The old roads to Waziristan are haunted again. At night, the air smells of pine and gunpowder, and it hums with stories of men climbing down from the same mountains that once buried them. Somewhere between Mir Ali and North Waziristan, a soldier counts the hours till dawn. His radio crackles once, then dies. A shadow moves. A convoy burns. And by morning, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has claimed another victory.

We were promised these ghosts had been buried. Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the grand cleansing of 2014, was supposed to end the war that began with our silence. Yet here we are, in 2025, watching the same hills erupt with fire. The TTP, thought dismantled, is once again alive, more organised, more ideological, and far more ruthless than before. Their ambushes in Dera Ismail Khan, their roadside bombs in Tank, their assassinations in Swat, they come carrying guns and a grim reminder that endings here are only pauses between wars.

Farhat Taj, in her book Taliban and Anti-Taliban, warned of this long before most of us were listening. She wrote of a people caught between two wars, the one fought by militants, and the one fought in their name. She argued that the tribes of the former FATA were never Taliban sympathisers, never "fiercely autonomous savages" as caricatured by analysts in Islamabad or Washington. They were citizens abandoned to the chaos of strategic depth, their voices buried under drone hums and official lies.

In those pages, Taj describes jirgas........

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