SADIA SHIRAZI

Lahore today looks like a city at war. One of the greatest unacknowledged casualties of the United States’ “war on terror” has been the cities (and citizenry) of Pakistan. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban from power in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. In 1985, sixteen years prior, President Ronald Reagan equated the Taliban mujahideen who had defeated the Soviet’s in Afghanistan as “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers,” a capricious stance to say the least. In 2008, the U.S. committed another surge of troops to Afghanistan due to the continued presence of the Taliban in the region while Pakistani military operations were waged in parallel in the northwest regions of the country bordering Afghanistan. Since then Pakistan has seen a particularly stark backlash within its borders as a response to its continued collaboration with its close ally. Militants within Pakistan have retaliated by targeting police and security sites in cities throughout the country, sometimes entangled with attacks against minorities. The city’s inhabitants are just one more unsung casualty of this war that connects Lahore and New York City across disparate geographies through the multiple refractions of the legacy of U.S. policy and Pakistani collaboration during the Cold War.

Beginning in 2008 Lahore experienced a wave of retaliatory attacks that were both unprecedented in scale and frequency. The attacks were in response to Pakistani military operations in its northwest that were perceived as occurring at the behest of the United States. The seemingly incessant bomb blasts that escalated form 2008 through 2010 gave rise to a public discourse of fear, anxiety, and paranoia, with a sense of incomprehensibility and dismay at the civilian deaths resulting from the violence. Public response to the bomb blasts saw securitization as an effective and justified response to the attacks in which “the city” as an undifferentiated whole was considered to be under siege by non-state actors. It is a markedly different thing to say that the attacks post-2008 in Lahore were primarily targeted at police and security services than to say that Lahore is being indiscriminately bombed. The repercussions of these blasts are now so interwoven into the daily experiences of the city’s inhabitants that youth particularly, cannot remember, nor imagine, the city otherwise. Bomb blasts today persist in the urban psyche and endure through the markers of securitization that populate this considerably altered city. It is increasingly difficult to gauge safety in Lahore, to situate the reality of lived experience against the symbols proliferating in the city that continue to mark it as unsafe. The response to the attacks has given rise to what I describe as Lahore’s architecture of in/security.

I am interested in tracing the emergence of Lahore’s securitized zones and the way power inscribes itself in urban space through an architecture of in/security. Parallel with this is my interest in using cartography as an analytic and resistant tool to interrogate and render architectures of in/security more transparent. By architecture I mean structural and conceptual approaches to space, following Eyal Weizman’s work on Israel’s architecture in the occupied Palestinian Territories, in which he studies both the way architecture sustains the occupation and can help us understand politics as constructed realities. New modes of representation can create alternative images of the city that help us imagine what already exists.

My hope is that this provokes us to critique the production of space and its relationship to power and to resist discourses of securitization. How else can we use radical cartography to inform practices that resist this architecture of in/security and confront its elastic territories and modes of enclosure? If we move from Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” to David Harvey’s insistence that a right to the city is not just about access but also about a common right, we can begin to think along with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s theorization of the “undercommons.” This can help us think outside of policy, rights rhetoric and access to the commons and more about planning, practices of resistance and the space of the undercommons.

It was in response to heated arguments with my mother regarding whether and how safe Lahore actually was that I began this research and cartographic project about the bomb blasts. I wanted to make sense of the paradigm of in/security and began to consider ways to visualize information regarding the blasts. First I combed through publicly available information on bomb blast sites, casualties, and perpetrators and assembled the data into a table from 1997 onwards. In the span of ten years, from 1997 through 2007, I saw that there were only two bomb blasts in Lahore, both targeting the minority Shia community. These attacks occurred in 1998 and 2004 respectively. There were no attacks from 2004 through 2007. Beginning in 2008, Lahore experienced a series of high intensity bomb blasts concentrated in the colonial city at targets such as the High Court, Police Headquarters, and Federal Investigative Authority headquarters. None of the 2008 attacks targeted minorities. It was clear to me after completing the table that in 2008 the character, location, and intensity of the blasts altered considerably, which corresponded with the U.S. surge in Afghanistan that same year and military operations conducted in coordination by Pakistan. Each subsequent year has resulted in an escalation of those attacks, from five in 2008 to ten in 2009 to fifteen in 2010, after which attacks subsided, with three most recently in 2012, one in 2013 and two in 2015. Most high-impact blasts were claimed — by militant groups ranging from the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan to Lashkar-i-Jhangvi — while others, such as the horrific attack on Datta Ganj-Baksh, also known as Data Darbar, a shrine revered by Sunni and Shia alike, are still unaccounted for. A series of low-intensity copycat bombs, usually targeting cultural sites such as music halls and theaters, have also occurred and are unclaimed. Visualizing the information made many things legible that were otherwise obscured.

