Historically, and more so since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and following the transforming events of September 11, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the two neighbouring Southwest Asian nations became the centrepiece of sustained global geopolitical, military and intelligence pursuits. Amidst military campaigns and militant attacks daily claiming numerous lives, along with the destruction of infrastructure and the environment, a comparatively less developed region in South Asia was catapulted into a cause célèbre of some of the longest and most expensive wars that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its allies have ever fought, costing them in the trillions besides providing substantial justification for the militants to act upon their own agendas. Southwestern Asia – sometimes simplified as Af–Pak – not a core area in the erstwhile cold war yet home to the historic and ancient Indus Valley civilization characterized by diversity and cultural fertility, has been transformed into a core region in what President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair and scores of their allies rushed to call the ‘war on terror’, or what some saw as the ultimate clash of cultures or even of fundamentalisms. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan turned into the proverbial bull's eye for a whole generation of military planners, strategists, scholars, think tanks, spies, journalists and certainly the warriors, all imbued with professional or moral righteousness to pursue the new millennium's sustained and taxing confrontation in the valleys of the Hindu-Kush and the upper reaches of the Indus. Here, modern cave busters, ‘dumb bombs’, midnight search operations, the whisking of the bearded fellows to Bagram and Guantanamo, ever-escalating, round-the-clock predator drone (UAVs) flights unleashing Hellfire missiles, and a whole generation of suicide bombers wearing crudely made vests or planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) kept filling the cemeteries.