My Country, Caving to the Taliban

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By Mohammed Hanif

Sunday, April 26, 2009

KARACHI The day after Pakistan's government signed a peace deal with the Taliban allowing them to implement their own version of sharia in the Swat Valley, there was a traffic jam at a square in downtown Mingora, the main town in the region. The square, Green Chowk, has acquired the nickname Khooni Chowk, or Bloody Square, because the Taliban used to string up their victims there. "Look at this." A shopkeeper pointed to the hubbub. "This is what people wanted, to get out and do business. Take the security forces away, take the Taliban away, and we can get on with our lives." He, like many Pakistanis, believed that the deal with the Taliban was the only way to stop bullet-riddled bodies from turning up at Khooni Chowk.

Mingora is not a backwater, not part of the Wild West that foreign journalists invoke whenever they talk about the Taliban. It's bursting with aspiration; it has law schools, a medical college, a nurses' training institute. There is even a heritage museum. Yet when peace arrived on Feb. 16, all the women vanished. They were not in the streets or in the offices, not even in the bazaar, which sells nothing but fabric, bags, shoes and fashion accessories.

The music market vanished, too. All 400 shops. The owner of one had converted it into a kebab joint. "This is sharia," he spat at his grill, which hissed with more smoke than fire. Across from his stand, a barber had hung the obligatory "No un-Islamic haircuts, no shaves" sign and was taking an early morning nap, his face covered with a newspaper.

This, I was told, was the price of peace.

As a Taliban insurgency gains strength in Pakistan, my country seems to be preparing to surrender. In areas where the Taliban formally hold sway, such as Swat, people have bowed to their guns. And in the heartland, in Punjab and other regions, there is a disquieting acceptance of the inevitability of the Taliban's rise to power.

Over the past two years, Pakistani civil society has driven a military dictator from power and managed to force an elected government to restore our top judges to the bench. But when it comes to the Taliban, it seems incapable of speaking with one voice.

There is little sense of an impending crisis, just the blithe belief that the Taliban are not as bad as they seem, and that in any case, Pakistan's fractious government and security services are no match for these men with beards and guns. I hear vague comparisons with the days before the Iranian revolution; the only problem is that we don't seem to have a Khomeini, at least not yet. And we do have nuclear bombs.

In my hometown in Punjab, a businessman friend was inspired by the news from Swat. "If two hundred Taliban take over our town, then we can all start making our own decisions. Who needs this corrupt system anyway?" My friend is a typical middle-class conservative Pakistani, and people in cities across the country share his excitement. I tried to reason with him: "You drop your daughters off at school every morning, you always have music on in your car. That would be unthinkable if they take over." He hesitated and then rolled out the explanation that most urban Pakistanis offer.

"What they are doing in Swat is their Pashtun culture," he said, speaking of the ethnic group that dominates western Pakistan. "Islam says education is compulsory for every man and woman. And we Punjabis don't have their culture."

I have confronted the same naive assertion on TV talk shows and in Urdu newspapers: The Taliban ideology is sound; it's their methods that need to be modified. Somehow people hope that when the Islamists march into Lahore or Islamabad, they'll suddenly realize that Islam is a religion of peace, that music is good and that girls should be allowed to go to school.

People who have experienced Taliban rule have no such illusions. When the Taliban took over Swat, they held a "peace" march. Thousands of men in black turbans and regulation beards stomped through the city. "There wasn't a single local among them," a schoolteacher in Mingora recalled. "I sat at home with my family and quivered with fear." Then he hesitated and made sure that my recorder was switched off, afraid that what he was about to say might be seen as blasphemous. "I felt like a non-Muslim citizen of Mecca the day it was conquered by prophet Muhammad's army. And I am a practicing Muslim."

Among the women of Swat, the fear and resignation is even stronger. The Taliban have blown up girls' schools and dumped bodies of professional dancers in Bloody Square. Women told me their stories behind closed doors, from under their newly purchased burqas, and always after extracting solemn promises of anonymity. "We have become prisoners in our own houses. We can't even go out to buy groceries. It's all over for us," one told me.