Today, in the aftermath of the bomb blasts, the most visible manifestation of a regime of control is legible in the preponderance of security measures distributed throughout the city against the specter of non-state violence. Walls, barriers, gates, and checkpoints crop up overnight while others calcify over time into permanent structures in residential quarters, religious sites, civic spaces, governmental and police zones. These security apparatuses delineate boundaries, block vehicular and pedestrian access, restrict entry, and alter the city’s urban fabric. In civic spaces, barriers and checkpoints effectively shrink public space and encroach upon inhabitants’ ability to access, circulate and gather without hindrance. In residential blocks securitization indicates that a family or community is fortifying its boundaries against some outside threat. The representation of an in/secure city emerges from the dominance of these objects, which are both the artifacts and performances of its control. This is further legitimized through discursive frameworks and violence enacted by state and non-state actors alike. What relationship various regimes of securitization have to the onslaught of bombings post-2008 and to threats from outside the city is almost impossible to disentangle from increased securitization within the city against its own residents.

After the 2008 bombings the city officially issued an ordinance to public institutions recommending that they increase the height of their walls from six to eight feet. Residential quarters took note and did the same. The city grew taller and less transparent overnight. At a basic level, a wall limits your access to a space, either blocking, delaying or rerouting movement, but a wall is also a tool of opacity, it keeps you from seeing into and through space. If you drive or walk along Mall Road, the civic spaces of the colonial city and their deep perspectival vistas have become shallow. Boards are also placed over the perimeter gates of Punjab University and National College of Arts, altering what was a visually permeable boundary line. The result of these security measures is increased opacity and flattening of urban spaces. This obliteration of transparency is a newer strategy of control that is moving from the physicality of the body to that of the gaze. Citizens are effectively cordoned off from using and even seeing these civic spaces that are inaccessible and invisible. It is inconceivable that two additional feet of brick, sheet metal, concrete block, or barbed wire enhance anyone’s safety, these are instead more legible as performances of in/security. If you look closely at the materiality of the city’s walls, the bricks and mortar belie their age and a line appears where the additional increments of brick begin. This horizon line is legible throughout the city, it is a horizon denoting fear.

The counterpoint to the fixity of walls and flattening of visual depth in Lahore is the movable barrier, the checkpoint. Checkpoints have a ghostly quality and can appear and disappear, expand and contract throughout the day and night. They exploit this architecture of impermanence in their self-presentation as temporary objects. Checkpoints unlike walls and barriers, engage the social realm in addition to blocking access to space, creating zones of opacity, and delineating boundaries. Checkpoints exclude, produce hierarchy, and restrict access through state agents who are empowered to monitor social behavior and control flows of circulation. Security details at checkpoints in Lahore routinely harass and demand bribes from drivers, discriminating based on class, gender, caste, ethnicity and likeliness of stimulant and narcotic consumption. The public discourse on safety considers the bomb blasts as the result of actions of people from outside the city, ostensibly non-Lahori’s, but through this infra-structure of in/security the figure of the foreigner as outsider and terrorist is collapsed into tensions regarding difference that arise from within Lahori society.

In the affluent, residential area of Cantonment, for example, checkpoints are now veritable tollbooths, with automated service lanes for residents. What was a temporary structure put in place after the spate of bombings has now concretized into a permanent entity. Defence Housing Authority (DHA) is another case in point. This upper class residential development is managed by the military and has checkpoints, guards, and barriers placed at points of entry between it and Charrar Pind, a village that actually predates the construction of Defence. Any departure from Charrar necessitates traveling through Defence, in which many of its residents are employed as domestic labor. As a result the residents of Charrar are defacto criminalized and policed as potential threats. The spatial arrangement of concrete barriers at the village’s policed entrance forces people and vehicles to navigate through it slowly, with the checkpoint functioning as a space of compression filtering movement uni-directionally. The interiority of Charrar village is involuted and becomes the outside captured within the newer suburban residential development of Defence, which strangulates it. This checkpoint targets class and caste difference in a way that distinguishes it from the “temporary” checkpoints that surface on Mall Road and the toll both in Cantonment. Discussions regarding the rise of securitization after the pervasive bomb blasts elides this internal friction between class and caste, villagers, suburban residents, military developers and foreigners. In its most pernicious aspect securitized re-sponses to perceived threats from within the city are constantly justified by invoking the refrain of threats from outside, by which the architecture in/securitization surreptitiously continues while the city has not become any safer for its inhabitants.

We have to question whether securitization processes indicate a safer city or one that is made all the more threatening through these devices and practices. It is also critical that we disentangle the idea of the foreigner, citizen and resident in order to see just whom it is that the city is protecting itself from. Since 2012, when I finished the research for this project, a new spate of bombings has occurred in which the targets are claimed by an ever expanding network of non-state actors that includes ethnic separatists and Pakistani Taliban splinter groups. The most recent attacks in 2015 include an attack on a police headquarters and a Christian church. The increased securitization by state actors must be rendered visible and interrogated alongside attacks by non-state actors, particularly at this time when securitization grows while targeted assassinations on individuals and minorities continues unabated in Lahore. I began this essay by writing that Lahore looks like a city at war. After having described both the increased securitization measures alongside the deductions I was able to make based on my mapping of the bomb blasts, the question remains — who exactly is the city at war with?