Approximately 8,036 miles separate San Antonio from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. But the distance between the two isn’t just one of geography; it’s one of understanding, which Madiha Afzal sought to lessen in a lecture Thursday for the World Affairs Council of San Antonio.

“In all of this broader picture that we see of (Pakistan), we don’t really get a picture of the ordinary Pakistani,” Afzal said. “What does the ordinary Pakistani look like? How does he or she think?”

Afzal is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, adjunct assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of “Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society and the State.” She grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and in Montreal. Afzal said she wanted to paint a more nuanced portrait of the average Pakistani’s worldview than that typically presented in discussions of the country and its people.

“What we see is, either they’re victims of terrorism or ... they are villains,” Afzal said. But fieldwork she conducted and polling data she’s studied have convinced her things aren’t so binary.

In interviews with students and other civilians, the predominant narratives she heard about terrorism were ones of retaliation (attacks as a response to harmful U.S. policies), conspiracy (U.S. and Indian forces said to be secretly responsible for attacks) and religious war (attacks justified in the name of building an Islamic state).

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Afzal also cited a poll of Pakistanis that found that 89 percent of respondents believe that attacks against civilians in the name of Islam are never justified. But she noted that sentiments toward America have been damaged by things such as drone strikes and the raid that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden — both seen as incursions on Pakistani sovereignty — as well as broader feelings of abandonment or enslavement at America’s hands.

“While the majority of Pakistanis reject al-Qaida’s violence against U.S. targets, they will say that they actually have some sympathy for al-Qaida’s attitudes toward the United States,” Afzal said.

For Afzal, the main driver of these sentiments is the Pakistani state, which is defined by two underlying assumptions: that Pakistan is inherently Muslim and that it faces an existential threat from India.

“The government, the army, they function in (an) ostensibly secular way, but the underlying motivations are again for strategic purposes, for political purposes, (and) tend to be ... (built) on these two pillars,” she said.

Through mechanisms ranging from legal, as with blasphemy laws, to educational, using school curricula, the Pakistani state has spread a narrative that “refuses to acknowledge the existential threat that radicalism poses,” Afzal said. This system doesn’t necessarily promote radicalism but does make it easier for Pakistanis to accept “extremist propaganda” from elsewhere, she said.

As long as these underlying sentiments remain unchanged, she concluded, terrorism will remain an issue in the country.

“Pakistan has not stamped down on extremism really hard because it has been defined by the two pillars that really foster extremism,” Afzal said. “And it doesn’t see these ideological pillars as a problem any more.”

Brian Contreras is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. | Twitter: @_B_Contreras_