The army is not alone in its speed to celebrate its own failures. The Pakistani media and other opinion makers are close behind. Although the Taliban jostle to take credit for these atrocities, analysts deflect the blame onto our older enemies. Someone from abroad must be funding the attackers, they say. Surely, India is behind this.

But weren’t these killers our strategic assets until recently? Didn’t they pledge to fight alongside the Pakistani Army if India dared attack us? Thousands of suspected terrorists have been killed in Operation Zarb-e-Azb and dozens have been hanged, and not a single foreigner has been identified among them.

But that didn’t keep some of Pakistan’s most influential journalists from speculating, while the Wednesday attack was still underway, that India was involved, intent on avenging the attack on its airbase in Pathankot in early January. The same journalists were also screaming that India had staged the Pathankot attack in order to blame Pakistan. Do we really believe we have an enemy so cunning and so heartless that it kills its own soldiers so it can kill our children? And are we being told that our only option is to remain a martyr-producing factory?

The truth is that we do have a cunning and heartless enemy: Our brothers in faith and our fellow citizens. Some of them have automatic weapons and suicide vests; others have pens and TV shows, and rewrite history even as it happening.

Last week Pakistan’s prime minister and army chief were seen huddled together in a plane on their way to Saudi Arabia and then Iran. As the rulers of the sole Muslim nuclear power in the world, they were on a mission to bring peace to the region. Maybe they should lower their expectations at home.

Maybe they should try to ensure that when children go to school and university they don’t become martyrs. The Pakistani political and military elites are fond of reminding everyone at every opportunity that the country’s nuclear assets are safe. Could they one day make the same claim about our schoolchildren?