December 16, 2014: The Taliban gunned down 152 people, 133 of whom were children, at Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan.

I stayed in bed that day. I was back home in Lahore for Winter Break. I didn’t click on any news articles on the attack. I didn’t want to know.

The day was referred to as “Black Day” on social media. Friends on Facebook changed their profile pictures to a black square and put up mournful statuses: “Oh God. Grant us patience. Why did this happen, how did this happen, we don’t know. Fill our wounds … Those who left this world today, grant them a place in paradise.”

I tried to keep myself distanced from this tragedy, but knowing next to nothing about it even then, my eyes welled up when I was about to go to bed. My sister-in-law said she and my brother couldn’t sleep that night. Eeshaal, my niece, kept flashing across their minds. It could’ve been Eeshaal, she said. Dad couldn’t sleep that night, either.

The Peshawar attack broke me. It broke my nation. And some of us were quick to react: Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ended the death penalty moratorium in terrorism cases, but will this help us get rid of the Taliban?

What Sharif conveniently overlooked was how corrupt the Pakistani legal system is: Many non-terrorism cases are tried under the Anti-Terrorism Act to hasten the trial processes.

“The people of Pakistan think that when you’re executing terrorists, you’ll be killing those who were responsible for the Peshawar attacks,” said Sarah Belal, the executive director at Justice Project Pakistan. “What you will (largely) see will be regular criminals — people who are accused of murder, robbery, property disputes – being executed.”

Imran Khan, chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, a centrist political party, has opposed military operations against the Taliban since 2001. “We have had military operations for nine and a half years and all it has done is, it’s exacerbated the situation. From one Taliban group, we’ve got 50 Taliban groups now,” he said last year on “The Global Conversation” in 2014.

The peace talks with the Taliban that Khan supported so vehemently failed, and they will fail again. But if waging wars against the Taliban were the solution, wouldn’t we have come up with one in the past 11 years?

“Till now, the only language in which this dialogue has taken place is that of violence. Whether it is the violence of the ‘terrorists’ or the violence of the state, both claim legitimacy in the name of Islam,” Aasim Sajjad Akhtar wrote in his column for Dawn.

In 2004, Pakistan Army’s search for al-Qaida fighters resulted in armed conflict with the Taliban. The First Battle of Swat, fought over control of Swat district, started in October 2007. The Taliban lost control of the district, but regained control by 2009 and that marked the start of The Second Battle of Swat.

Since 2003, around 56,000 lives have been lost, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal. Around 30,000 of those were terrorists. The rest, civilians and security force personnel.

Should we just turn a blind eye to civilian casualties? What about the internally displaced? Should the civilians in Waziristan just take one for the team?

The numbers can’t even be verified. The data comes out of a country where journalists pay a high price for reporting facts that don’t fit the government’s frame: Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani journalist, was found dead on a canal bank, with heavy bruising to his face and with serious trauma to his stomach, two days after publishing a story that accused Pakistan military officials of having secret ties with al-Qaeda. Frequently, the media in Pakistan struggles to stay afloat: Pakistan’s Electronic Media Regularity Authority suspended Geo TV channel’s license for 15 days after it accused the intelligence service of Pakistan, ISI, of an attack on its anchor, Hamid Mir.

“I always believed in negotiations with the Taliban or had a soft side to how to deal with them, but after today’s attack, I think they should be ruthlessly removed from every corner of this country,” wrote one of my peers at NU-Q on Facebook. “No humans can do what they did today, and they should be treated accordingly.”

I was disappointed when I read the status. No humans can do what the Taliban did because these Taliban have been raised in an environment where they are dehumanized. Fighting evil with evil has only produced more evil. Don’t let the wounds of Peshawar attack blur your judgment.

In the documentary, “Children of the Taliban,” Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy showed how the Taliban target children from poor families: Children are separated from their parents and provided free food and shelter. The Quran, being in a language the children don’t understand, is tweaked to fit what the Taliban want to teach in these schools: Suicide attacks against “infidels” are justified. Listening to radio, reading newspapers or anything that the Taliban don’t assign is strictly forbidden. And through poverty and illiteracy, young Taliban are produced.

To stop the Taliban from having the opportunity to create more Taliban, Pakistan’s government needs to cut down on its military budget and spend more on eradicating illiteracy and poverty. These children deserve a chance at having the option of not becoming the future Taliban. To put an end to terrorism, Pakistan’s government needs to get to the root of the problem rather than dealing with its aftermath. The Peshawar attack could have been stopped before it happened.

Rhytha Zahid Hejaze is a sophomore studying journalism at Northwestern University in Qatar. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].