Alia Ali: ‘Displacement’ is a neat word. The operation – another clean cut word to describe death and destruction – descended upon the people of Waziristan with not enough warning. They fled with what they could, dragging their young, old, women, disabled and all. I heard yet another story: a father who left his two weak and ill children behind in North Waziristan with requests for their burial if they did not survive — gave birth, left behind; simple and spine-chilling lines to describe despair. I had an old-style radio years ago. I used it to tune in to BBC at night in the media blackout during Ziaul Haq’s rule — the longest running dictatorship in Pakistan. Static was that annoying background distortion. But very quickly one was able to tune it out and listen to the stronger voices. The frail cries of the children, women, aged and infirm in the current operation, are perhaps nothing more than that — the static that no one wants to hear. The intelligentsia, the army and the state, the smug and the sure, the liberal elite — are experts at tuning out that static. 800,000 displaced — and the rest is white noise. More here.