FrameTheGlobe, Edge Narrator, and A Poet's Voice
Forty kilometers east, in Paktika province that same night, a religious seminary and a guesthouse were struck. Afghan authorities reported the buildings were empty at the time. The craters were not empty.
This is one side of the ledger.
The other side runs back further and runs deeper. In December 2014, a Pakistani Taliban gunman walked into the Army Public School in Peshawar and killed one hundred and thirty-two children. They were Pashtun children, in a Pashtun city, killed by a Pashtun armed group that Pakistan’s own intelligence apparatus had helped build and then lost control of. In Bajaur, in Swat, in Waziristan, in Kurram, in Bannu, Pakistan’s military fought a counter-insurgency across two decades that displaced millions of its own Pashtun citizens, flattened villages, and produced a generation of internally displaced families who returned to find their homes rubble and their young men radicalized by the experience of watching the state bomb their own neighborhoods. Pakistan counts eighty thousand dead in its war on terror. The overwhelming majority of those dead, soldiers, police, and civilians alike, were Pashtun. They were Pakistani citizens.
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