Pakistan: A Hard Country (81 page)
VISIT TO SWAT
I visited Swat again (more than twenty years after I had gone there for a peaceful holiday) in August 2009, over two months after the army counter-offensive had begun. The army had cleared the Taleban from the Swat val ey itself, and according to military figures by mid-August had kil ed or captured some 2,000 militants, while losing almost 200 of their own men; but another 3,000 – 4,000, led by their chief commanders, had taken refuge in the surrounding hil s, and began to launch suicide bombings and occasional assassinations. However, in the four days that I spent in Swat and Buner I did not hear a single shot or explosion – a sign of the extent to which the army had regained control of the val ey. Over the fol owing months, the army managed to kil or capture many of the remaining Swati commanders.
The road leading up to Swat from Mardan and the plains is itself a reminder of the region’s turbulent past. To reach the Swat val ey, you have to cross the dramatic Ambela pass, where in 1863 local tribesmen under the banners of Islam fought a long battle against a British invading army. The British eventual y dislodged them from the heights, but accepted a compromise settlement and did not occupy the val ey itself (three centuries earlier, a Mughal army dispatched by the Emperor Akbar had met disaster in an attempt to subdue the Yusufzais of Swat).
The reason for the British expedition had been to force the expulsion from the region of a group of Islamist militants (the surviving fol owers of Syed Ahmed Barelvi, mentioned in Chapter 1), whom the British cal ed ‘Wahabis’ and ‘Hindustan fanatics’. These had been raiding British-control ed territory and attempting to stir up rebel ions among other Pathans. How the hopelessly outgunned Swatis managed this is easy enough to see: the bare mountains rise almost sheer from the val ey below, and a road hacked out from the mountainside crawls along their face. Viewed from the opposite hil side, the trucks carrying refugees back to their homes in Swat looked smal as beetles. Then you cross the pass, and look down into the beautiful Swat val ey, a sort of giant oasis with the Swat river meandering through it, fringed by wil ows and clumps of waving feather grass. In August 2010, this river became a raging torrent of destruction.
One of the reasons the floods of 2010 were so destructive is that the population has grown so much and settled in places always known to be vulnerable to flooding. The capital, Mingora – stil quite a smal town when I visited it in the 1980s – has suffered like everywhere else from the runaway growth of Pakistan’s population, and now is just another overcrowded semi-slum with between 300,000 and 450,000 people (as usual, no one knows for sure). When I first arrived, it smel ed terrible, because of uncol ected rubbish; but, by the time I left, municipal workers in laminated jackets were beginning to clear things up. Damage in Mingora itself was very limited; the Taleban had not tried to make a stand in the town, and the army had taken care not to bombard it.
Talking to people on the streets in Mingora was not very enlightening. Fear of the army was very obvious, and I had a strong sense of everyone looking over their shoulders to see who might be listening. Everyone said that they supported the military and hated the Taleban. Interviews with people from Swat in the Jalozai camp for displaced people near Peshawar a fortnight earlier had given a rather different impression (the ones conducted out of the hearing of the camp administration, that is).
They al described how popular the TNSM had been when the movement first started, because of their advocacy of the Shariah, their administration of harsh but fair justice, and their actions against corrupt and oppressive local politicians and landlords; but also because of the great prestige that many local people attached to their participation in the jihads in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Al said that they supported Shariah law for Swat and wanted the Nizam-e-Adl agreement to remain in force.
A large majority said that their sympathy for the Taleban had declined sharply over the previous year. For this they gave various reasons. Among the most common were that after the Nizam-e-Adl agreement the Taleban had shown that they were not real y interested in the Shariah but in power for themselves. Many people mentioned the petty and not-so-petty harassment of local people and the offences against local traditions of dancing and singing at weddings, and so on.
Particular offence had been caused by young Taleban boys stopping older men in the street in front of their families and ordering them to stop trimming their beards. ‘In our Pashtun culture, we show respect to our elders,’ one man growled.
