Graveyard of Ideas

Someone once explained two easily confused words to me rather simply: “Illusion is building castles in the air; delusion is when you start living in them.” Nations can make that mistake too. I saw something of it in 1983, when my father was posted to Tehran and our family moved to Karachi for our education. Our neighborhood seemed ordinary. Evenings belonged to cricket, football and hockey, and the boys around me were cheerful and ambitious. I did not know then that I was about to watch ideas enter our streets and change many of their lives forever.

Within a few years, cricket bats gave way to TT pistols, the grim signature of Karachi’s violence in the 1980s and 1990s. Some boys joined ethnic armed groups, first fighting rivals, then one another. Many were killed. Others disappeared. A few entered politics. Strikes and curfews even cost us an academic year. Years later, the questions remain: who turned ordinary boys into gunmen, who stood behind them, and what idea made violence seem legitimate?

At university, the Afghan jihad raised similar questions. Young men crossed the border believing they were defending faith and fellow Muslims. Some students I knew left to fight. Not all returned. Years later, the lesson became clearer: those who fight a war are not always those who design it, sustain it or benefit from it.

Politics has no remote control for violence. Once released, it rarely obeys its original operator.

Dr. Syed Kaleem Imam

Balochistan brought the lesson closer. I witnessed tribal rivalries, sectarian violence and insurgency feeding on old grievances. Old disputes acquired new weapons. New grievances found new recruits. Groups could be accommodated at one moment and confronted at the next.

Each side believed history justified its cause, and each assumed violence could remain limited. It rarely did.

Then came Darfur. Serving with the United Nations, I watched Arab Muslims and African Muslims fight one another brutally. Religion connected them. Identity and power divided them. The Janjaweed became associated with destroyed villages and mass displacement.

Peacekeepers arrived with mandates, but for too many people they arrived too late.

The geography changes, but the temptation does not. Powerful states too have relied on armed actors and private military structures to advance strategic interests at reduced political cost. Blackwater became controversial in Iraq. Russia later relied heavily on the Wagner Group across several theaters, before Wagner itself challenged Moscow. Yesterday’s instrument can become tomorrow’s liability.

Pakistan has experienced its own variations. The TTP grew amid militancy and confrontation with the state. Baloch separatist violence draws on longstanding grievances while intersecting with a wider regional contest. Religious street mobilization has shown how quickly identity and grievance can acquire political power. Once anger is organized, given a narrative and backed by force, controlling its direction becomes difficult.

Why do we repeatedly make this mistake? Perhaps because the immediate gain is tempting. External powers seek influence. Governments seek leverage. Communities seek protection. Political actors seek support. Individuals seek identity, belonging, justice or revenge. A proxy, militia or militant narrative may look useful for the problem of the moment. But politics has no remote control for violence. Once released, it rarely obeys its original operator.

That is the illusion worth confronting. Groups cultivated against one enemy can become threats themselves. Militias raised to defend one community may terrorize another. Movements promising justice can become instruments of fear.

Nor are the most consequential decisions necessarily taken on battlefields. They are often made in conference rooms, intelligence briefings and distant capitals. On paper, a proxy can look cheaper than war, coercion faster than politics, suppression easier than reform. On the ground, ordinary people inherit the consequences. The planner moves on. The neighborhood keeps the wounds.

This is not an argument against resisting injustice or defending the state. Legitimate grievances must be addressed, and states have a duty to protect citizens from violence. But methods matter. Once violence is legitimized as a convenient political instrument, it develops constituencies, economies and narratives of its own. Eventually it may consume the cause that first justified it.

The graveyard of ideas is filled not only with abandoned causes but with strategies whose consequences outlived their architects.

My years in public service taught me something simple: after a serious incident, asking “who did it?” is only the beginning. We must also ask what allowed it to happen, what we missed, what we got wrong and what must change. Nations should examine their policies with the same discipline.

Pakistan should remember this as it confronts terrorism, sectarianism, ethnic violence and growing polarization. Institutions take decades to build. Hatred can be mobilized in days. The real choice is not between conflict and no conflict. Conflict is part of politics and society. The choice is between institutions capable of managing it and the recurring delusion that shortcuts, expediency, proxies and violence can do the job instead.

We have built enough castles in the air. It is time we stopped living in them.

The writer is a former federal secretary, IGP and UN Police Commissioner. He teaches law and philosophy at universities.

X: @KaleemImam