Blood, like alcohol, is intoxicating and Pakistan today -- a country that spends $100 per second on its military -- has grown drunk on blood. Now even Pakistan's children are acquiring the taste. PNS commentator Dr. Zia Mian, based in Islamabad, is a Research Fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute and a columnist with Islamabad's English-language newspaper The News.

KARACHI -- The French writer Albert Camus once observed that bloodshed is like alcohol. It intoxicates.

Pakistan has been drinking this headiest of wines for years and now seems to have reached the state of drunkenness where judgment is lost, vision becomes blurred, unconsciousness beckons. But like those drunk on alcohol, the warning signs are ignored. Pakistan keeps on drinking.

Today the state spends $100 a second to support its military -- a figure that dwarfs all other expenditures. But the state has long been partial to the taste of blood, turning again and again to violence to solve political problems. The violence attending Bangladesh's breakaway from Pakistan in 1971 was the first drinking party-- and as with such things, the morning after the drinker remembered little of what happened the night before. The Pakistani armed forces killed tens of thousands of Bengali intelligentsia and workers in Dacca in the first few days. Baluchistan followed in the mid-1970s, then Sindh in the early 1980s. Now it is Karachi's turn.

These drinking sprees have been accompanied by the more restrained, some would say civilized, drinking that occurs through the courts. Today some 2,386 people await execution in Pakistani jails. Many were simply too poor to have a lawyer. Yet they sit and wait their turn to face the gallows, victims of a legal system notorious for corruption and arbitrariness.

The number of condemned is certain to increase as the death penalty is extended to more and more crimes. Blasphemy, for example, was made punishable by death in 1991. (When Islamic law was first introduced in 1986, the punishment was life imprisonment.) Far from terrifying people into respecting Islam, the imposition of a compulsory death sentence has only resulted in more arrests. Some 500 alleged blasphemers await trial.

The death penalty also now applies to possession of illegal weapons. And confessions made to a senior police officer can now be admitted as evidence in trials. Both measures will lead to a glut of convictions and executions in the months ahead. Over the last two years, Pakistan executed 231 people, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

War and dispensing justice provide the official functions where blood is served. In Hyderabad and Karachi jails earlier this year, hundreds of inmates were dragged from their cells to watch the hangmen do their work.

But those who have tasted blood cannot forget the taste easily. They begin to drink off-duty, and soon there are informal parties. The "police encounter" has become common-place. Someone is caught and despite eyewitness evidence that he was unarmed and did not resist, he turns up dead. HRCP recorded 32 extra judicial killings in Sindh in the first five months of last year. Three months later, the number of deaths in police custody had increased by another 18.

None of the cases was ever investigated; no policeman was arrested, let alone tried. No outcry over human rights violations was evoked. Why should it have been? As long as the killings appeared to be motivated by service to the state rather than personal gain, they were legitimate. More to the point, they set an example for the larger public life.

In 1991, Naimat Ahmar, a high school principal in Faisalabad and a Christian, was transferred from his post after arguing with local bigshots over their efforts to use school land to graze animals. Once installed in his new school he became the target of an anonymous campaign accusing him of blasphemy. On January 6, 1992, he was stabbed to death outside the district education office, in full view of office workers. According to the HRCP, local police congratulated the killer when they arrested him and the President of the Bar Association offered free legal advice.

Today, the same thing is happening again only this time the target is a 14 year old girl student at a Catholic high school in Sukkur who wrote an answer on a monthly test rumored to have been blasphemous. All over town anonymous posters have appeared calling for the death of the principal and the child.

The terrifying thing about the Sukkur case is that students have now attacked the school, throwing stones, breaking windows, yelling slogans demanding the principal's death. Having watched their state, their political leaders and their parents drown their sorrows in blood, the children of Pakistan too, it seems, are growing thirsty for blood.