In a recent spate of bloodshed, militants ruthlessly massacred nearly a dozen government officials in the Zurmat district of southern Paktia province. Militancy in this country, through all the decade, has drenched entire Afghanistan with blood. There is hardly a place where the insurgent Taliban haven’t spilled Afghan blood. When the nation is receiving coffins and dead bodies from all sides, militants have increased their deadliest attacks and activities. President Ashraf Ghani, has ordered probe into the carnage of a dozen government officials as they were found shot dead in various parts of the district the other day.
Editorial: Insurgency and gruesome carnage in Paktia’s Zurmat
Officials in Paktia called them civilians, but the Taliban claimed they were security personnel. Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid says their fighters killed eight policemen and an intelligence operative in Zurmat district. He adds that they were captured on their way home. A statement released by Presidential Palace said the government employees were travelling in a vehicle in Zurmat when they were intercepted and mercilessly gunned down. For those who love this country they were true sons of the soil and true Afghans. Whether a civilian dies or a government official in this ongoing war, it means this nation loses a son, a brother, a father, an Afghan, and above all a good citizen. Therefore this gruesome bloodshed immediately should be stopped which is going on in the name of jihad, government officials and foreign agents. If someone works with an international organization, it doesn’t make them foreign agents rather they are Afghan citizens, who want to earn decently and put their share in the development of national economy being responsible citizens.
Those gone angry should rethink their war. If they really want to serve this country, liberate it from the clutches of grinding poverty and foreign intrigues, they need to repudiate violence, work for the development of this country. If they want to be in the first row, they may join politics as politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed, but unfortunately the insurgent Taliban have adopted the latter—though the world knows they are in war for politics. The merchants of bloodshed, intolerance and hatred, one thing needs to be made clear is that righteousness triumphs over evil always, but yes it takes longer, really longer, sometimes years but righteousness prevails. They cannot keep the nation in dark for longer. A day is coming when there will a new dawn, a dawn of hope, change and development. Confidence is taking roots in this society; education has been on the rise, political acumen on the bloom, harmony in progress, and the propaganda of the Taliban on a sharpest decline.
All these things make us confident about a new age and a new tomorrow. We the people of Afghanistan have found the way to peacefully coexist under one flag, one identity, and those who don’t let us to live in a hatred-free world, without the fear of being killed, are our enemies. If they have failed in living peacefully with us they could live somewhere outside Afghan frontiers, and they have no right to call themselves true representatives of Afghanistan while living in a country that peruses proxy war in Afghanistan. The insurgents have kept their land as a pawn into the hands of their lords, but we will not let them to succeed in their odious game. They should be ashamed of what they have had done to this nation at the behest of others.