This resignation was on display recently when a video surfaced showing the Taliban flogging a teenage girl for stepping out of her house unaccompanied by a male family member. The gruesome display outraged civil society and portions of the media. But apologists for the Taliban were louder, and the response in Pakistan followed a pattern that has become familiar since 9/11: first denial and then willful ignorance. "The video was fake." "The media should not have run it." "Are you using this video as an excuse to criticize the Koran?" By the time the debate died down, the Urdu media had concluded that the video was part of a conspiracy to derail the Swat peace deal, but that the punishment was appropriate. Again the justifications. Maybe the Taliban had not followed the proper procedures, but surely they can be reasoned with.

While Taliban cheerleaders monopolize the airwaves, their advance parties are already in the cities. Schools in Lahore and Islamabad are routinely shut down after receiving anonymous threats. The education ministry circulated a notice in Karachi last week warning coed schools to beef up security. The same is true in the industrial hub of Sialkot.

Sure, thousands have turned up at anti-Taliban rallies; there are Facebook groups galore protesting their policies. But people know that raising a banner in a city square or clicking on an e-petition is not going to convince the Taliban to give up their arms and go back to their day jobs (or, in most cases, return to an endless cycle of unemployment).

There were hopes that Pakistan's security services would fight the Taliban, but the army and the intelligence agencies seem so obsessed with the supposed menace from India that they are ignoring the menace at home. If they are not colluding with the Taliban, as many observers believe they are, they are staying neutral. In fact, they are so neutral that they rent their bases to the United States for launching missile-laden unmanned aircraft while simultaneously supporting the very people those missiles are aimed at.

Last week, the Taliban took over Buner, a strategically important district just 70 miles from the capital, Islamabad, and less than 20 miles from the Tarbela hydropower plant, which provides one-third of Pakistan's electricity. The military's response was anemic -- it deployed a small, lightly armed constabulary force.

In Swat, I heard the same story again and again: Before the peace deal, soldiers would stop people at checkpoints and say, "Don't go that way, the Taliban are slitting someone's throat." But they wouldn't intercede to stop the throat-slitting.

The problem, as many see it, is that there's no alternative. Yes, the Taliban routinely place near the bottom of opinion polls, and in elections they garner less than 10 percent of the vote. But we seem to be an exhausted society, incapable of rising to this challenge.

When we look overseas for support, we are confronted by the Americans demanding that we oppose the Taliban even as U.S. drones continue to kill impoverished civilians in the remote-controlled hunt for Taliban officials and the latest al-Qaeda No. 3. There is not a single Pakistani who supports these attacks or the way they are being conducted. They have made being pro-American radioactive. And they have also made opposing the Taliban that much more difficult.

What are people to do?

I got a glimpse of what they are already doing in Lahore. At a hotel that is so safe, I was told, that Americans often use it, I saw security guards posted at multiple entrances. You see private security guards everywhere in Pakistan, but one I spoke with had his pistol drawn. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said that those were his orders. But how he will guard against a truckload of explosives, a band of men armed with rocket launchers or an ideology that wants us to dress and behave like people in Mecca circa A.D. 570 remains unclear.

haneeef@yahoo.com

Mohammed Hanif, a special correspondent for the BBC's Urdu service, is the author of the novel, "A Case of Exploding Mangoes."

Mohammed Hanif — Pakistan Bows to the Taliban's Rise

 

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Precarious position

When Richard Holbrooke visited Islamabad this month, the consequences of defeat in the Swat valley were all too clear. Not only was the former tourist paradise, 120km from the capital, now overrun by Taliban fighters but the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, rather than send its troops to fight, had struck a peace deal with the Islamists.

