At first glance, Glocal Terror in South Asia: Tracing the Roots in Geopolitics and the Tragedy of Afghanistan appears to be another account of terrorism centred on Afghanistan and its long conflict. But Anju Gupta’s book is far more than a chronology of terror attacks or militant movements. Instead, it traces the geopolitical roots of instability in South Asia and explains how Afghanistan became the theatre where local conflicts evolved into a global jihadist enterprise.
Published by
Simon & Schuster India, the book examines how internal developments in Afghanistan, interventions by external powers, shifts in the Arab world and Pakistan’s strategic calculations together fuelled terrorism and extremism across South Asia and beyond.
Ms Gupta, a veteran strategic and security expert and former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, chronicles nearly five decades of events, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the geopolitical churn of 2025. Yet, the book goes beyond simply recounting history. It attempts to connect the interplay between State actors, non-state groups and ideological movements that transformed what was initially a local Afghan jihad into a transnational phenomenon.
One of the book’s strengths lies in the way it prepares the reader for this complex narrative. The placement of a supplementary section titled ‘Brief History of Afghanistan: Timeline of Key Events’ between the introduction and the first chapter works effectively as a bridge for readers unfamiliar with Afghanistan’s turbulent history. The concise overview, beginning with the British defeat and Afghanistan’s independence and moving through the Soviet invasion to the US withdrawal, provides the context necessary to understand the developments that follow.
The book argues that the US-USSR proxy war in Afghanistan became the foundation for the decade-long Afghan jihad, whose consequences were felt long after the Cold War ended. According to Ms Gupta, the conflict opened space for a wide range of actors — including the US, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the CIA, ISI, Afghan Mujahideen, Al Qaeda and later ISIS — to converge around geopolitical interests that reshaped regional security.
What emerged, she argues, was the evolution of a ‘local jihad’ into a ‘global jihad’. Ms Gupta carefully explains how competing ideological currents and political movements intertwined with foreign policy objectives. She maps the tensions between Afghan jihad and Soviet communism, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s Free Officers movement, as well as pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism. These ideological contests, combined with the interests of powerful states, gradually mobilised jihad as a shared project of the global Islamic community.
The book describes how, by the 1980s, the Afghan jihad was being actively promoted across the Gulf region. The publication of Abdullah Azzam’s 1984 fatwa, The Defence of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation after Faith, provided religious legitimacy to the idea of joining jihad in foreign Muslim territories perceived to be under attack.
Ms Gupta identifies this as a defining moment in the shift from local to global jihad, further accentuated by the arrival of Osama bin Laden and his associates, who helped mobilise Arab fighters into Afghanistan through Makhtab al-Khadmat (MAK), a militant support organisation based in Peshawar. Saudi media support further amplified the campaign, encouraging the movement of fighters and resources into the region.
Ms Gupta argues that the infrastructure and networks created during this period did not disappear after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pakistan continued to provide operational and logistical support that later fed terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere. The book suggests that these ideologies, support systems and militant infrastructures effectively became long-term laboratories of terrorism affecting South Asia and beyond.
For Indian readers, one of the more compelling arguments in the book concerns Kashmir. Ms Gupta examines why Kashmir, despite Pakistan’s efforts, never became another Afghanistan-style theatre for Arab jihadists. She attributes this to the distinct cultural identity and political consciousness of Kashmiris, as well as a disconnect between Arab fighters and the Kashmiri context. Arab militants, she notes, were more drawn to theatres such as Bosnia, Chechnya and Tajikistan. Yet Pakistan’s inability to replicate the Afghan model in Kashmir did not prevent the continuation of cross-border terrorism directed against India.
The narrative also explores how geopolitical ambitions and ideological mobilisation became mutually reinforcing. State-backed interventions, militant recruitment, propaganda networks and religious legitimisation all merged into a larger framework that survived the end of the Cold War. In Ms Gupta’s telling, the forces unleashed during the Afghan jihad acquired a momentum of their own.
The concluding sections of the book focus on the implications of US counter-terrorism strategy. Ms Gupta argues that, from the American perspective of preventing attacks on the US homeland, the strategy may have worked. However, she suggests that the broader consequences for South Asia have been far more destabilising. The region, she warns, continues to face evolving security threats shaped by decades of geopolitical manoeuvring.
The book also discusses current geopolitical developments and outlines possible ‘Black Swan’ events that may emerge from the region’s continuing instability. Seen from a South Asian perspective, Ms Gupta suggests, these possibilities appear less hypothetical than they might from a Western lens.
A notable strength of Glocal Terror is its ability to simplify highly complex issues involving geopolitics, extremist ideologies, strategic interests and state policy. The book consciously avoids heavy theoretical debates and academic jargon, relying instead on a narrative style that keeps the reader engaged. This approach makes it accessible to first-time readers while still offering enough depth for students, teachers, policy practitioners and geopolitical enthusiasts.
Indian readers, in particular, may find chapter five — ‘Poster Boys of Glocal Jihad in Af-Pak’ — especially engaging because it deals with personalities and developments closer to home. The book’s treatment of events often makes them appear immediate and contemporary rather than distant historical episodes.
For scholars and practitioners of South Asian security studies, the book also functions as a useful reference work, drawing connections between historical developments, ideological movements and present-day geopolitical realities. At a time when India is recalibrating its engagement with Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Ms Gupta’s work raises important questions about how peace and security in South Asia, particularly Afghanistan, should be understood.
Perhaps the only drawback noted in the review is the absence of an index which would have made cross-referencing easier in a work covering such a large and interconnected subject.
Author: Anju Gupta
256 pages
Price: ₹699
(The reviewer is a Research Fellow, Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA).