The TNSM/Taleban also established a growing reputation for savagery, which frightened people into silence but also deeply shocked them. The IDPs (Internal y Dispaced Persons) mentioned two cases in particular (not, interestingly enough, the public caning of the girl which caused so much offence among educated people elsewhere in Pakistan). One was when the Taleban publicly hanged four local policemen in the main bazaar in Mingora to frighten the rest of the police into surrender – ‘and they were just local men, we didn’t know anything bad that they had done,’ as one IDP said.
The other incident that caused great disgust was the TNSM/Taleban’s treatment of Pir Samiul ah. He was a leading hereditary religious figure from the Barelvi tradition and guardian of his family shrine at Mangal Dagh, and had led local opposition to the Taleban. It was not the fact that the TNSM/Taleban kil ed him that caused the disgust, but the fact that they later dug up his body, hung it in public for three days, and then blew it up with explosives, scattering bits for hundreds of yards – in order to shatter the mystique attached to the body of a pir. ‘To kil your enemy is one thing,’ I was told by local people, ‘but to desecrate his body, that is not Muslim and not Pashtun.’
On the other hand, quite contrary to government propaganda, sympathy for the Taleban had by no means evaporated altogether. A majority of those I spoke with in the Jalozai IDP camp near Peshawar, albeit a smal one, stil blamed the army and the Taleban equal y for the violence and destruction that had taken place, and said that the government should stil try to make peace with the Taleban. ‘In the end, this is al America’s doing,’ an old man said. ‘They have brought this war to Pakistan.’
This impression was confirmed by a local schoolteacher to whom we gave a lift on the way to Swat from Ambela. He said that when the TNSM first appeared, the vast majority of the local population supported them, but that most had changed their minds as a result of their fanaticism and when it became apparent that they wanted power for themselves. Stil , he said that 15 – 20 per cent of people continued to support them, and this estimate was backed in private by officers and local journalists with whom I talked.
MINGORA TO DOROSHKHEL
Some of the reasons why a good many local people blame the army and the TNSM/Taleban equal y became apparent on a drive up the Swat val ey from Mingora to the vil age of Doroshkhel near Matta about a third of the way up the val ey, where I went to see a local ANP leader, Afzal Khan Lal a. Along the way, we passed numerous destroyed buildings, some on their own, others clustered together where battles had been taking place.
As we went, my guide gave me a running commentary: That building there was a hotel owned by an ANP politician. The Taleban burned it last year ... That was a Taleban madrasah which the army destroyed ... Those houses over there were destroyed by shel ing when the army attacked in June ... That used to be a girls’ school which the Taleban destroyed ... Those shops over there were owned by a Taleban sympathizer. The army blew them up last month ...
I began to see the differences between houses destroyed from above by bombs or shel fire and those blown up from below by explosives.
Major Tahir told me candidly:
We have demolished more than 400 houses belonging to Taleban members. Destroying houses in this way is an old punishment among Pashtuns. And seeing their homes demolished, local people are encouraged. They see that this time we are real y serious about fighting the Taleban.11
No doubt this is true, but it is also easy to see how an ordinary inhabitant of the Swat val ey might feel that his or her neighbourhood was suffering equal y from the two sides and cal a plague on both their houses. In addition, according to a solidly researched report of Human Rights Watch published in July 2010, the army in Swat has been carrying out a very considerable number of extrajudicial executions of captured Taleban and suspected Taleban supporters. Human Rights Watch said it had firm evidence of 50 such kil ings, and had been told of 238 in al .12
The widespread use of extrajudicial executions was confirmed for me in an off-hand way by Afzal Khan. Immediately after my interview with him, he went to sit in a jirga with elders from the nearby Sakha side-val ey. They were trying through Afzal Khan to negotiate the surrender of the local Taleban commander in their val ey, named Gul Yar (whom most of them had reportedly supported), so as to avoid attack by the army. I asked what terms they were trying to negotiate: ‘Wel , firstly of course that the army should not shoot him out of hand, because that is what they do with most Taleban commanders they capture,’ I was told.
