Daily Times

Barbed wire around schools or Lawrence Garden on the mall is a symbol of our utter defeat and the victory of terror in Pakistan

Every year I am invited to give lectures in training workshops for the security establishment of Pakistan on terrorism. This year a colleague said something to the course participants that I found tremendously insightful. He said that terrorism itself is not a problem, as it is the culture and politics of violence that is the problem. Terrorism is just one form of violence, which divorced from its context is simply not very interesting by itself. It is not just that it is uninteresting, but it is also virtually impossible to stamp out through military means. We don’t get tired to blame the Americans or the West but seem to practice the same thing that we critique them for, i.e., pretend that we can bomb and shoot our way out of the terrorist threat. Just look at the incredible popularity of Zarb-e-Azbeven Raheel Sharif, whose photos are used as phone wallpapers.

The questions arise: What is terrorism? What does it hope to achieve? And how could it be eliminated? To the first question, the answer seems to me that it is spectacular violence, to impress an audience, and aim to destroy places, or make people scared of them. In other words, it is a type of violence where the human victims of terrorism are coincidental.

You are a victim of terrorism, if you are subjected to violence, not because who you are or what you have done, but where you are. Just as we can understand a person by the places (s)he frequents, e.g., boutiques, shrines, five star hotels, restaurants etc. One could also get clues to the mindset of terrorists by understanding what places and spaces they target. Making every place hardened against terrorism is not only wasteful but ultimately futile.

In reading the pattern of attacks and the spatiality of violence, we can understand thismindset. And once we do that, we may also come upon a realisation that it also tells us something about the society that we have become. When terrorists target churches, temples and places of worship of sects that they don’t like, they don’t do it in a social vacuum. Terrorists arise out of a social milieu such as ours where we do tolerate and even encourage religious differentiation and preach violence against those who we do not agree with. The question of terrorism in Pakistan is not separate from the fact that every time one applies for a Pakistani passport, one cannot do so without insulting the religious beliefs the Ahmadi community. Terrorist violence is not isolated from the ubiquity of gender, honour and ethnic based violence in our country.

In a society where left-wing bloggers are a security or religious threat, in a society where even the accusation of blasphemy is fatal, in a society where the prime minister declares that web-based blasphemy is inexcusable, in a society where those who wage war against the state of Pakistan and wantonly murder citizens and armed forces personnel are misguided brothers to be brought back into the fold, and where any criticism of the army or the state is deemed treachery — what else will you have? The type of terrorist violence that we already have?

So, what does terrorism, as a special type of violence, hopes to achieve. The clue is again in its spatiality. Terrorists want to constrict the spaces and places for sociability. To show oneself as a citizen and to engage in social discourse, one has to do it elsewhere. Terrorists ideally want to take control of our spaces and only allow interactions on the terms that are acceptable to them. But as they work towards that end, in the interim, they want us to be afraid. They want us to be isolated from each other.

They want us to hide behind higher and higher walls, sharper and sharper barbed wire and security barriers. Here the Pakistani state wilfully lends a helping hand to achieve that intermediate objective of terror. I said to the military men, mostly men who participated in the training program, that if they are looking to defeat terrorism, they have already lost. Drive around Lahore or any city in Pakistan. Increasingly all one sees are higher and higher walls and more and more scared people scurrying around. Barbed wire around schools or Lawrence Garden on the Mall is a symbol of our utter defeat and the victory of terror in Pakistan.

What can be done about terrorism? I suppose the answer is in the problem’s definition. If the objective of terror is to isolate us and constrict the spaces for our sociability, the only way to defeat it is to deny it, its prime objective. We must open up the space and places for human sociability. We must step out of the security paradigm and instead encourage art, culture, dissent and diversity, that are hallmarks of a healthy society. Violence begets violence is a cliché. But it is a cliché that must be told and retold as widely and as possible. Terrorism is a symptom of the violent polity we have created and seem to perpetuate. This pervasive violence is bound to keep us anxious, angry and alone.

The author is a reader in Politics and Environment at the Department of Geography, King’s College, London. His research includes water resources, hazards and development geography. He also publishes and teaches on critical geographies of violence and terror.