AN ANTI-TALIBAN PASHTUN PERSPECTIVE ON THE TALIBAN

An old African proverb—‘Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter’—comes to mind after reading Farhat Taj’s combative, if also compelling, and to an extent controversial, description of what is actually happening on ground zero of the War on Terror, i.e. the Pashtun-dominated belt of the Afpak region. Often enough, the dominant narrative of any war drowns the voices of those living through and dying in the conflict. This is precisely what has happened in the Pashtun-populated areas that lie in the eye of the Islamist storm. Here the narrative has been monopolised either by itinerant reporters and columnists, many of whom have never travelled through the conflict-ridden areas or have at best done ‘parachute reporting’ on the area, or by academics sitting in Washington or London who have either travelled to the conflict area on tours conducted by the Pakistan army or have analysed the issues on the basis of conversations and interviews with people sitting in Islamabad or Peshawar.