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No longer were they just tribal men fighting to preserve their way of life; they started dreaming they could convert everyone to it.

When Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle.

Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting? The logic—or its absence—goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him? If the United States is talking to the Afghan Taliban, why can’t we talk to our own Taliban?

he popular narrative in Pakistan holds that the Taliban’s fight is simply a reaction to American drone strikes: it’s a war between American kids sitting in front of LCD screens eating their TV dinners and our own men in the north, who are better Muslims than we are.

Pakistan’s rulers have developed a strange fetish for lionizing its tormenters.

“This is not just the killing of one person,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, said. “It’s the death of all peace efforts.”

As a result, we now have a raging national debate, in which serious-minded journalists are asking even more serious-minded politicians and religious scholars if the godless Soviet soldiers killed by American-funded mujahideen in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties should also be declared martyrs.