Home to a transnational highway long traveled by warriors and militaries from Alexander, Genghis and the Mughals to the contemporary United States’ mighty war machine, the Pashtun Belt has been forged in the furnace of death games, a battleground for every empire seeking dominion. In this imperialist history, the nineteenth century's rivalry between two superpowers of their time, Great Britain and Russia, is a peak moment that is much hyped in academic and popular discourses. These fights for control over the region's land and routes militarized the local life, shaping the various local ways and means of representation. The birth of modern local journalism, for instance, is an important regional development that emerged on the cusp of these imperialist epochs, yet we don't know much about it. Filling the gap in the literature, this chapter maps the origin of the local media landscape, situating the journalism's role in these deathly games within the larger historical context of the region.

The Pashtun Belt, itself, is essentially an imperialist construction—a geography, cartography and demography—that the British Indian State used as bulwark against Russian influence from the north (Ainslee, 1977; Siddique, 2014; Spain, 1977). For instance, the British “forward policy” in the late nineteenth century was meant to establish strategic control over routes and regions connecting northwestern fringes of United India with Afghanistan, which, then, curtailed local freedoms, leaving Pashtuns without viable means of subsistence. Available to be used as a war fodder, the British raised thousands of them as soldiers before sending them to fight in the First and Second World Wars. This imperial design I aim to identify using Achille Mbembe's (2003) necropolitics. The term “necropolitics” means, among other things, a deadly regime that drains life of its prospects; it stands for a regime of deathly power that thrives on impunity; it is a default state of murderous existence in which death prevails as a defiant rule. How this regime took its form in the Pashtun Belt and how it relates to the origins of the local media landscape is my inquiry in this chapter.