When I visit Karachi, I take the pulse of cosmopolitanism. Is it still beating? How is it surviving the war? That is, the war for minds.

The war is the one for Islamization in Afghanistan and Pakistan and it has no borders. On June 9, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization convoy was attacked near Islamabad. Sixty containers were damaged, seven people killed. The attack was carried out by tribal Mehsud fighters. Supplies for Western troops in Afghanistan travel through Pakistan after arriving in the port city of Karachi.

Karachi is key for both sides. The murky war economy that is part of the Western-led campaigns against the Taliban is centred here. The Taliban raise money in Karachi through kidnappings for ransom as well as through the heroin trade. And the Taliban have Karachi-based Islamist political parties as allies.

I spent my early years on Hali Road in Karachi. Hali Road is wide and tree-lined, and the houses have art deco façades. In my parents' time, the place was peopled by judges, writers, cricket players and actors, and was in walking distance of bakeries, cafés, markets, parks and bookstores.

“Society,� where Hali Road is located, is an area as storied as The Plateau in Montreal or Chelsea in New York. Tens of thousands of Canadians from Karachi have their roots in Society. It was one of the first middle- and upper-middle-class neighbourhoods of Pakistan (housing many urban professionals) that developed in the new country of Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947.

My parents time of art deco living in Karachi, if I may put it that way, started to end when General Zia ul-Haq came to power in a coup in 1977. (He later died, in 1988, in an air crash.) His foreign policy was both anti-Indian and pro-American. He supported the U.S.-led proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviets – and he had a domestic policy of Islamization.

At age 18, I left Karachi, for Brooklyn, Toronto and Mumbai.

THE ISLAMIST CALL TO ARMS

I go to Pakistan on newspaper assignments, and when I do I visit Hali Road to check the cosmopolitan pulse. That pulse is under pressure from the puritanical jihadis, but in a world of contrasts, it still beats. Hali Road has changed over the years. Most of the houses look vacant because their young are elsewhere: Toronto and other Western cities, and the Gulf. Pakistan is the Muslim country with the greatest diaspora, and that emptying out shows up in these Society houses, which abide in genteel poverty. The walls are increasingly desecrated to fight or foment jihad.

The Taliban are not invisible attackers in Pakistan: They are present in letter and spirit, especially in Karachi. On the highways of Karachi, residents can see the 18-wheelers that carry goods for our troops. Even more important, in their neighbourhoods they can see the graffiti and the posters that market the Taliban ideology, which uses powerful cultural and religious metaphors to woo citizens to their cause. On the walls, one can see a war of ideas: an anti-woman, non-democratic, self-righteous ideology versus those of a cosmopolitan city. I've seen the campaign change radically over the years.

In 2000, while on assignment, I visited the working-class area of north Karachi, where the industrial work force lives in slum-like conditions, and came across the posterings of a new militant organization. These posters were unprecedented in their savviness and “global� message.

The poster depicts what it calls India's oppression through the arm bearing India's flag on its sleeve, holding a dagger dripping with blood. The headless man stands behind a mountain range (disputed Kashmir). The militant organization's black-and-white flag flies in the upper left corner.

Rehan Ansari for The Globe and Mail

The poster depicts what it calls India's oppression through the arm bearing India's flag on its sleeve, holding a dagger dripping with blood. The headless man stands behind a mountain range (disputed Kashmir). The militant organization's black-and-white flag flies in the upper left corner.

It seemed that these militants from Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Mohammed) were on the verge of some drastic action. They were. A year later, they kidnapped and killed Daniel Pearl. Around the same time, chilling posters started popping up around Hali Road and Society.

In 2004, I flew to Karachi to report two stories: one on U.S.- instigated Pakistan army action in the tribal areas, and one on the Pakistanis who had been deported to Karachi from the U.S. after the 9/11 crackdown on Muslim immigrants in New York. The graffiti and number of jihadi posters had grown since my last visit. Militants are quick to take advantage of Pakistani resentment to Western actions.

Yet the secular world seemed to be thriving. There were beer stores that sold locally made alcohol under a state-approved licence and the latest new proliferation, shops selling musical instruments.

On a spring trip this year, the tenor of the poster campaign had changed again. Like Jaish-e-Mohammed, militants laced their posters more and more with the noun “Mohammed� and not “Allah.� The call to arms is made in the name of a man and not a deity. They are not fighting for Allah, their ambitions are worldly, territorial, of the here and now.

But the militants have not won the war of the wall space. There is graffiti that directly challenge the jihadis. “Mullah Omar of the Taliban is a one-eyed monster� is painted boldly on the wall of the major mosque closest to Hali Road. That graffiti share the wall space with a poster celebrating a right-wing ideologue (based in Canada, according to his wiki entry). This ideologue is Maulana Tahir ul Qadri, who made the news this spring when he issued a fatwa against suicide bombing. However, he extolled the values of resentment on television the day of a major terrorist attack in Lahore.

The most striking juxtaposition I saw when I was last there was a woman walking next to a graffiti-scrawled wall: “We are against Seclarism� (sic), signed by the Jamiat (misspelled as “Jamit�), the student wing of the Jamaat Islami, an Islamist party. A woman walking her dog without a head scarf on the open street is a nightmarish image for the Jamiat: She is walking unescorted, and uncovered. The Jamiat enforces moral policing on Pakistani campuses and was powerful during the rule of the Western-backed Gen. Zia. Along the same wall is scrawled anonymously, “SEX RULZ.�

Most explicably is a colourful poster that announces a protest meeting on “Kashmir.� That one word in the poster refers to the dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmiri territory and people. Indians control the flow of rivers into Pakistan. The script calls for caravans of protesters, a potent image in the poetry and religious. The determined group holds frequent meetings though they are not yet popular.

Cosmopolitanism still thrives. Just off the main drag off Tariq Road is a store selling hijabs for “everyday wear� across from a shop selling “Beatles Instruments.�

This battle for the minds of Pakistanis seems to be at its zenith: There is more debate in the media and in living rooms, and artists are more attuned to it than ever.

This, for me, is a hopeful sign for Pakistan.

Rehan Ansari, ethnically a Sunni Muslim, is a freelance journalist who spends his time between Toronto and Karachi. An excerpt of Unburdened, his new play, will be at CEPA gallery's Art of War festival in Buffalo, N.Y., Aug. 18, 19, 20.