Crazy in Peshawar

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a common response in soldiers who have battled in combat zones, particularly arenas when enemy strikes are constantly imminent. We’ve seen movies about returning soldiers, wrapped in this theme, for just about every modern war our nation has fought. Vietnam and Iraq are the most recent examples, but less focus is addressed to the impact on the civilians whose lives are defined by turmoil, death, destruction and explosive violence. And even less attention has been paid to those cross-border Pakistani regions where our soldiers have not often crossed, but where drones and internal strife take as many casualties as in the active combat zones in present-day Afghanistan.

In Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), where Peshawar is the main city, men walk the streets carrying machine guns or rifles with straps of bullets across their chest. Peshawar has become the city of lost souls. “Thousands of men, women and children [who minds have been destroyed by incessant violence] wander Peshawar's anarchic streets. They are the forgotten victims of the war between Pakistan's army and Islamic militants. The city is where the mad come for solace, pouring in from war-torn regions of the Pakistani frontier and even farther afield in search of a disturbingly scarce resource: psychiatric aid… Most find little relief in Peshawar, where the streets are lined with barbed wire and punctuated by checkpoints, and where bomb blasts are an almost weekly occurrence.” Sphere.com (January 10^th)

A doctor at the Shafique Psychiatric Clinic, a local specialized hospital, estimates that as many as 70% of the population of NWFP suffer mental illness by reason of the violence. Depression, anxiety, agoraphobia are everywhere. It is a land where might makes right, where religious zeal creates emotional calluses that allows vicious attacks with little concern for any semblance of innocents and non-combatants; everyone is expendable for the “cause.” Bad things happen to good people every day.

Sphere.com: “Incessant violence is the reason. In the NWFP alone, more than 400 people have been killed in terrorist attacks since October 2009, nearly matching the total number of civilian deaths in the province for all of 2004. A truck bomb killed nearly 100 people at a New Year's Day volleyball tournament in Lakki Marwat near the South Waziristan tribal agency, where an ongoing military operation has prompted the Pakistani Taliban to unleash a wave of attacks across the country…. Yet as violence escalates in Pakistan, there has not been any effort to confront the psychological effects of it. According to [a local doctor], there are fewer than 30 qualified psychiatrists in the NWFP and a mere 250 psychiatric beds available for a population of more than 25 million. ‘But that's just the NWFP,’ he adds. ‘We're also dealing with patients coming over from the border in Afghanistan. There are no facilities there for them, so they come here to Peshawar.’”

Imagine a 12-year-old child being told by a Taliban operative that if he fails to plant a bomb, his family will be slaughtered. Or children so terrified by not having any means to retaliate that they join one faction or another just to get a gun in their hands and soldiers at their back. “Children are some of the worst affected by the violence in NWFP, says Dr. Sayed Mohammad Sultan, head of the psychiatry department at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar. ‘We are seeing a lot of children suffering from phobic anxiety disorders. They are in a constant state of fear – of Taliban attacks and from seeing dead bodies hanging in trees.’ The long-term effects could be devastating, he warns.”

A war without end… America caught in the middle, taking its share of innocents with each attack. Militants without conscience, believing that God has sanctified their killing and maiming, raining terror down on their own people. This is the daily lot of millions… trapped in the only homeland they have ever known. It is a part of war that none of us should ever forget.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder how human beings can do this to each other in the name of God.