Pakistan’s insistence on trying and convicting its terrorists in secret is baffling. The war against the Taliban and other religious extremists is supposedly a war of ideas. But how are we to fight an idea when we don’t know what it is?

Should I just be relieved that my friend’s killer will be hanged? Or should I also be asking: How should we kill our killers? I don’t have the stomach for the death penalty, but if Aziz is to be executed, I’d like to make sure he actually did murder Sabeen and I want to know why.

These trials provide not justice so much as revenge, and they uncover very little information. The Taliban were fond of killing our soldiers and making videos while doing it. We let our army take away suspected terrorists to try them and hang them, but we want to be spared the gory details.

And yet the gory details are what we need to know if we want to know our enemy. The reasons Aziz gave in his interview for killing Sabeen — she spoke out against the Taliban, she promoted secular values — echo views and values common among corporate workers, lawyers, journalists and other armchair jihadists. That’s why holding court hearings in the open matters: Because then they might reveal how a theological argument can lead to a massacre, how prejudice can lead to sectarian violence.

Our killers went to the same schools we did. They and their supporters read the same newspapers we do. We all attend the same wedding banquets. But many of us pretend they live in caves and are funded by our enemies. Well, maybe they are funded by our enemies, but some of them also have business degrees and run restaurants in Karachi.

Before these terrorism trials, the Pakistani army already had its own system of justice: It would abduct people it believed were a threat to national security. Only last week there were protests across the country after four activists went missing. They were all critical of the army and their families believe intelligence agencies abducted them. The army has been accused by local and international human rights organizations of killing and dumping the bodies of Baloch nationalists. Some of the people convicted of terrorism by the military courts had been declared missing and were already in the army’s custody.

This kind of military justice confirms the notion that we are at war. But it doesn’t tell us who we are at war with. Do we have a shape-shifting enemy, or are we fighting a war of convenience? The Pakistani army has twisted its narrative about the war too many times.