A fundamental problem in the analysis of the 'war on terror' is a general predisposition in the West towards reflecting on violence as cause and violence as solution. In other words, a militant version of political Islam is treated as the problem, and a war to eliminate it is viewed as the appropriate response. My approach, which suggests a different way, breaks down the problem into two parts. Firstly, I investigate the history of West-Islam relations in order to gauge the impact of Western discourses on the development of political Islam and its causal impact on the 'war on terror'. Secondly, I extend this approach to examine the conflict in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan for an indepth analysis of the intractable and protracted nature of this conflict in that setting and a new way to deal with it. The thesis argues that the construction of 'otherness' in the Christian-Western discourses played a critical part in the defining of Muslim identity, and resulted in a dehumanising and demonising tradition of viewing Muslims down the ages and reacting to them. It further argues that Muslim responses to these discourses produced movements and organisations whose worldviews were influenced by the West itself. The emergence of reformists, revivalists, fundamentalists, Islamists, radicals, extremists and Jihadists all, in varying degrees, took note not only of the long history of encounter between the West and Islam but also the way that those encounters were framed.