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........

© Arab News Pakistan