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 terminology also fits well into the imperialist tradition of grand western narratives. Celebrating the post-Soviet era, for instance, Anglophone academics strategically excluded context from their political analyses in the early 1990s. The win of capitalism over communism was termed 'the end of history' and a 'unipolar moment' (US the only superpower). This imperialist text not merely heralded capitalism's domination over other forms of ideologies, but also inspired in commercial media the use of a wide brush in painting spatial realities.

In the Af-Pak region, at least, the use of 'jihad' as a lexicon began to develop double meanings: it legitimised terrorism in the name of religion, creating a break from the past.

Dictators have loyally defended US regional interests at the cost of local Pakhtuns.

Throughout the 19th century, the British used violence for controlling north-western territorial fringes of colonial India (Af-Pak region). When the local people resisted, they were first blamed and then victimised for being unruly, violent and fanatical. Pakistan embraced this legacy...