Lahore's Architecture Of In/ Security

Lahore today looks like a city at war. One of the greatest unacknowl-edged casualties of the United States’ “war on terror” has been the cities — and citizenry — of Pakistan. The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban from power in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.1 In 1985, sixteen years prior, President Ronald Reagan equated the Taliban mujahideen who had defeated the Soviet’s in Afghanistan with “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.”2 This presidential stance has obviously changed since. In 2008 the US committed another surge of troops to Afghanistan due to the continued presence of the Taliban in the region. 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.3 Militants within Pakistan have retaliated by targeting police and security sites in cities throughout the country. Lahore is just one unsung casualty of 67the war that links Lahore and New York City across disparate geog-raphies, through the legacy of US policy and Pakistani collaboration during the Cold War.4 As Eqbal Ahmed presciently said: “These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost.”