Pakistan: A Hard Country (72 page)

The mixed picture on the Frontier also reflected local realities, which the British learned to understand and manage during their hundred years in the region. It always made sense to try to play divide and rule, because the tribal society of the Pathans meant that the enemy was natural y divided; and if the Pakistani state was attacking some militant groups while seeking agreements with others, this was also true the other way round – that is to say, the Pakistani Taleban were attacking in some areas while seeking accommodation in others.10

Raising local lashkars (independent militias) to fight is an ancient Pathan tradition – indeed, the Taleban in Afghanistan operate largely through temporarily raised local lashkars – and was also much used by the British. Like the Pakistani army today, they would raise a lashkar from one tribe or clan who were local rivals of another clan which had revolted. As of 2008 – 9 this was being touted by the Pakistani military as a key part of their new strategy, but it carries obvious risks both of multiplying local civil wars and of creating Frankenstein’s monsters.

Until mid-2007, militant attacks outside the tribal areas were restricted to individual acts of terrorism, such as the murder of Daniel Pearl, and attacks on French technicians and the US Consulate in Karachi. In July 2007, however, an incident took place at the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) complex in Islamabad, which led to the end of the truce, to an explosive growth of militant action in the tribal areas and beyond, and to the formation of the Pakistani Taleban, or Tehriq-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP), under the leadership of Beitul ah Mahsud.

Since January 2007 the Red Mosque complex had become a base for militants who were launching vigilante raids on video stores and Chineserun ‘massage parlours’ in adjacent areas of the city. In the NWFP and FATA this kind of thing was happening constantly without the government taking action, but the Red Mosque is situated less than 2 miles from the presidential palace and the parliament. The damage to the government’s prestige was becoming intolerable.

On the other hand, the mosque is the oldest in Islamabad, and the clerical family which ran it was exceptional y wel connected within the Pakistani establishment. Moreover, the complex included a religious col ege for women, and many of the militants engaged in vigilante actions in Islamabad were women from this col ege. The government was extremely afraid – and, as it turned out, with good reason – of the effects on public opinion of a battle in the mosque leaving women dead. However, when Chinese massage girls were arrested by the militants, the Chinese government sent a strong message to President Musharraf that he had to act. Given China’s importance to Pakistan both as a strategic al y and as a source of development aid, that message was listened to (in response, militants kil ed three Chinese engineers in the NWFP).

On 10 July 2007, after repeated negotiations for surrender had failed, Pakistani troops stormed the complex. According to official figures, a total of 154 people, including 19 soldiers and some of the women militants, were kil ed in the ensuing battle, during which militants retreated to the cel ars of the building and fought to the death.

The Red Mosque affair il ustrates some of the appal ing dilemmas faced by Pakistani governments in confronting Islamist militancy. In the months leading up to the military action, the Musharraf administration was constantly reproached by the Pakistani media for its failure to take action. He was accused not merely of negligence, but of deliberately helping the militants in order to prove to Washington that he was facing an Islamist revolt and therefore needed unconditional US support – something for which there is no actual evidence whatsoever.

When Musharraf final y ordered an assault there was a storm of condemnation from the media and civil society. Leading members of the Human Rights Commission and of the Lawyers’ Movement have told me that, even after resigning from office, Musharraf should be imprisoned or even hanged for ‘murdering thousands of people at the Lal Masjid’, and that ‘this issue could have been resolved through negotiations but General Musharraf intentional y spil ed the blood of innocent people to please his foreign masters’.

The then Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, saw this coming. He told me in early May 2007:

It’s true that we shouldn’t have al owed things to go so far at the Lal Masjid, but you see we real y don’t want to see body-bags of the people there appearing on television, least of al of women from the age of ten up. Then the same editors who are criticizing us for inaction would criticize us for brutality, ordinary people would be disgusted, and terrorism and extremism in the country would certainly increase enormously. So far, these people at the mosque are not carrying out terrorist attacks.

They are an irritant, not a menace, and so we wil try to negotiate a peaceful end to al this if we possibly can.11

Much criticized at the time by Pakistani and Western liberals, these turned out in retrospect to have been very sensible words.

As Shaukat Aziz predicted, the storming of the mosque led to a wave of insurgency in the Pathan areas, a huge increase in terrorism, and a revulsion in Pakistani public opinion which helped lead to the downfal of the Musharraf administration. In reaction, militants in Waziristan cal ed off a truce with the army, in force for the previous ten months, and launched a new wave of attacks on military and official targets. Al over Pakistan, sympathizers with the Taleban with whom I talked used this incident to justify Taleban terrorism against the state.

In December 2007, different militant groups operating in the Pathan areas came together to form the Pakistani Taleban (TTP), a loose al iance with Beitul ah Mahsud as amir or overal leader. The TTP

declared itself to be an al y both of the Afghan Taleban and of Al Qaeda in a defensive jihad against the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Their statements on Pakistan have varied considerably. On occasions they have declared that they have no quarrel with Pakistan and are only fighting the Pakistani army because it attacked them on US orders. On other occasions, however, they have declared their hostility to the existing Pakistani state as such, and their determination to achieve an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.

As a senior Pakistani general said to me, ‘We on our side should avoid cal ing these Pakistani militants “Taleban”. It’s exactly what they want. It means that they are associated with religion, study of religion and above al what our people see as the legitimate jihad against the foreign occupation of Afghanistan.’ And indeed, the view of the mass of the Pakistani population on Afghanistan was summed up pretty wel by Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, leader of one faction of the JUI: If a dog fel into your wel , would you remove the dog or would you empty the wel ? Once a red dog fel into the Afghan wel , and the international community helped to get the dog out. Now a white dog has fal en in, and what are they doing? Trying to empty the wel , one bucket at a time. Haven’t they learned anything from Afghan history? But our people, the Pakistanis, support those who are trying to remove the dog.

