IT has been six months since the start of the military incursion into North Waziristan. While in the first few weeks reports about ‘terrorists’ killed came thick and fast, nowadays we only hear about ‘successes’ every once so often. Either way the storyline does not change.

Media outlets all over the world have been reporting such ‘successes’ for the best part of the 13 years since the onset of the ‘war on terror’. If I were to venture an estimate of the number of ‘dead terrorists’ on the basis of media sources in Pakistan alone, the figure would run into tens of thousands.

It is plausible that such a figure is accurate. Given the scale at which the ‘war on terror’ has been prosecuted, and the fact that this is a country of almost 200 million, there is every possibility that 100,000 people or more have enlisted with militant outfits, just as it is possible that a fraction of this number has died in combat.

There can be no peace where injustice and exploitation are rife.

Yet journalistic ethics as much as critical social science demand verifiable facts, not hypothetical projections. Sceptics — and I am very much among them — might be tempted to ask how ‘terrorists’ just keep falling out of the sky? North Waziristan, for instance, is a territory of modest size with only so many places to hide, especially given indiscriminate bombing raids: why, then, does the world’s seventh biggest military still have such an epic fight on its hands after six long months?

Certainly right-wing militancy is not a superficial trend without sociological roots. Many ordinary people in this country are drawn to millenarian violence for a host of reasons, mostly material but also ideological. Regional powers — Saudi Arabia and Iran most of all — have played a decisive role in breeding various brands of political Islam, but there is now a well-developed indigenous infrastructure that would not disappear even if foreign patrons ceased to exist.

It is this local infrastructure, and the ideological impetus provided through educational, media and other institutional sources to it, that is woefully under specified, both in the popular media and within academic circles.

Also read: Tribal women bear the brunt of military operation in North Waziristan

Take the most obvious example: what do we really know about who becomes a ‘terrorist’ in North Waziristan? Frankly, not very much at all. In this case it can be explained by a lack of information due to the military’s refusal to allow outsiders into the area to make sense of what is really happening. But we would do well to remember that self-proclaimed jihadis ply their trade all over the country: if investigative journalists and the intelligentsia really want to uncover the sociological roots of right-wing militancy, there is no reason why they cannot do so.

Comparative study could help us in this regard. A well-tested hypothesis about militancy in general – both of the left and right-wing variety – is that it often takes root amongst displaced populations, and particularly in refugee camps. Hamas is an example of an organisation that gestated in the Palestinian refugee camps of Gaza.

Some amongst us are currently lamenting the plight of those displaced by the North Waziristan operation, but we refuse to think of them as people with agency whose harrowing experiences may drive them in the direction of militancy. I am not suggesting that this is necessarily the case, just that there is an urgent need to think deeply about such potential correlations.

It is by concerning ourselves with such questions that we demonstrate a commitment to truly addressing the phenomenon that is so loosely termed ‘terrorism’. A knee-jerk demand for a military solution every few months gives way to a sense of deflation when we inevitably discover that the problem has not gone away. This is precisely why we need to have a much more circumspect attitude towards the never-ending ‘successes’ of our uniformed guardians in the ‘war on terror’.

The truth is that progressives are caught in a vicious cycle with regard to our fading dreams of establishing a just and egalitarian social order in this country. We implore the very forces that have been the principal source of popular disaffection and injustice in society — the military foremost amongst them — to establish peace and harmony.

In doing so we forget the cardinal rule of politics that there can be no peace where injustice and exploitation are rife. In a bygone era progressives were well aware of this rule and in fact themselves propagated a politics of change, mobilising those suffering injustice and exploitation to overturn the military-dominated structure of power.

Whether or not we like it, the religious right is today laying claim to spearheading a transformative politics. We will have to take back this mantle ourselves. Asking the generals to do the job for us is not only futile but also bad politics.

The writer teaches at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2014