Touched by horror

The conflict against IS may not be existential, but it does have the sense of being the defining conflict of our age

Try as I might it is impossible not to have my gaze dragged to events in Paris. They touched me in the most tangential way with the daughter of a very old friend being injured, not seriously, in the attack on the Bataclan in Paris. The news came to me as does much else these days via Facebook, and flashed in seconds around the world to a now widely scattered group of schoolmates. We briefly reminisced via messenger services and then all went back to our disparate lives… and as these words are typed an operation is ongoing in the Paris suburb of St Denis with confused reports of a gun battle with men holed up in an apartment one of who may or may not be one of the key players behind the attacks on Friday the 13^th.

What is becoming clearer not just by the day but almost by the hour is that a global conflict is unfolding with Islamic State (IS) at its centre. This is not the place to explore the many and complex reasons for this, instead a small snapshot from inside the conflict.

This is not a war I am a combatant in but could conceivably be a victim of, as could almost anybody reading these words wherever in the world they are. It is a very visible conflict, watched by the media across all platforms and a war about which there seem to be no neutrals, no fence-sitters, everybody has an opinion about it one way or another and there is virtually nobody that is unaware of it being fought.

For some it is an in-and-out-and-in-again fight. Go to Syria or Iraq or any other place where there is active conflict; sign up for a period in the organisation of your choice, train, get battlefield experience and then sign out. Go back to wherever you came from and pick up arms, or detonators or a slab of C4 Plastique, get together a number of like-minded friends and proceed to wreak havoc until you detonate the body-belt or you die by a bullet fired by somebody trying to stop you doing what you had decided to do.



For the rest of us — and that is the vast majority as this is a war that though global is being fought in miniature with no set-piece battles, more a series of bloody skirmishes widely geographically separated — it does not feel like an existential conflict. The integrity of the states that we all live in is not threatened. Threats are uttered to be sure, hundreds dead and wounded day to day, but with the exception of Syria there is no combatant state that is likely to be conquered by IS. Conquered maybe not, but infected certainly. A contagious war against which there is no immunisation.

Despite what the doomsayers would have us believe, civilisation — a term I use in the loosest and most generic sense — is not on the verge of collapse. The barbarians may be at the gates but they are nowhere close to knocking them down, and what we see on our screens are in truth pinpricks, not full-scale assaults capable of taking down the combined forces of nation-states.

It may not be existential, but it does have the sense of being the defining conflict of the age, though that in itself may be a false perception as the conflict stretches back in one form or another hundreds of years and the two world wars may almost be a sideshow in comparison. (Which leads me to wonder if war is a perpetual state and peace forever unattainable, a wondering sustained as much by the manufacture and trade in arms worldwide as anything else — war is good for business.)

But back to the here and now and sleepy Bahawalpur that is falling comfortably into the arms of what passes for winter hereabouts. People smile more. The atmosphere is relaxed. The electricity is on most of the day. The a/c units are wrapped up and the fans silent. Everybody sleeps easier. But somewhere in these quiet streets there will be an IS supporter. And if there is one thing that will not be on their minds it is peace. Stay safe.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 19^th, 2015.

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