In the mid-1990s, I shared a house with a colleague from Pakistan's Saraiki people.
In those days Pakistan was riven by conflict between the state and the MQM, a party that represented Mohajirs ("migrants") - Muslim Indians who migrated to what is now Pakistan from the time of partition. The government of the late Benazir Bhutto brought a paramilitary force called the Rangers onto the streets of Karachi to combat the MQM, and its supporters were periodically cut down in what the authorities described as "encounters".
![Bloodshed: Relatives mourn over the coffin of Mohammed Ali Khan, 15, after the school massacre in Peshawar.](/web/20161030231745im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/1/2/9/6/k/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.12dmom.png/1419952969768.jpg)
One evening my Saraiki friend brought round a fellow Pakistani - a big, bluff Pashtun. In the 1980s, Pashtuns and Mohajirs had fought each other in brutal turf wars for control of Karachi, and this fellow had clear ideas about the need of the hour.
"You know what Ayub Khan would have done?" he asked, referring to the country's dictator of the 1960s. "You take one out of every 10 Mohajirs and bang" - his fingers made the universal symbol for a gun - "no more MQM problem, hai na [don't you think]?"
![Lost lives: Students hold a vigil for the victims of the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar.](/web/20161030231745im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/1/2/b/4/8/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.12dmom.png/1419952969768.jpg)
That logic surfaced again last week after the appalling massacre of children and their teachers at the Army Public School in Peshawar. The moratorium on the death penalty was lifted, followed by news that 500 convicts had "exhausted all appeals" and would be put to death "in the coming weeks".
And so, once again, the Pakistani authorities try to slaughter their way out of a political problem.
Having begun its life as two pieces torn from the fabric of British India, Pakistan has struggled ever since to assert its integrity. As early as the 1950s its leaders devised the "One Unit" policy, making the country's western half, with its diverse array of ethnic groups, a single Urdu-speaking entity for administrative purposes. The main motive for this fiction was to counterbalance the massive population and growing power of the Bengali-speaking east.
When the east won a general election and the right to rule the nation, the west's response was military: Operation Searchlight, in which Bengalis of every stripe were rounded up. Yet in trying to enforce unity, the military ended up amputating part of its own territory, which became a new and equally turbulent state: Bangladesh.
![Force demanded: Supporters of Pakistan's MQM political party call for harsh measures at a rally in Karachi.](/web/20161030231745im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/1/2/b/m/p/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.12dmom.png/1419952969768.jpg)
In the decades that followed, what remained of Pakistan became a political bed of Procrustes. All those viewed as threats to unity were exiled, internally or externally, or stretched on the rack. Instead of attempting to bridge the nation's divides through constitutional and political reform, the ruling class repeatedly fell back on force.
Balochistan - rich in resources but the country's poorest province - became the site of a rolling insurgency that rendered it ungovernable, allowing the Afghan Taliban's leadership to hide near its capital, Quetta, and their footsoldiers to repeatedly massacre Shiite Hazaras, who then look to our shores for asylum.
![High level: Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and army chief Raheel Sharif visit a student injured in the Peshawar ...](/web/20161030231745im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/1/2/9/p/5/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.12dmom.png/1426294339511.jpg)
In Karachi, the Mohajirs were subjected to Operation Clean-Up, turning the country's largest city into a killing zone. Yet this week, after the school massacre, MQM supporters were out in force calling for the Pakistan Taliban to be "crushed".
In the Western world we tend to view both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban as Islamist forces, yet they are also manifestations - albeit extreme ones - of Pashtun ethnic identity. In an interview in February 2009, Tooryalai Wesa - the governor of Afghanistan's southern Kandahar province - referred to his fellow Pashtuns as a "nationality" and noted that "most of the kings in the history of Afghanistan were from Kandahar. Even the Taliban."
![Cold comfort: A man walks his children home from school in the north-western city of Peshawar after the massacre.](/web/20161030231745im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/1/2/b/m/s/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.12dmom.png/1419952969768.jpg)
Pakistan's decision to become a rear base in the war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan gradually brought Pashtuns and their ideas about Islam, society and their rightful place in it into Pakistan's mainstream. Millions crossed the Durand Line between the two countries and set up shop in Peshawar and Karachi, while the Pakistani government in Islamabad hoped that nurturing Pashtun militancy would give it a lever with which to control events in Afghanistan.
Instead it was rising Pashtun sentiment that reshaped Pakistan, most notably in 2010, when the North-West Frontier Province was renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a name that identifies the region with its Pakhtun (or Pashtun) population and was immediately the subject of protests by other ethnic groups there.
![Execution: Villagers carry the body of executed militant and former soldier Arshad Mehmood to his grave.](/web/20161030231745im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/1/2/b/m/s/n/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.12dmom.png/1419952969768.jpg)
In the wake of the Peshawar massacre, Pakistan has revived long-repeated promises to repatriate the Afghan refugees and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed to pacify the north-west. One of the first executions last week was of an ex-soldier called Arshad Mehmood. The Pakistani media noted the crowd at his funeral, and online readers were divided on what, if anything, such a turnout signified. What can be said without a doubt is that the execution of one man or 500 men by the state has repercussions, both political and social.
There are people in Peshawar and its tribal hinterland and across Pakistan who long for a state that can extend its care and protection into their lives. But there are others - whether they have militant relatives or not - who dread the indiscriminate attentions of Pakistan's armed forces and the whims and evidential standards of its courts. There are even more around the world who love Pakistan and its people but cannot believe that the cure for what ails the state can ever come from the barrel of a gun or a tank, or be fired from a drone. They fear that unless Islamabad can finally absorb the lesson of Bangladesh, Pakistan may become the author of its own demise.
Maher Mughrabi is the Foreign Editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald