And so, like Shah Mahmud before him, Gulkhan set off on a lonely trek to meet the enemy, struggling up a goat track to an advance post at the top of 10,000-foot Zagh Sang Mountain.
"But if," I said, "you picture to yourself that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating.
The abrupt end of the Cold War necessitated a new argument, and the rising lethality of transnational terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s provided one: Israel and the United States shared a common enemy and struggle in the "war on terror".
Complacency could be an enemy in that struggle.
The first is Islamic fanaticism, a formidable enemy in the struggle for cultural survival.
Sure, you wouldn't want Claire Underwood as an enemy in the struggle against male oppression, but a reliable ally?
The film, "Fear and Desire," was about four soldiers lost behind enemy lines and struggling to regain their identities as well as their home base, and it was full of lines like "We spend our lives looking for our real names, our permanent addresses".
The government seemed keen to make out that the enemy they were struggling to defeat was big enough to deserve its own sinister meta-narrative – that it was some despicable new fusion of commerce and ideology – rather than just 300 peasants living in the countryside.
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"After that, the battles may look more like the battles of WWI or WWII, where you're struggling to find the enemy first, and they're struggling to find you".
"The main speaker said, 'I know you think of Crow as working with the enemy – but we too struggled for water rights, treaty rights'," Banks said.
