The War of Terror in Praetorian Pakistan: The Emergence and Struggle of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement

In January 2018, a spontaneous march of young men from the region of Waziristan descended upon the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, dramatically exploding the myths about the so-called war on terror in the “tribal” border zone with Afghanistan. This organic mobilisation became the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a civil rights uprising embodying the repressed rage of a generation of Pashtun youth that had come of age in the shadow of violence propagated by the unholy nexus of US drones, the Taliban and Pakistan’s security establishment. In this commentary, the PTM’s emergence as a response to the brutalisation of Pashtun society on what remains a colonial frontier hundreds of years since the British conquest is counterposed to a right-wing populist upsurge led by current Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose primary constituency of support is a myopic middle-class strata in metropolitan areas. This confrontation between left and right populisms reveals growing social polarisation under the backdrop of rapid demographic change in a rentier state dominated by an all-powerful military establishment.