In order to understand the growth of militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan, it is essential to understand the weak nature of the border dividing the Pathan tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan: weak in terms of physical control by the two states, but even more importantly in the minds of the tribesmen themselves. As noted, the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s weakened this border stil further, with Pakistani Pathans encouraged by both Pakistan and the West to see Afghan refugees and the Afghan Mujahidin as their brothers and to fight alongside them.

Furthermore, while the Afghan Taleban have not explicitly drawn on Pathan nationalism since 2001, and their propaganda avoids insults against other ethnicities (in the hope of winning over the non-Pathan ethnicies of Afghanistan), their identity and propaganda are nonetheless suffused with Pathan culture, imagery and identity. The importance of motifs of resistance and Islam in that culture gives the Taleban a very strong appeal. A speech by Mul ah Omar the day before the start of the US bombing campaign in 2001, refusing to surrender Al Qaeda to the US and vowing to resist US attack, has, for many Pathans, a Shakespearean or Churchil ian force. He stressed that victory would come only in the long run, and in the short term the Taleban could expect defeat and death: I know that my power; my position; my wealth; and my family are in danger ... However, I am ready to sacrifice myself and I do not want to become the friend of non-Muslims, for non-Muslims are against al my beliefs and my religion ... I insist on sacrificing myself, and you should do likewise ... [I am] ready to leave everything and to believe only in Islam and in my Afghan bravery.12

The militants who later formed the Pakistani Taleban revolted in 2004

against the Pakistani army in order to defend what they saw as the legitimate jihad in Afghanistan, their sacred code of hospitality for Muslims and Pathans fleeing from infidel attack, and their own ancient tribal freedoms. We may wel argue that what they did went horribly against the real interests of their own people. We cannot argue that they betrayed their own code.

So while the Afghan and Pakistani Talebans have separate leaderships and face in different directions, they draw their inspiration from the same sources. However, it does seem that as the struggle with the Pakistani state and army intensified after the storming of the Red Mosque in 2007, the Pakistani Taleban leadership may have become obsessed with this struggle to the detriment of the Afghan jihad.

Mul ah Omar declared several times that the Pakistani state was not the enemy, and that Muslims should concentrate on fighting the real enemy, which he says is US forces and their al ies in Afghanistan. This presumably reflected pressure on Mul ah Omar from the Pakistani army, but by the same token it probably reflected genuine fear that the Pakistani Taleban might wreck his relationship with that army, and with it his chances of long-term victory in Afghanistan.

THE NATURE OF THE PAKISTANI TALEBAN

The Pakistani Taleban is not nearly as tight a movement as the decentralized Afghan Taleban, but is, rather, a loose al iance of autonomous Islamist radical groups and commanders, under the nominal leadership of an amir. The first amir was Beitul ah Mahsud; when he was kil ed by a US drone in August 2009, Hakimul ah Mahsud took over. Both are from the notoriously unruly and fanatical Mahsud tribe of south Waziristan, which was a thorn in the British empire’s flesh for 100 years.

Pakistani journalists who have travel ed in the tribal areas have described needing passes and permissions from as many as half a dozen different local Taleban commanders in order to move from one Agency to another. Some of the local Pakistani Taleban groups are close to Al Qaeda and are heavily influenced by international jihadi agendas. Others, especial y in Swat, have agendas more focused on local power and the transformation of local society. Al , however, are committed to supporting the jihad in Afghanistan, and most seem capable of cooperating effectively against the Pakistani army when it penetrates their territory. While al now say that they are committed to Islamist revolution in Pakistan, al also claim – and probably believe – that their movement began as a defensive action against the Pakistani army’s ‘invasion’ of Waziristan in 2004, and against US drone attacks on FATA.

The Pakistani Taleban draw much of their funding from taxing the heroin trade and other il egal activities, and some are directly involved in kidnapping and other crimes. In the Taleban case the distinction between ‘taxation’ of local transport and business and ‘extortion’ is impossible to draw. In most areas of FATA it seems that their demands are not too heavy, or at least not heavy enough to drive the population into revolt against them.

After their association with what is seen as a legitimate jihad in Afghanistan, the other reason which every Taleban sympathizer I met gave for his support was the Taleban’s implementation of Shariah law.

This is not the same as support for revolution and, what is more, the ‘law’ that the Taleban enforce is often not real y the Shariah at al , but a sprinkling of the Shariah mixed with the pashtunwali and a rough form of communal justice. However, for reasons set out in Chapter 3, a great many people see this as preferable to the appal ingly slow, opaque, alien and corrupt Pakistani judicial system.

The Taleban also gain credit for crude but tough and effective enforcement of their version of the law. One of the reasons why the Taleban is popular, including with many smal businessmen from FATA and Peshawar with whom I talked, is that they have cracked down very hard on freelance kidnapping, and on local drug-dealing which helps fuel crime. They also sort out smal -scale business disputes. In Peshawar, I talked to a ceramics trader from Landi Khotal in the Khyber Agency. He deeply disliked the Taleban, and despite his limited means had sent his son to study in Britain for fear that he might fal under their influence or just be conscripted to help them. However, he also described how for almost fifteen years he had been trying to recover a Rs800,000 debt from another businessman through the Pakistani courts: ‘bribe after bribe, and nothing happened; because of course the other side was bribing too, and so the case was delayed and delayed’.