TODAY marks 14 years since the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon that triggered a series of events which changed the whole world, not least Pakistan, Afghanistan and our wider region. In this time, ‘terrorism’ — or rather the imperative of countering it — has become the motive-force of the entire state system, with the media, intelligentsia, artists and just about everyone else jumping on the bandwagon.

Yet it can easily be argued that what has transpired over the past decade or so is a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. When the state system as we now know it crystallised in the aftermath of the Second World War, the defining imperative of the self-proclaimed ‘free world’ was the need to contain communism, which was that era’s proverbial bogeyman: communists were depicted as inimical to human nature and generally committed to destroying ‘our’ way of life.

Of course, dissidents refused to accept the anti-communist ‘consensus’ that was forged in the capitalist West and its allied states all over the world, including Pakistan. Just like dissidents in today’s world regularly call attention to the dubiousness and contradictions in the discourse and practice of states vis-à-vis terrorism — after all, state terrorism is the most prevalent form of all.

But today there is no counter-bloc of countries to provide refuge to alternative ideas about society and its ills, let alone support political movements that reject the bogeyman of ‘terrorism’ and instead identify capitalism, patriarchy and imperialism as the bane of humankind. The handful of leftist governments in Latin America is a pleasant exception, but they do not have the capacity to effect developments in faraway regions such as ours.

‘Terrorism’ in Pakistan is far from a straightforward matter.

The comments of Awami National Party chief Asfandyar Wali provide insight both into the limits of the mainstream political ‘consensus’ and the cul-de-sac that parties like the ANP now find themselves in. Reacting to the targeting of the MQM and PPP in Sindh, he lamented that the political forces with principled positions vis-à-vis terrorism, which had also sacrificed greatly to this effect, were being actively victimised.

It is indeed a tragedy of our very peculiar political order that mainstream parties remain willing and able to target one another, often at the behest of the military establishment. The PML-N is walking a dangerous road — like all other weak civilian regimes in the past it is under the delusion that acceding to khaki wishes will allow it to complete its time in office.

It is a matter of conjecture how the merry-go-round of Pakistani politics plays out in the coming months and years, and particularly whether the military high command remains content to pull the strings from behind stage or decides once again to bestow its grace upon us in more direct ways.

But I want to come back to the question of ‘terrorism’ and the realm of political possibility. While in other countries, especially in the Western world, the bogeyman of terrorism has been deliberately concocted to protect corporate and state interests, the situation in this region is unique and deserves to be considered in its own right.

As is now common knowledge, today’s ‘terrorists’ were yesterday waging a principled jihad against ‘kufr’ (read: Soviet communism). Indeed, as the reaction to the death of jihadist ideologue-in-chief Hamid Gul shows, many segments of contemporary society continue to believe in the righteousness of the jihad, and completely reject any association of this cause with ‘terrorism’.

Now I also object to the dominant discourse on ‘terrorism’, but not because I think that jihadis are doing us a great service. In fact, myself and many progressives are still not convinced that the Pakistani state, and, for that matter, Western imperialist powers, have any principled contradiction with right-wing militants — they continue to patronise some elements while picking a fight where strategic and material interests demand it.

There are more specificities: for instance, can the Baloch brand of militancy simply be equated with that of the religious right?

All of this is simply to say that ‘terrorism’ in Pakistan is far from a straightforward matter. Unfortunately, the mainstream parties that consider themselves part of a heritage of progressive politics — the PPP and ANP most notably — have owned the dominant narrative. This strategy has neither benefited these parties unambiguously nor weakened the religious right per se.

This is in part because religio-political forces are very well integrated into the economic, political and cultural mainstream. So the PPP, ANP and ‘civil society’ can cry foul about the militant right wing, but what about society at large? The only way out of this impasse is to reintroduce a radical lexicon into the mainstream that goes beyond ‘terrorism’. One can only hope that we will still not be floundering 14 years from now.

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

Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2015

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