The pact, covering Swat and the sizeable Malakand region of the North West Frontier Province, granted the state’s acceptance of shariah Islamic law there in return for a ceasefire. Few of the 200,000 people displaced by the Taliban advance are keen to return. Video footage showing the public flogging of a woman suspected of adultery may help explain their reluctance.

“What has happened in Swat has stunned ... many of the people of Pakistan,” Mr Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said in New Delhi on the next stop of his tour. “The events in Lahore [where Sri Lanka’s cricket team was shot at last month and a police station attacked] ... have further raised concerns and I think everyone here in this part of the world should recognise what’s happening.”

Pakistan’s deteriorating security has unnerved the country’s civil society, neighbouring countries and the world. The Taliban, once thought of as a menace merely in the border areas, are advancing across Pakistan and meeting little resistance. Beyond the country’s borders, this is fuelling fears for the stability of south Asia, the potential loss of a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and – not least – the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The Swat peace deal, rather than halting the Taliban, has emboldened the militants, estimated to number about 15,000 fighters in total. The group “continues to terrorise the local population, carries weapons in public, patrols main roads, operates checkpoints, kidnaps government officials and security forces personnel and attacks security forces convoys in Swat and the Malakand region,” says Maria Kuusisto of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. Last week the Taliban pushed closer to the capital by seizing the Buner district. The recent attacks in Lahore, the country’s second largest city, have led many residents to believe that the populous and affluent Punjab province is the next battlefront (see left).

US officials talk of the Taliban as an “existential threat” to Pakistan. The disquiet in Washington, which has given Islamabad at least $10bn in military aid over the last nine years, is deepening. Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, last week showed her impatience with the inability of the Pakistan government and army to stand up to the enemy. “We’re wondering why [the Pakistani army] don’t just get out there and deal with these people,” she said. “If you lose soldiers trying to retake part of your own country, it seems to me that’s the army’s mission.”

The army is indeed at the centre of Pakistan’s difficulties. One of the world’s largest, with some 555,000 personnel and a similar number in reserve, it is widely regarded as the country’s most powerful institution, having ruled on and off for most of the nation’s 62-year history.

Stung by the criticism, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani , Pakistan’s US-trained army chief, on Friday defended the resolution and capability of his forces. Outsiders, he insisted, were mistaken in confusing an operational pause in the campaign with a desire to seek compromise.

But speak to civilian leaders and senior military officers and each side admits the army does not have much stomach for this fight. Why do the armed forces, so well resourced and capably led, appear unwilling to protect the country – and what can be done? Extensive interviews conducted by the Financial Times reveal a range of problems threatening cohesion.

First is a sense that the nation is merely providing cannon fodder. Pakistan, the leaders complain, has lost more troops – about 2,000 – in the US-led war against terror than Nato forces on the other side of the border in Afghanistan. “That means we are paying a heavy price,” says Yousuf Raza Gilani, prime minister. “The border terrain is long – 2,500km – and the terrain is so difficult, and we have deployed more than 150,000 troops to guard it.”

Second, more and more low-ranking troops view the conflict as a civil war and are reluctant to fight people often seen as brothers. On the streets, civilians share the ambivalence. The fighting on the Afghan border is a US war, not Pakistan’s, they say. Seething resentment towards Washington intensifies whenever a drone – an unmanned bomber aircraft – strikes on Pakistani soil.

The military establishment also has longstanding loyalties to militants. Although prepared to withdraw its support for groups it once sponsored to cause trouble in Afghanistan and India, the army cannot bring itself to close them down entirely or destroy them. Instead it prefers to monitor them.

“The danger to Pakistan is fundamentally that the army has been Islamised over the long term. For them, jihad is the guiding principle,” says one western diplomat. “They have been so closely married to the cause of Islamic militancy that there are questions over their determination to fight. Does a mother ever kill its own child?”

Third, a lack of engagement by other arms of the government can mean that military successes are often quickly reversed. A top commander complains that, once the army has cleared an area of militants, law enforcement and development agencies fail to make good the gains and the militants reassert themselves.

