Washington: Two local employees of the US Consulate in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar were killed by a roadside bomb while on a mission to eradicate drug cultivation, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday.
“Just this morning I woke up to the news that we’ve lost two local employees in Peshawar who work with our consulate there, who were going out on an effort to eradicate narcotics fields,” Kerry said at a state department conference.
“An IED exploded and several were lost and a few of the soldiers who were there to guard them also,”Kerry said. “So what happens tomorrow morning? They’re gone, but is the community better? Did that explosion tell you what the people who set it off really want? Does it say anything about education, about history, about culture, about poetry, about music, about all the things that we really value in life?” he asked.
“It is just stunning to me that people are content just to blow things up without offering one constructive vision of a better world, of a world at peace or anything that embraces any of the values that most of us embraced in coming into this kind of work. It’s the most nihilistic, depressing presentation of life that you could possibly imagine,” said the top American diplomat.
Kerry said these terrorists are literally at war with modernity itself and they want to destroy almost every connection to those values that people cherish so deeply. “I know that our vision is the right vision to organise our lives around, creating a world in which no one can conclude that murdering innocent people is somehow the only truly viable option please,” he said.
PTI