Pakistan: A Hard Country (79 page)
On that score, two Pathans who played critical roles in the fight against the Taleban said very similar things to me in August 2008. One was Afrassiab Khattak, the most famous ANP intel ectual and chief adviser to the ANP chief minister. The other was Lt-General Masoud Aslam, officer commanding XI Corps in Peshawar in 2008 – 9 and therefore in effect commander of the army’s fight against the Taleban in FATA and Swat.
At that point, Dr Khattak was ferociously critical of the military’s performance, and General Aslam for his part, though more discreetly, criticized the politicians for their failure to ‘take ownership’ of the fight against the Taleban. Both however emphasized the vital importance in Pathan culture of being seen to try sincerely to negotiate a peace settlement before resorting to arms – if you wanted to have public opinion on your side in the battle. General Aslam had served in Waziristan in 2004 – 5 and had this to say about dealing with the Taleban:
The problem is this damned pashtunwali, which the people fol ow, and everyone who wants to operate effectively here has to respect. Most of the ANP are deeply influenced by it, progressives though they say they are. The pashtunwali includes this tradition that if people come asking for peace, you have to talk to them whatever has happened before. So then a jirga is held. And they talk. You know how they talk. They talk not just al day and al night, but al week and al month. And even if the army has started in a position of strength, with time your position gets weaker and your prestige goes down. Your men are sniped at, your vehicles are burned. And the morale of your men goes down, because they are just sitting there being shot at and not al owed to do anything in response. Meanwhile the militants say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t us, we wil try to catch the miscreants, who knows who they are, maybe the ISI is responsible.’ In Waziristan in 2005 the talks went on for three months, and by the end of it we were in a much weaker position than when we started ...
It’s true that you do have to be seen to talk genuinely and honestly before you strike real y hard. Many of our own men are Pashtuns and they expect this. It is essential to put the militants in the wrong, to convince ordinary people that it is the other side which is breaking the peace. So the ANP government is right to negotiate. But to negotiate from a position of weakness is a disastrous mistake. The tribesmen respect nang [honour] but nang is based on nom [name, prestige]. And that means showing that you can use force: use it early, use it hard, but use it discriminately. That is why burning the houses of miscreants is a good old Pashtun tradition. This is how the religious leaders enforced their authority. It is not something that you wicked Brits thought up. The tribesmen see this, and say to themselves, ‘Ah, they know who did what. I had better be careful.’6
From the point of view of Pathan culture and public opinion, the Nizam-e-Adl agreement, so much criticized at the time, contributed enormously to the reversal in the Taleban’s fortunes – but only because the Taleban also misinterpreted it to mean that they were winning and the army was on the run. Four Taleban actions in particular were responsible for transforming public opinion concerning the need to fight against the Taleban.
First, the Taleban and other Islamist groups al ied to them began to extend their campaign of terrorism from the Pathan areas to Punjab.
The bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on 20 September 2008 was a forerunner of this, and a shattering blow to the complacency that had hitherto reigned among many of the Pakistani elites. In the winter and spring of 2009, attacks began in Lahore, including most notably an attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team on 3 March that left six policemen dead, and an attack on the police training academy on 30 March that kil ed twelve.
These attacks cruel y exposed the unpreparedness and vulnerability of the Punjab police, and brought home to the ruling classes in Lahore that the Taleban were not just a bunch of traditional y unruly Pathan tribesmen on the far-off Frontier, but were a real threat to themselves.
When I visited Lahore in September 2008 immediately after my stay in the NWFP, I was shocked by the complacency and indifference of Lahoris of every class of society. When I returned in January 2009 this had begun to change a bit, but the real transformation came between then and my next visit in July 2009.
The second Taleban mistake – though one that was so bound up with their ideology and revolutionary purpose as to be inevitable – was the public caning of a seventeen-year-old girl for ‘immorality’ in Swat by the Taleban. Captured on a mobile phone camera, this film was very widely shown on Pakistani television in early April (with strong urging by the government and military), and caused general revulsion.
However, the responses of the elites and of ordinary people with whom I spoke were rather different. Educated Pakistanis were outraged that it had happened at al ; ordinary Pakistanis, that such punishment had been carried out in public before a male audience, when such punishments should be carried out in private and by the girl’s own family.
On 19 April, Sufi Muhammad Hassan, an Islamist leader whom the government had released from jail in return for a promise to negotiate a settlement with his son-in-law, Swati Taleban leader Maulana Fazlul ah, made a speech in Swat in which he declared that ‘We hate democracy ... We want Islam in the entire world. Islam does not permit democracy or election.’ He also stated that there could be no appeal from Shariah courts in Swat to Pakistan’s higher courts (he had been saying the same things for many years, but the Pakistani media had never real y taken notice before). Also widely reported in the media, this showed Pakistanis that the Taleban were by no means just good Muslims interested in promoting Islamic behaviour and Islamic justice (which many non-Islamists throughout the NWFP and Punjab had persisted in believing), but aimed at overthrowing the existing state and imposing their own rule.
It must be said, though, that, to judge by my interviews, the effect of al this among the Pakistani masses was somewhat less than government and military propaganda have suggested. So these developments alone would not have provoked a mass backlash or a strong counter-offensive against the Taleban. The tipping-point came in the second week of April 2009 when the Taleban sent hundreds of their fighters from Swat across the mountains into the neighbouring district of Buner, to the south-east. A completely insignificant place in itself (historical y part of the Swat princely state) Buner therefore came to play an important role in Pakistani history.
