The portrayal of Pakistan as whited sepulture against the Taliban: a case study of American media

The changing narratives and portrayal of Taliban in the US media has been a subject of much deliberation among the media connoisseurs ranging from their heroic portrayal during the Afghan-Soviet war to desperados in the post 9/11 world landscape. For this particular reason, the present study is an effort to locate how the proxy actor (Pakistan) has been linked to the Taliban by the US media in the post 9/11 world. This research takes Time magazine as a case study and articles related to Pakistan are selected encompassing the decade following 9/11. The corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis has been applied using Graph Coll and Wordsmith. The analysis has been done on three levels: (i) the time-specific pattern of the node linked with the Pakistani context, (ii) the most significant and strong collocates of the node, and (iii) the semantic categorization of the collocates. The analysis reveals that Pakistan has been linked with Taliban groups throughout the decade in some years more frequently than others. The second level of analysis reveals that the Taliban groups are statistically significantly and strongly connected with Pakistan. The third level of analysis reveals many aspects such as ambiguity pertaining to Taliban and associated groups, their ties with Pakistan, and Pakistan playing a dodging game with Taliban groups as well as the US government. Such media portrayal of Pakistan as being a white sepulture reveals a political world where binaries (Us vs. Them) in the case of Pakistan do not exist.

Ayisha Khurshid