What Went Wrong? A Critique on Pakistan’s War on Terror

This paper explores the collective loss experienced by a family and a community of ‘Mir Ali’ in Fatima Bhutto’s The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013). By using Butler, 2003 and Moglen, 2005 theories of loss (personal and social), personal and collective mourning, and melancholia, the study reveals how people of Pakistan’s backward tribal area, Mir Ali, have suffered the trauma, loss, mourning and melancholy on personal and collective level during the ‘War on Terror’ by being alienated from their country. A detailed study of characters (Aman, Sammara, Mina, Hayat, and Sikandar) emphasizes how undermining it is to persons and families when they are tossed into rings of fire that expand and cause not only individual loss but irreparable communal or collective loss.