I met Afzal Khan in his ancestral vil age of Doroshkhel. Afzal Khan is not in fact the staunch ANP loyalist that ANP propaganda since 2008
has tried to make out. Like so many Pathan landowning politicians, he has repeatedly moved between parties, and sometimes stood as an independent, depending on circumstances and personal and family advantage. In 2009, a nephew was a minister in the ANP government in Peshawar and other relatives were scattered through the national and provincial assemblies.
Long before I visited Swat, ANP leaders whom I met in Peshawar were presenting Afzal Khan as an iconic ANP figure, for one reason and one reason only: he had stood his ground in the face of the Taleban, when most of the ANP and other politicians in the area had been driven out by them. This flight was very understandable in view of the number of politicians kil ed by the Taleban, but in a culture which has traditional y prized physical courage above any other virtue, it has nonetheless done them and the ANP terrible damage.
Afzal Khan’s reputation for courage was not undeserved. It is true that his vil age and the compound of his extended family were defended not only by his own fol owers but by the Pakistani army; but it is also true that this determined eighty-two-year-old great-grandfather stayed on leading his men after he had been wounded in an ambush in which two of his guards and his nephew were kil ed. It probably helps his public image that he certainly looks the part of a chieftain. The garden of his home in Doroshkhel could have been an English garden, on an English summer afternoon – if you can imagine an English garden with a machinegun nest in one corner, and sitting in the other an owner who bears a strong resemblance to a giant bald-headed eagle.
Pathan features are often on a large scale (and the noses of ANP
politicians sometimes seem to be growing in sympathetic if hopeless emulation of the epic hereditary protuberances of their ruling dynasty, the Wali Khans), but whether in reality, or because of his rather overwhelming character, Afzal Khan’s nose, ears and eyebrows seemed truly enormous. I must also say, however, that if set of eyes and shape of mouth are anything to go by, like many a chieftain Afzal Khan owes his leadership not only to his courage and determination but to a very considerable capacity for ruthlessness.
This was indeed his reputation in Swat long before the TNSM began their rebel ion, and it brings me to one key element in the Taleban’s appeal, which seems especial y marked in Swat: that of class resentment and even of class war. This was of course fervently denied by Afzal Khan and other politicians with whom I spoke, but I heard it from a great many other sources, including Pakistani army officers.
Since the end of Swat state, as agriculture has become more commercialized, so certain landowning khans have used their power to encroach on the lands of weaker neighbours. This also helped to increase loathing of the Pakistani judicial system.
As I was told:
A khan politician would use his gunmen to seize some poor farmer’s land and his political connections to stop the administration doing anything about it. Then he would say to the farmer, ‘Sure, take me to court. You wil pay everything you have in bribes, you wil wait thirty years for a verdict, and the verdict wil stil be for me. So what are you going to do about it?’ Wel , when the TNSM came up, that farmer could do something about it. He joined them.
Such behaviour was by no means true of al or even most khans, but it was widespread enough to cause great resentment.
The TNSM/Taleban never adopted land reform as a formal part of their programme, but they used their power to redress local grievances like the one just described, recover seized land for the poor and drive out unpopular landlords. This social radicalism was related in complex ways to their appeal to non-Pathan communities in Swat, the Guj ars and Kammis, who make up a large though undefined proportion of Swat’s population.
The Guj ars were original y a nomadic tribe in the plains of northern India. In Swat, they had traditional y been tenants of the Yusufzai Pathan tribe which had dominated the val ey since the sixteenth century (indeed, in Swat and elsewhere, ‘Pathan’ and ‘landowning farmer’ were traditional y synonyms). The Kammis were a service caste of bakers, barbers, butchers, artisans, and so on, probably of Hindu origin. They had traditional y not farmed land or even owned their houses. However, with the breakdown of the old order, Guj ars and even Kammis had acquired land of their own, while remaining especial y vulnerable to oppression by the Pathan khans.