In March 2010, while suicide bombers and gunmen were killing Pakistanis in Swat, Waziristan, Quetta, Peshawar, and Karachi at a rate that the United States State Department would later tabulate as exceeding two thousand fatalities for that year alone, the Chief Minister of Punjab stood at a seminar in Lahore and addressed the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan with an argument that belonged not to the vocabulary of counterterrorism but to the vocabulary of real estate. The PML-N, Shehbaz Sharif said, had opposed Pervez Musharraf’s alliance with the United States and rejected foreign dictation; if the Taliban were fighting for the same cause, they should not conduct acts of terror in Punjab, where his party governed. He did not extend this request to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, then still called the North-West Frontier Province, where families were being displaced by the tens of thousands, nor to Balochistan, where disappearances and killings had become routine, nor to Karachi, where sectarian and political violence was woven into the city’s daily commercial life. He extended it to the province that housed Lahore, Rawalpindi, the country’s military headquarters, the largest share of its population, and the decisive bloc in its National Assembly. He asked the men who were killing Pakistanis to consider a provincial boundary as a line of exemption.
The condemnation was swift. Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab and a member of the PPP, said publicly that the statement had embarrassed the province and would embolden both sectarian and Taliban elements. Shehbaz later issued a clarification, saying his remarks had been taken out of context and that he had always supported the victims of terrorism, including those in the frontier provinces. The clarification mattered less than the original statement, because the original statement had articulated a principle that required no supplementary context. It said, in the plainest terms available to a chief executive, that the obligation of a provincial government was first to its own electoral territory, and that the violence consuming the rest of the country was a condition from which Punjab might negotiate a separate exemption. That was the logical content of the sentence, not an interpretive error committed by journalists.
