TODAY, Pakistan marks Defence Day, the nation will once again turn its eyes towards mountains of the north and the deserts of Balochistan, towards quiet checkpoints on the border and crowded streets of our cities, and remember what it means to be defended. Every year on 6th of September, we recall 1965, when a young nation stood its ground against a much larger adversary and proved that resolve, not size, decides the outcome of a war. But this year, as in every year, it is worth pausing to ask whether our remembrance is complete. We honour the fallen, as we must. Do we honour, with equal warmth, those who are still standing?
Right now, as this piece is being read over breakfast on a Sunday morning, Pakistani soldiers are on watch in the mountains of the north, where terrain and weather are themselves adversaries, and in the vast expanse of Balochistan, where operations against terrorism continue with grim regularity. These are not abstract “operation areas” on a map. They are real places where real men leave their homes for months at a stretch, where a knock on a family’s door can carry news no parent ever wants to hear. Alongside armed forces stand police and civil armed forces, Frontier Corps, Levies, Rangers, who guard the rear, the highways, the check posts, the cities, and who fall in numbers that rarely make it beyond a small news item. A soldier who dies at the border and a policeman who dies defusing a threat in a crowded bazaar have given the same thing: everything. Both deserve the same reverence.
Pakistan, like every proud nation, has learned to remember its martyrs. We build memorials, we hold ceremonies, we recite names of those we lost in 1965, in 1971, in the long war against terrorism that has claimed tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians since turn of the century. This remembrance is right, and it must never fade. Grief for fallen is not sentimentality; it is the debt a nation owes to those who paid in blood. But there is a second debt, less spoken of, that we owe to the families left behind. A shaheed’s parents grow old without the child who was meant to support them. A young widow raises children alone. A soldier’s siblings carry a name that means both pride and permanent absence. To honour the fallen without also honouring their parents and their families is to honour only half the sacrifice. Our gratitude must extend to the empty chair at the dinner table, not only to the photograph on the wall.
Yet there is something we still do too rarely, and it is this: praising and showing love to those who are alive and serving right now. It is easy, almost automatic, to grieve for those who have gone. It is harder, and perhaps more meaningful, to make a soldier standing at a checkpoint in the cold, a young captain leading a patrol through difficult terrain, or a policeman manning a barrier late at night, feel seen and valued while he is still there to feel it. A martyr is honoured after the fact. A serving soldier can be honoured today, in real time, and that honour can be a source of strength precisely when it is needed most. When citizens stand along the roads as convoys pass, when children wave at a passing military vehicle, when a family sends a simple message of thanks to a relative in uniform, something changes. The soldier understands that the nation behind him is not an abstraction. It is watching, it is grateful, and it is with him.
This is what distinguishes a proud and responsible nation from one that merely mourns well. Pride is not only expressed in grand parades and gun salutes on a single day of the year. It is expressed in the everyday gestures of a citizenry that refuses to take its protectors for granted, whether they are guarding a border in the north, conducting operations in Balochistan, or standing at a city checkpoint at two in the morning. Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, addressing the officers of Pakistan’s armed forces in the earliest, most fragile days of this country, reminded them that theirs was, in his words, a duty they were “entrusted” with on behalf of the nation. That sense of trust runs in both directions. Just as the soldier is entrusted with our defence, we are entrusted with his morale, his dignity, and his family’s wellbeing while he serves.
As Defence Day dawns this Sunday, let the newspapers, the television screens and drawing-room conversations of Pakistan carry two messages rather than one. Let us remember our martyrs with the solemnity they deserve, and let us stand, quite literally if we can, along the roads our soldiers travel, to tell those who serve today that their sacrifice is seen before it becomes a memory. A nation that waits until a soldier has fallen to say thank you has left half its duty undone. Let this Defence Day be remembered not only for the wreaths laid at graves, but for the warmth shown to those who are still coming home.
—The writer is an international law expert and an internationally accredited arbitrator and mediator.
