The rutted street is strangely empty. The only sound comes from brittle leaves crackling in the hot wind and then, far away, a soldier’s warning, “Don’t touch anything!”

Unlike in many other parts of Miramshah that the Pakistan army has walked or driven us through, there are no charred houses and storefronts on this street. No billboards, sheets of metal and pipes lying beside damaged buildings. No bullets pockmarking walls everywhere. No cars, their chassis burnt and twisted.

Just a deserted street.

The blue gate of one house is unlocked. I push and it opens into a messy living room: the result of the army’s rushed house-to-house search operations or just a life suddenly interrupted as its inhabitants fled not knowing what would happen next or when they would return, terrified by what the army would do to regain control of its lost city?

A brown sofa is piled high with clothes and a pair of olive green sandals dotted with plastic diamantes lies overturned on top of it. Woollen caps neatly hang on pegs.

Above the mess, two posters are taped to the wall: one of the New York skyline looking merry as Christmas itself; another of a city I cannot identify but in which an enlivened downtown is the backdrop to a glistening bullet train rushing to an unknown destination.

The quintessence of hope? In a siege as long as eternity, the ultimate symbols of What We’re Fighting For?

The needle of a sewing machine still pins down a piece of cloth in the house next door.

Only our dreams have not been humiliated.

Not far from these isolated streets with their homes still intact, more destruction lurks. Booby traps and explosives hidden away in undiscovered hideouts present the main danger to the soldiers who say they now control the territory one month after a military operation began.

Miramshah in pictures: After the troops march in

Already, says the army, entire neighbourhoods in Miramshah have been reduced to rubble after caches of explosives hidden by militants in homes, shops and mosques detonated. The military’s air and ground offensive has compounded the destruction.

From the open verandas of a major mosque, we descend into a dark maze of tunnels: rooms lead into more rooms, bookshelves open into hidden staircases, cupboards hide secret storage spaces, training rooms and living quarters that offer a portal into the lives of the fierce militant fighters who have fought the Pakistan army for years.

Overwhelmed by the sophisticated infrastructure, a thought arises that is so naive I almost laugh out loud: “Where was the state when they were building all this?”

Truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself.

On a cratered road framed by the skeletons of damaged buildings, a red flag marks the point up until which the army has cleared the area of IEDs.

Inside what the army says was a suicide bomber training camp, a colonel almost jumps out of his skin as I absentmindedly reach to switch the lights on in a dark room, wanting to get a better look at its contents.“Don’t. Touch. Anything.”

The fighter’s impatience with the inferior chronicler.

I step back, mumbling an apology, and he says, “Don’t be sorry. We just don’t know what’s strapped to what.”

The siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns.

At a warehouse-type bomb manufacturing plant, IEDs made of blue plastic kegs filled with white explosives are ready for use, lined up by the wall. 

In an adjacent room, a home-made lamp — a piece of wire connected to a crunched can of Fanta — hangs from a hook on the low ceiling, casting a hallowing glow on a map of Pakistan on the wall. One of its edges has come untaped.

“The militants worked and lived in the same place. This was their life,” a brigadier said.

From the roof of a half-built flour mill, a brigadier points to the sprawling wall of the military’s Miramshah headquarters inside which the Pakistan army was confined before the operation began while militants cruised into villages on pickup trucks, carried out public beheadings and constructed a sophisticated infrastructure of terror whose ripples were felt around the world.

The vista is tragic and there are just two things to behold: that sprawling headquarters and around it, the enormous wreck of a city, boundless, and lonely.

From here, standing on the highest point in Miramshah, watching this last great war that they tell us will “change everything” is humbling — and frightening: one can only hope this war, indefensible like all others, is not another one dangerously authorised by the dreams of second-hand glory dreamt by those who sleep in their own homes far, far away from the nightmarish reality of the battlefield.

Is this, finally, the climactic moment on a long trajectory of Pakistan’s unravelling?

There could be no better place to be sceptical about the power of states and certain of the indignity of wars.

And yet, there is also, from this outpost on the front line of an uncertain future, a magical-realist tone to the whole scene: a once-upon-a-time air that says something good may just be born from this hell.

If we lose the ruins nothing will be left.

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2014