Daily Times Editorials 9th August 2026

Monsters Among Us

Despite the labyrinth of harrowing tales of abuse around us, a family in Karachi would hardly have thought twice about their relative, a 17-year-old, frequently visiting their house and taking their toddler daughter outside to buy her treats.

On Tuesday evening, however, he brought her back unconscious. By the time the family rushed her to hospital, the one-and-a-half-year-old was dead. An arrest has been made under Section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code, while initial medico-legal findings point towards sexual assault. Yet, as the final post-mortem report is awaited, social media is abuzz with hashtags and calls for swift justice.

Horrific as that sequence is, its most unsettling detail lies in its familiarity. That should trouble every household far and beyond because the comforting picture of the predator as a stranger waiting outside the gate has never quite survived the evidence. Sahil’s Cruel Numbers 2025 recorded 3,630 reported cases of child abuse across Pakistan, an eight per cent increase over the preceding year and an average of more than nine every day. There were 1,107 abductions, 596 cases classified as sodomy, 522 rapes, 108 gang rapes and 58 children murdered after sexual abuse. Girls accounted for 53 per cent of the recorded victims, while children between 11 and 15 formed the most vulnerable age group. Most tragically, acquaintances remained the most commonly reported relationship between victims and alleged perpetrators.City & Local Guides

Even this grim ledger can only account for the tip of the iceberg, for we have no trace of those who were silenced by fear or paralysed by shame.

That an FIR can record a crime does little to carry a child through the long corridor from investigation and medical evidence to prosecution, testimony and judgment. Sahil says 82 per cent of the cases it recorded were registered with police, while research points to a conviction rate below one per cent.

Yes, laws have been enacted, helplines advertised, and child-protection authorities created. UNICEF, nevertheless, continues to point to the absence of a nationally coordinated public case-management and referral system meeting international standards. That gap is felt in the most private places: homes, schools, neighbourhoods and institutions where a frightened child may have no idea whom to tell, or whether telling will change anything.

Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov could find no grand design worth the suffering of an innocent child. Pakistan needs no philosophy to understand the smaller obligation before it. A girl barely old enough to recognise faces left this world just because the very hands she had placed her tiny faith in belonged not to humans but to deranged monsters walking among us.

No Scapegoating

Iran and Oman have agreed the contours of a new navigation arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, but anyone tempted to make new declarations should look at what seems to be happening alongside it. Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards have made clear the waterway would not fully reopen until Washington accepted Iran’s wider conditions, while the United States said its blockade of Iranian ports would be lifted once unhindered commercial traffic resumed. Meanwhile, the UAE accused Iran of firing a missile at another oil tanker. ADNOC says its ships have now been targeted in 15 missile and drone attacks since the war began.

This glaring contradiction between diplomacy and active war fronts tells us more about the endgame than declarations of an imminent agreement. Hormuz is no longer merely the artery through which roughly a fifth of internationally traded oil and gas normally moves. Tehran is clearly attempting to turn its capacity to disrupt that waterway into bargaining power over the political settlement itself.

Washington faces the opposite dilemma. It retains the capacity to inflict vastly greater military damage, but nearly six months of war have exposed the difference between destroying targets and imposing an acceptable political outcome. Reports that senior US military commanders have privately urged senior Trump officials to find an off-ramp are important for precisely this reason. From the looks of it, America’s problem is not finding another target. It is the diminishing political return from hitting one.History

Nor can Tehran indefinitely enjoy the leverage it has manufactured. Closing Hormuz hurts Gulf economies, exposes Iranian infrastructure to further attacks and accelerates regional efforts to insure themselves against Iranian coercion. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that this war is producing a security architecture of its own.

Pakistan sits unusually close to both sides of this emerging equation. Islamabad has supported regional ownership of the Hormuz question, where Oman has naturally assumed a central role, while Pakistan remains engaged with the broader settlement envisaged under the Islamabad MoU. Such a division of diplomatic labour makes sense. Pakistan’s advantage has never rested on overwhelming economic leverage, relying on its geography, access and hard-earned credibility to keep a window open when Washington and Tehran reach a mutually hurting stalemate.

Pakistan should therefore not be made the scapegoat if the peace process again breaks down. Mediation is not guardianship. Islamabad cannot manufacture trust between divided adversaries. The persistence of confrontation reflects the principals’ unresolved demands far more than the mediator.Arabs & Middle Easterners

The immediate question, therefore, is not whether Saturday’s Hormuz framework ends the war. It plainly does not. It is whether Washington and Tehran can now turn the coercive leverage each has accumulated into compromises neither could obtain by force.