Pakistan: "clear and present danger"
Please note that the views expressed by the author of this feature do not necessarily reflect the views of Asia New Zealand Foundation.
No further proof is needed of the rising power of the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan than the attack in late April 2009 on an army convoy sent to stabilise Bruner, a district just 100 km from the capital, Islamabad.
The militants, newly arrived from the Swat Valley, had become increasingly assertive in Buner, setting up checkpoints in villages, occupying government buildings and sending out armed patrols, despite government concessions aimed at restoring peace in the region.
Pakistan’s allies, and even moderates within the country, had earlier expressed dismay when president Asif Ali Zardari bowed to Taliban pressure for the imposition of Islamic law (actually, what has been termed a ‘brutal’ Taliban interpretation of Sharia) in Malakand — a huge area encompassing a third of the North West Frontier Province — in return for an end to 18 months of fighting. The United States went so far as to accuse Pakistan’s leaders of abdicating to the Taliban. The government’s own expectation — unrealistic then as now — was that having agreed the peace deal the Taliban in turn would lay down their weapons and forsake their uncompromising ways, allowing the police and other instruments of state in North West Frontier Province to function once again.
In reality, the Taliban used their bases in the Swat Valley, where they have already forced the closure of all girls’ schools, as springboards into Bruner and other districts. Although later saying that they would pull back from Bruner, they wasted no time in crushing local opposition, looting the offices of international aid and development agencies, taking over mosques in the district and enlisting new recruits.
What makes Bruner a watershed is that for many months locals resisted the Taliban, forming small private militias whose volunteers effectively fought the militants until the region’s commissioner, Javed Mohammad, ordered them to be disbanded. This, along with the army’s apparent lack of resolve, led many residents to abandon the struggle or leave the district.
The government’s declared policy of dialogue and reconciliation with the Taliban is problematic, given the well-attested and unequivocal hard-line agenda of the militants. Muslim Khan, a spokesperson for the Swat Taliban, is on record as saying that their aim was the enforcement of Sharia law throughout Pakistan. And when Maulana Aziz, the jailed radical chief cleric of Islamabad’s Red Mosque, celebrated his own release, it was with a sermon telling followers that the ‘Islamic’ system was the destiny not only of Pakistan but of the entire world.
The radical leader Sufi Muhammad, considered a moderate by army and government alike, ratcheted the rhetoric further, saying that the country’s legal system, democracy and civil society were ‘systems of infidels’ and should be done away with.
Nor have the insurgents felt cowed by the power of the state. In the past 12 months some 1,400 people have been killed by terrorist attacks, including 692 in North West Frontier Province. Moreover, the attacks, which have become increasingly brazen, are often carried out far from their mountainous safe havens. They include suicide attacks on a security convoy and on a mosque in the town of Jamrud, and attacks on a police station in Islamabad and a police academy in Lahore, the latter culminating in a bloody eight-hour battle. It was also in Lahore that the touring Sri Lankan cricket team was ambushed, it is thought by Tehrik-e-Taleban (TeT), perhaps aided by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a group with suspected links to al-Queda. The attack, which left a bus driver and six police dead, unnerved cricket organisers and has cast a shadow over future touring plans for South Asia’s premier game.
The TeT, led by the notorious warlord Baitullah Mehsud, has all but driven government forces from its Waziristan homeland and is said to have a terror network extending as far as the southern port city of Karachi. The Wazir tribe, with which Mehsud has formed an unlikely alliance (they are traditional enemies), straddles the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The tribe is believed to shelter senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama Bin Laden.
The only things to have penetrated Waziristan in recent months have been US military drone aircraft, and drone attacks, supported by the Obama administration as an instrument of policy, have proved to be a two-edged sword. Hampered by a shortage of on-the-ground intelligence, the strikes have not hit many strategically important targets. They have, however, killed some 340 people since August 2008, many of them civilians, and as a result have served to unite the militant factions and feed anti-US sentiment among the local population.
Against this background, operations by Pakistani soldiers, such as that launched in late April against the Taliban in the Lower Dir district, have left the government open to Taliban claims that it has taken American ‘blood money’ to declare war on its own citizens.
The truth is quite different. The army has often shown itself reluctant to mount effective action against the insurgents except when its own immediate interests are threatened, and has yet to demonstrate that it considers them to be a serious national concern. Instead, it remains preoccupied by India and continues to deploy some 80 percent of its forces along its eastern border. The sending of a mere 300 soldiers to Bruner in April was in stark contrast to the Kashmir crisis of 2003, when as many as one million troops were mobilised against India.
Then there are the links claimed by frustrated US commanders in Afghanistan between Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the insurgents. They accuse the ISI, among other things, of warning the insurgents about impending strikes. The head of US Central Command, General Petraeus, has gone further, saying that some of the militant groups have actually been established by the ISI.
Whatever the situation militarily, the fate of the insurgency in Pakistan is likely to depend on the attitude of the country’s civilian population. Locals in the tribal areas and in the more densely populated Swat Valley embraced Sharia law largely because the state’s judicial system was cumbersome and expensive, and cases gathered dust while awaiting a hearing. Add to that the property damage inflicted on the largely poor people of the mountain regions by Pakistani soldiers and American aircraft, and it is clear that much goodwill has been lost.
The best counter to the insurgency may come from another brand of Islam — Sufism. Pakistan is a Sufi nation, and this mystical, non-violent form of Islam is at the heart of the country’s culture. But its ability to withstand hard-line Wahhabism — a puritanical Sunni Muslim sect originating in the desert tribes of Saudi Arabia — will depend on a change of policy by Pakistan’s political and military masters: two power elites who seldom see eye to eye.
In a foretaste of what may unfold, extremists from a new Saudi-funded madrasa at the foot of the Khyber Pass have attacked the nearby shrine of the eighteenth-century Sufi mystic Rahman Baba, having found its emphasis on poetry and music not to their taste. Such clashes are likely to increase, given that the number of madrasas has soared in Pakistan — from 245 at independence in 1945 to a staggering 6870 in 2001. This in itself can be put down to another shortcoming by Pakistan’s leaders — a failure to address the collapse of state education.
Militant Islam is very unforgiving of poor governance.
by Vaughan Yarwood
Images used under Creative Commons license.
