<p>Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in cultural gatherings and communal spaces, this article explores how the poetic expressions of the Pashtun belt offer a counter-discourse to the necropolitical regimes of the Pakistani state and non-state actors. Against the backdrop of colonial histories and the necropolitics in the ‘war on terror,’ in which Pashtun lands and bodies are instrumentalized through surveillance, militarization, and the distribution of death, this paper argues that local resistance represented in Pashto poetry, including folk couplets (<i>tapa</i> and <i>kakari ghare</i>), articulates a politics of life embodied in shared cultural practices. Rather than valorising death, these poetic forms construct non-war subjectivities of collective memory, embodied resistance through music and dance, and an inclusive future in women’s education. Thus, they defy both colonial tropes of militarized identities of the British colonial era perpetuated by the Pakistani state and the nature of ‘resistance tied to death’ in the necropolitical order. This paper argues that, in the context of the Pashtun borderlands, resistance resides not in war and the sacrifice of life, but in sustaining non-war life, which opens space for its organization into non-violent indigenous rights movements.</p>