The Blowback of “War on Terror” on Pakistan (Fusion Tables)

The exercise was steeped in data reduction in order to visually highlight the zones of violence and conflict within Pakistan from the fallout of the US/NATO led “War on Terror” in Afghanistan in 2001.

The data is sourced from ACLED ( Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) project designed

for disaggregated conflict analysis and crisis mapping.The raw dataset comprises of dates and locations of reported political violence and protest events in over 60 developing countries in Africa and Asia. Political violence and protest, according to ACLED, include events that occurred within civil wars and periods of instability, public protest and regime breakdown.

My aim is to map the geographic zones still taking the brunt of violence in Pakistan 14 years after the first airstrikes began in Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2015 the number of fatalities in terrorist violence in Pakistan were 3,682. The large concentration of these attacks on security personal and civilians was from organizations which had newly surfaced (namely the Pakistani Taliban or TTP) claiming to fill the void left by Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership especially after the death of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar respectively.

In over a decade the conflict has metastasized and metamorphosed and the objectives of the actors in this conflict: the Pakistan security forces and various Taliban factions, are seemingly distant from those set out 14 years ago. It is a civil war like situation with sporadic violence of over a calendar year but concentrated geographically around the Pak-Afghan border.

It is safe to conclude that Pakistan is to Afghanistan, what Cambodia was to Vietnam. Pakistan has been blamed for harbouring terrorists, yet it is an indispensable military ally. It has suffered from the simultaneous US policy of “do-more” and “distrust” and from the shame of being the hideout place for Osama bin Laden. In the electronic media the senseless and sometimes heinous violence is now being construed as a proxy war spearheaded by Pakistan’s traditional foe India, in its efforts for to weaken the state and establish regional hegemony.

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