The representation of a zone of conflict is key to the perpetuation of power over it. I thus began the story of Gilgit-Baltistan in the first chapter by problematizing how the region is constructed within the nationalist/statist imagination of Pakistan, through an exclusionary and silencing narrative of beauty. In this final chapter, I broaden my analytical frame to transnational regimes of knowledge, and demonstrate how Gilgit-Baltistan has been constructed within such regimes through a problematic narrative of terror. My purpose is to emphasize how political subjection in ‘hot zones’—such as Gilgit-Baltistan, Kashmir, and Pakistan—is overdetermined by both national and transnational logics of truth and knowledge, and that the affect, effect, and violence of such knowledge must be unravelled in order to demystify the region and its predicament. Moreover, the narratives of beauty and terror themselves produce the region as an affect: regions seem to acquire and produce a feeling—an aura as it were, an aura of space and sociality such that invoking ‘Northern Pakistan’ or ‘Gilgit-Baltistan’ conjures immediately a set of images and feelings that shape how one sees, senses, and receives the region. This chapter hence unpacks the image-feelings of fear, terror, and humanitarian care that have recently been carved on the body of Gilgit-Baltistan, under conditions of empire and the so-called war on terror.

The point of entry for my analysis is the immensely popular biography of the American humanitarian Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time (2006), which is primarily set in Gilgit-Baltistan, and was originally published in hardcover as Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations …One School at a Time. Through this text, Gilgit-Baltistan suddenly became the prime terrain to ‘fight terror’, ‘build nations’, and promote peace through schools in Muslim lands, in the context of the US-led war on terror. The text deserves attention not only because it visibilizes Gilgit-Baltistan nationally and globally through a misplaced narrative of terror, but also because it provides a larger template for combining a discourse on terrorism with a discourse on poverty, development, and humanitarianism in the production of Muslim others. Despite the scandal that revealed Mortenson's intellectual and philanthropic deceit—an exposé in which my own writing played a role—the discourse embodied by Three Cups of Tea continues to be stable and widespread.