most notable contribution to the modern world: a university of jihad.

... contd.