Is the War Lost?

The next day, he got an anonymous phone call asking him if he could do something about the sale of the pornographic CDs and DVDs there. “I assured the caller that I can,” Mr. Labha recalled, sitting in his basement office on a recent afternoon.

Within a day, the traders had handed over more than 60,000 pornographic videos and burned them in a bonfire as the city’s top government officials, the police and a large crowd looked on.

“We were not sure if the threats were made by the Taliban or not,” Mr. Labha said. “But the bomb blasts in Garhi Shahu had made us apprehensive. We didn’t want to take any chances.”