This chapter provides a rare insight into the strategic use of local media labor in extending neoimperialism, an example of Pashtun journalists whose work transforms in the wake of a war/military confrontation in Pakistan's bordering region with Afghanistan. In 1979, at the peak of the Cold War politics, hundreds of Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in harsh winter to occupy Kabul's snowy roads. No strangers to Afghanistan, the Soviet troops had apparently intervened in support of the pro-Soviet Afghan president, Nur Mohammad Taraki. They faced no official resistance, therefore. About seven hundred miles west of Kabul, however, generals in Pakistan were sulking. In the country's scenic capital, Islamabad, dictator Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan was already in trouble. He had toppled Z. A. Bhutto's elected government before hanging him in jail, a political murder that followed him like a ghost, earning him worldwide condemnation. The Soviets not just provided the Pakistani general with a chance to divert domestic tension focusing on events outside the border, but the local ethnic reporters also got subsidiary role of reporting the events across the border in Afghanistan. The war, in other words, became training as well as a launching pad for the emergence of the first generation of local reporters, a role reassigned to “fixers” in the post-9/11 Pakistan.

Provoking nationalism on domestic front, Pakistan military presented the “godless” Soviets as a threat to Islam and, hence, Pakistan. If the Soviets “were allowed to occupy Afghanistan, it would then be but a short step to Pakistan,” Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, a military strategist in Zia-ul-Haq's dictatorial regime, wrote later in his widely famous book (Yousaf & Adkin, 2001, p. 23). The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy chief General Akhtar Abdur Rahman in his presentation to Zia recommended that Pakistan back the Afghan resistance, not just for “defending Islam but also Pakistan” (pp. 22–23). Zia did not find trouble in mending his US fences and winning over the capitalist world. In his book-turned-movie, Charlie Wilson's War (2007), George Crile writes about this operation: