Urbanisation of violence in the frontier

Terrorism has become more targeted recently, if not lethal

PESHAWAR: "The city is not just the site, but the very medium of warfare ­— a flexible, almost fluid, medium that is forever in flux."

There is no doubt that war has straddled into the city. Violence, like everything else, is getting urbanised and reshaping the mundane circle of civic life. And if this violence remains unhindered, soon there will be nothing that has not been a target for the full spectrum of symbolic or real violence. The pessimist thinks it is too late; the optimist keeps devising strategies. But the fact that incidents of terrorism are increasing in urban spaces at an alarming rate brings to life the ancient tropeof taking revenge from profligate cities with postmodern weaponry.

Arguably, strategies to attack systems that support or defend civil life have grown more sophisticated, since the cities have expanded, and so have the strategies of self-defence. The proportion of violence on the outskirts of the cities now equals, if not surpasses, the violence within the cities. The prognosis is that violence will be internalised and the process to do so has already begun. For example, the provincial government maintained that incidents of violence reported in Peshawar decreased in the last nine months as compared to those reported in the last five years. Though true statistically, the attacks in urban areas by armed groups and non-state actors have become more targeted, if not lethal. While Peshawar is divided into four towns — a structural analysis of the trickledown effect of violence between lesser and more urbanised areas, Badhaber (Town- IV) and Hayatabad (Town-III) shows that violence has seeped into the fissures of the city. The government of K-P in 2010 believed Badhaber and its surroundings were the most difficult areas for maintaining law and order. In 2015, after a number of terrorist attacks, including bomb blasts, target killing, sectarian violence and extortion, the government holds the same view for Hayatabad.

Almost all major terror attacks in the city, with casualties surmounting to hundreds, have taken place in the more urbanised zones. The Meena Bazaar bomb attack, the All Saints Church twin suicide attack, the Army Public School massacre and now the bloodbath in Badhaber are all related to urban violence.

The reasons behind the growing violence can be marked as massive migration from the peripheries of urban spaces and rural localities into cities, the lack of economic opportunities and the absence of a policy backed by a system to deal with the issue at hand. While the paradigm of security grows, the discourse related to North/South Waziristan and Mohmand agencies is the same as an urban operation in Peshawar or any other city. While critics might argue that the settings of a “war-zone” might be different from that of a city, what remains central to the argument is that acts of violence are predicated on a set of shared ideas, and not the shape or setting of a space.

Even in the West, military theorists believe that urbanised strategies to counter terrorism will be the need of a counter-insurgency policy of the 21st century. But this is not an easy task, not by any standards and is even more difficult in the context of Peshawar and K-P in general.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 23^rd, 2015.