Fourth, and perhaps most crucially, combating a growing militant threat is not top of the day’s orders at national military headquarters in Rawalpindi, south of Islamabad. For the army, the principal enemy remains India. The big threat to Pakistan’s security, as seen by the military, lies on the eastern border, where it maintains its largest concentration of troops and equipment.

The threat from within, in spite of high-profile militant attacks on government buildings and other installations, goes barely recognised by a security apparatus that has for so long defined itself against its larger neighbour. “The military leaders cannot focus on the internal threat. They are still focused on the external [Indian] threat. They are not understanding the gravity of the internal changes,” says Talaat Masood, a retired general.

Civil society leaders say Pakistan can no longer play the victim of someone else’s war. “Terrorism is the number one issue in this country. And yet there are still competing priorities,” says Hina Jillani, a human rights lawyer in Lahore. “Pakistan’s problem is not equipping a military for a war situation. We have to equip the security forces for internal armed conflict and a guerrilla war.”

But in what shape are Pakistan’s forces to take this step, without either haemorrhaging further loyalty in the lower ranks or tipping the country into yet another military dictatorship? Some of the portents are good. Not only has the army received considerable financial support from the US since 2001 but its links with western militaries and intelligence agencies go back rather longer. Washington forged stronger ties with Pakistan in the 1980s amid the Soviet occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan. Gen Kiyani has so far displayed no appetite to rule himself.

Yet in spite of its size and US support, the army is far from insuperable. Swat clearly demonstrated its Achilles heel. Some local commentators say the peace deal with the Taliban was irresponsible because it was signed out of weakness after a military defeat. Another says the west is asking the army to turn 180 degrees, adding that Inter-Services Intelligence, the military intelligence agency, despite its links with militant groups led by Afghan leaders Jalaludin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an essential partner for tackling terrorism. At the same time, a realisation is growing that “extremist groups are now doing more harm than good. They have now started to cause harm to Pakistan and the people of Pakistan.”

Teresita Schaffer of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies agrees. “The military is passionately nationalistic. They don’t want to fight Muslims but they certainly don’t want to be pushed around by Afghans.”

The internal threat invites historical parallels. Failing institutions and blindness to danger have drawn comparison with Cambodia, even the Soviet Union. “It’s almost like the rug being pulled away from beneath the generals,” says a western defence official in Islamabad. “The Soviet Union collapsed due to internal contradictions and Russia’s large arsenal of nuclear missiles targeting the western world could not save it from ruin.”

Others claim the fears are exaggerated. Although the Swat deal may yet be reversed by Mr Zardari, some officials consider it a blueprint that could be rolled out more widely to bring stability and help sift the hired guns from the committed extremists.

“People simply exaggerate when they say the state of Pakistan will be taken over by the Taliban,” says a Pakistani official. “Has anyone considered that the Punjab is home to six of the nine corps of the Pakistan army? The military’s headquarters are in Rawalpindi, while the air force and navy headquarters are in Islamabad. Do you seriously believe the Taliban can simply walk over this area?” He predicts that a bloody fight awaits. But for now, the government’s strategy is to neutralise the Taliban through conciliation.

Others blame a weak government. For them, the peace deal in Swat was a blunder by an inexperienced Mr Zardari. Shaukat Qadir, a military analyst, says the problem is political inaction rather than lack of military resolve. “Our present political set-up is not inclined to do anything major [to repel the Taliban] ... The army has decided to let democracy run its course, civilian supremacy to stay intact – and we are paying a price for that ... But somewhere in Gen Kiyani’s mind must be the question: how long can we let this continue?”

Mr Holbrooke and Mrs Clinton are asking the same thing, with ever greater urgency. Not long ago, Swat with its lakeside holiday camps seemed an unthinkable conquest for extremists. Now, other possibilities are opening up: after assaults on Lahore, an encroachment on Islamabad and, most worrying for neighbours and western powers, the capture of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

FT.com / Comment / Analysis - Precarious position