OK - How do you tell a people to lay down their arms which is a 'Way of Life' for them. Who pick up the arms the moment they drop from their mother's womb and cling to it till you bury them in their graves, You are asking them to give up way too much.
Nobody is asking them to physically surrender their weapons, they can do whatever they want with their weapons, except for attacking innocent human beings. Its the symbolic laying of arms, meaning to leave the path of confrontation with the govt. No one up til now has asked them to lay their personal weapons.
As for the STATE - MUSHARRAF was the STATE for you when it all started. Did you people listen or obey your STATE?
The strikes, the violence, the unrest, the bloodshed all for the sake to drive out that STATE to bring in another STATE - the visible face of which is Zardari. This FORUM itself is witness of how much you respect and obey this STATE authority, and I am not going beyond to prove this point.
Your comments on this STATE AUTHORITY ring truly hollow and I can see that you have another supporter here cheering you on, who claims to be a Patriot who loves every inch of his country - S. Waziristan does not fall within the very inch that he measures.
Musharaf was removed for the misadventures he did in the last leg of his tenure, not for the mess we are in right now. Removing him did not meant to surrender in front of the TTP by bringing in the new govt, so the policy to engage the terrorist had to continue either through peace talks or through war. Zardari is disliked by everyone of us, but he is not just the state, there are other elements making up a state, due to which the state machinery is rolling. The recent developments does show that he is not running the show 100%.
Don't lecture us on Patriotism by sitting somewhere where you can't feel the fire in which we are burning nor knowing about the ground realities or even knowing about FATA & who we are fighting with & what they want in reality.
Your arguments about Pakistan & we being wrong about the policies would have been correct, had you known about the one we are fighting & what in reality is their agenda. We are not fighting on behalf of US now, it has now become our own war for survival with organizations who are challenging the existence of Pakistan not due to support to US or taking a U turn against the Taliban, rather for their own personal & foreign backed agenda to destabilize Pakistan.
If this be the state of Think Tankers here who provide Guidelines and Direction to your Policy Makers, how can anyone expect anything different than what is happening to your country.
As i said, where you are, you are in no position to lecture us, as we are the ones who are facing the fire & we have to decide how to extinguish it not by taking dictation from US or from people like you who have no understanding of the ground realities. Reading international newspapers, articles on net or TV programs won't make u someone to comment or lecture us, its we who are sitting here in our cities, hearing & watching bomb blasts, seeing human body parts, hearing the artillery fire from few hundred meters away or clutching our little babies & running for cover to get them to safety at the sound of rockets landing nearby. We are the ones who know what to do & how to handle them.
Being a Pashtun myself, belonging to the same area from where this menace started, having gone through the pain of lost ones, i do know these barbarians are not the ones who will understand through dialogue as past is a testament to it, they need the same language in which they talk, then they will understand.
Its very sad to hear such comments from people like you who have the luxury of sitting somewhere safe & talking about Islam or that Pakistan did wrong, when everyone knows no one else, no muslim country is gonna come & help us if we get into problem.
Tomorrow if India attacks your parent country, do you think anyone else will come to support you, NO WAY, or will you guys surrender ?? It will be you & your countrymen who will decide how to safe their own arses, no matter how much you have to take some damage yourself with bad decisions before reaching the goal decided earlier.