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This essay argues that the “gendered attention” afforded to the “war on terror” (WoT), both in the West and in the case of Pakistan, has yielded merely two channels of representation for Muslim women. Women victims of the war have had the opportunity to serve as martyrs of Western imperialist designs against Islam, or Islamist women in Pakistan have received scholarly tributes for their roles as “agentive” bearers of male nationalist and Islamist cultural politics, simply by virtue of their faith-based politics. This renders women as the real losers of the WoT, because a decade on, Muslim women continue to be celebrated only narrowly in terms of their “religious/pietist agency”, and continue to serve either as subjects for many PhD theses, or as a male political tool of religio-nationalism. Neither role has served as a driver of women’s particularised personal or political rights in substantive ways in Pakistan