Systemic violence on local people.

WHEN it comes to the coverage of terrorism in the Af-Pak region, journalists and analysts in Pakistan have one thing in common: their fixation on ideological aspects of extremism often overshadows territorial considerations rooted in actual power politics. This conceptualisation has detrimental implications for people in marginalised regions where violence is staged locally but reported from a distance.

This (mis)representation has its origins in the 1980s when the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan forced thousands of refugees to flee to Pakistan. 'Resistance' and 'jihad' were the two buzzwords representing Pakistan's stewardship role in a subsequent anti-Soviet proxy war. With the help of US-Saudi petro-dollars, the Zia regime's blending of extremism with warlord-ism birthed an alliance comprising four fundamentalist and three nationalist parties. This alliance was foisted on the ragtag refugees put up in over 400 camps in different parts of present Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. To sustain this militarism, a madressah network was set up to turn local youth into extremists - lasting fodder for the proxy war. But the term 'resistance' itself was also gradually replaced by 'jihad'. This transformation from the secular to the divine obscured over a period of time what went into the making of the conflict zone.

Read: How Zia ruled

Though a skewed reference, jihad as an abstract...