Although Buner is only 70 miles from Islamabad, there are an awful lot of mountains in between, and no one in Pakistan seriously thought that its fal indicated that the Taleban were simply going to sweep on and take the capital. However, the capture of Buner brought the Taleban much closer to the motorway linking Islamabad and Peshawar, and to the Tarbela dam, which provides northern Pakistan with much of its electricity. The immediate and complete col apse of the local police in the face of the Taleban, and the easy routing of a local lashkar, were profoundly worrying. ‘They real y seemed al set to go on to take Mansehra and Abbotabad,’ Major Tahir, a staff officer in Swat, told me later.
Most of al , I was told by officers, the fal of Buner produced a feeling in the army high command that the military’s prestige was now on the line; that if they failed to fight back now, people would begin to think that they would never fight. Not just ordinary Pakistanis but even Pakistani soldiers (especial y in the Frontier Corps) would begin to look on the Taleban as the winning side, whom it would be wise to conciliate or even to join. At the same time, the army was encouraged by what officers described to me as a ‘180-degree change’ in the attitude of the ANP government and local politicians to military action.
Final y, the fal of Buner made it even more difficult to resist the growing pressure from Washington to take tougher action against the Pakistani Taleban. Pakistanis were stung by a speech by Secretary of State Hil ary Clinton on 6 March describing the internal security situation in Pakistan as ‘threatening’ and hinting that it might col apse as a state. The fact that Pakistan desperately needed US aid, and goodwil in producing international aid, of course contributed greatly to the belief in the Pakistani establishment that something had to be done to please Washington. China, too, previously fairly relaxed about the growth of militancy in Pakistan, reportedly became alarmed by the Taleban’s takeover in Buner, and communicated this alarm to the Pakistani government.7 However, this outside pressure would not in itself have brought about a change in Pakistani behaviour, if the actions of the Taleban themselves had not produced a new sense of wil in the political and military establishments, backed by a significant shift in public opinion.
It is difficult to say whether it was the army, the federal government under the PPP and President Zardari, or the NWFP government of the ANP who took the initiative in pressing for a counter-offensive, because, when it turned out to be a success, al tried to claim the chief responsibility. In fact, what seems to have happened is that al of these groups contained leading figures who for the past year had been pressing for a counter-attack; and the Taleban seizure of Buner empowered them to push this through against the resistance of hesitant col eagues.
The result was not just a counter-offensive in Buner and Swat, and then in south Waziristan, the Mohmand Agency and elsewhere, but a general tightening of policy and behaviour across the board. The army rigorously excluded journalists from the fighting zones, ensuring that they could not report Taleban views. Moreover (so I have been told by journalists) they used commentators and television anchors with military links to persuade or pressure them into supporting the military operations, making the same approach to media owners – who by this stage were themselves becoming alarmed by the Taleban’s rise, and the possible effects on their own fortunes.
A senior journalist in Peshawar described to me how on 27 April General Kayani invited him and eleven other Pathan journalists to see him and asked them for their backing in the coming military operation in Swat. Above al , he asked them in their reporting to play down the issue of col ateral damage and civilian casualties, which had made previous operations so unpopular, and this they promised to do.
The change in media coverage was crucial to the change in Pakistani public opinion. Prior to this, the media had given extensive coverage to Taleban statements, and indeed had often given them equal time with official statements by the government and military.
Contrary to al egations by Pakistani liberal publications like the Friday Times, this was not in general because of outright ideological support for the Taleban, but rather a reflection of Pakistani public opinion in general, which was prepared to see certain good sides in the Taleban and which tended to blame the Taleban and the government equal y for violence.
The media of course also love a good scoop, which interviews with the Taleban often gave them. Final y, the media are just as addicted to conspiracy theories as the rest of Pakistani society and, like that society, for years had tended to accompany reports of Taleban terrorism with heavy hints about ‘foreign hands’ and conspiracies by the Pakistani intel igence services – which is only to say that before April 2009 the Pakistani media in their coverage of the Taleban were neither better nor worse than the society from which they came. Al of this changed considerably when the army and state final y put their feet down.
The ANP also belatedly began to exercise real leadership as far as its own supporters and activists were concerned, ordering them to support the military operation and to stop criticizing the military for civilian casualties or al eged ties to the Taleban. Instead, ANP
propaganda began stressing the number of ANP politicians who had been kil ed by the Taleban, and the Taleban’s threat to democracy in the NWFP. The change in the language of my ANP acquaintances concerning the army between August 2008 and July 2009 was truly astonishing. An additional reason, in the view of Major-General Ishfaq Ahmed, commanding the army in the Malakand division, was that ‘the new Chief of Army Staff [i.e. General Kayani] played a big part in this, because he made clear that he is not interested in a political role, so the politicians are no longer scared of us’.8
THE BACKGROUND TO REVOLT IN SWAT
The Islamist militants’ takeover in Swat in 2007 – 9 was widely seen as a sign that they could extend their control from the tribal areas into the ‘settled areas’ of the NWFP, and further towards Islamabad. Much was made of the fact that Swat had previously been a tourist destination (I was told in August 2009 that I was the first Western tourist to visit the bazaar in Mingora for more than two years), and even, in the 1960s and 1970s, a stop on the ‘hippy trail’. Al of this was rather misleading. Swat has a very specific history, different alike from the tribal areas and from the rest of the NWFP. The Islamists’ takeover was not a question of the ‘Taleban’ moving into Swat from outside, but of an overwhelmingly local movement which, while it placed itself under the name and banner of the Pakistani Taleban, remained completely autonomous.
Key to understanding the militants’ temporary success in Swat are three factors: a tradition of Islamist militancy in the region stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century; the nature of the princely state of Swat, which retained a semi-independence until 1969; and the way in which Swat was incorporated into Pakistan.