Last Monday, at 10pm, my phone beeped.
"The Sri Lankan cricket team attacked by terrorists in Lahore," read the text message.
"This is outrageous," my husband mumbled, reaching for the TV remote.
I did not register footage of the attack in real time. Instead, as the bedlam played out around the Liberty Roundabout in Lahore, my mind turned back to November 2007 when I passed that spot on my last visit to my homeland.
The call to prayer had prompted my driver to mute the volume of the CD player. I controlled a twinge of annoyance to accommodate this gesture of respect. He turned the volume back up when the call ended. I didn't ask him to rewind the part I had missed.
And such is the balance we struck - and were constantly striking in our attempt to build a real pluralistic society.
Because Lahore's dusty embrace was big enough to absorb the designer clad liberals with their swanky parties, and the bearded shopkeeper who halts business five times a day to pray.
The Pakistan I grew up in was always an upholder of Islamic and conservative values in its constitution and in public life. But it remained home to energetic and strong liberal currents. We sustained both elements - albeit not to the same degree. Islamic influence flowed freely through our society, but citizens absorbed it only to the extent they desired. We coexisted in peace.
Now with the rising threat of a militant Islam - that is as frightening to the deeply religious Pakistani as it is to the liberal Pakistani - that balance is teetering.
It has been harder and harder to dismiss the steady trickle of terrorist attacks in Pakistan as random acts of violence. Expats like myself quell the rising waves of panic by calling each other and rehashing theories floating around on cable TV.
"They are targeting government buildings as retaliation against the military strikes in the northwestern tribal areas," I said to my husband when they struck the Lahore High Court last January.
"They are out to get foreigners," I explained to myself when they attacked the Islamabad Marriott in September.
"They hate liberals," I mumbled after the incident at Lahore's World Performing Arts Festival in November.
Ashamed and alarmed as I am at these events, reading and watching the pundit post-mortem is even more painful. More and more, Pakistanis feel blamed for what is happening to our country. Like a pack of salivating hyenas, the experts gather to point fingers at the failed state, the complacent people, the inept government.
I have a hard time reconciling the place of which they speak and my home of twenty four years. Rabia Mughal is a San Francisco-based journalist and writer
They say it is important to disarm an unstable nuclear Pakistan. I don't have a more peaceful memory than that early spring drive by a sun-sprinkled canal brushed by weeping willows. As they warn of Islamic militancy, I remember young couples dancing up a colourful bhangra storm on the night before my wedding. As they discuss the Taliban's bloody campaign against girls' schools, I recall heated political debates with my girlfriends at late night coffee shops.
For my generation of Pakistanis, this disconnect is very real.
We recognise our share of responsibility for the horrors going on inside our borders. There are warped and misguided people in Pakistan as in any country. But I also know from my years in Pakistan that these problems are not exclusively the result of faults in our society.
We made mistakes. Weary of the constant power struggle amongst corrupt leaders we chose to make individual well-being a priority. We placed guards at the gates of our neat bungalows, made quality education the privilege of the few, and neglected the sweeping economic disparity in the country.
So when international terrorism - backed by the wealth of many other countries - chose my homeland as a battleground, they had a ripe recruiting field.
Drones, bombs, and international rebuke are now tuning out the voices of moderate Pakistanis. And it is just as well because for too long we have viewed the war in our own country from a distance. Even though news of violence in troubled border regions was a source of concern in the metros, the Afghan frontier seemed so far away.
Then the conflict spilled into Swat, the picturesque valley not far from Islamabad. Suicide attacks then reached the capital itself, and subsequently Lahore with men detonating themselves a quarter of a mile from my father's office.
Last week's shooting at the Sri Lankan cricket team has finally shaken me into accepting reality. The war on terror will not remain confined to "that region." It is knocking on my door threatening to break it down.
Now that so much is at stake, I realise in a very real sense how heavy a price Pakistan is paying for this war - in civilian blood, in jeopardised security, in a stigmatised national identity, in a murky, unsure future.
Though enmeshed in the conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Americans view the war as a sad but distant affair, far removed from their own lives. They need to realize that this is their war; the key to solving the problem is not just to urge Pakistan to take more decisive action, but to build a mutual understanding of the "common threat". Just as Pakistanis are waking up to the encroaching disaster, so too must Americans.
