Pakistan: A Hard Country (76 page)

The Taleban have driven out criminals and bad characters.

They are doing much good work stopping drug-dealing and kidnapping. There has been no more of that since they came here. We can travel in the middle of the night without problems.

Before, everyone was home by 10.00 p.m. for fear of dacoits.

And mothers want their sons to join the Taleban. Yes, it is dangerous, but it is honourable and for Islam, and it is better than joining some gang and getting into God knows what dirty business ...

In Bajaur, Musharraf and the government have kil ed too many people. The Taleban are just kil ing Pakistani soldiers in response. The Taleban are good. If the government targets them, only then they wil fight back. Otherwise they wil just fight the Americans and not trouble the Pakistani army. Everyone here is against the Americans.

I asked Shehzad about how the Taleban spread their influence and enforced their authority.

They started with a few men, often ones they had recruited from round here coming back here, and going round the hujras and mosques, talking quietly about the Taleban and what they want, and persuading people to support them. Then, when they thought they had enough support and could start acting, they put up banners and posters al over this area saying what they wil not al ow, tel ing people to be good Muslims. If you sel alcohol or drugs or do other bad behaviour, the Taleban wil warn you twice and then if you don’t change or leave, they wil take you to a Shariah court and execute you, or maybe let you off with a fine and a beating. In Mansuqa, a nearby vil age, a local mul ah publicly mocked the Taleban and was kil ed by them a few weeks ago.

Although appointed by the maliks, the mul ah of the family mosque, Zewar, endorsed these views.

That afternoon, I went out to talk to people on the streets and in the shops of the vil age and, with rare exceptions, it was the same picture.

I talked to forty-eight people in al in that vil age, and every single one of them sympathized with the Afghan Taleban. Al but seven also sympathized with the Pakistani Taleban. Those seven – local shopkeepers plus one visiting minor civil servant – condemned them categorical y for their attacks on the Pakistani army and police. But it was difficult to say just how deep this condemnation went, since they too – as far as I could make out from the shouting match which developed on several occasions – often blamed such actions on Indian agents.

As afternoon drew towards evening, I sat with my hosts on their verandah as the family of the mul ah came to pay their respects, with a mixture of deference and affectionate familiarity. Some of the herd of clerical offspring came to be admired and patted on the head.

Afterwards, my host, a compact middle-aged man in the neatly pressed shelwar of the civil servant, with a military-style clipped moustache, began to speak in confident tones of the struggle against the Taleban – and indeed it seemed that he had little idea of the state of feeling in the vil age, or even among his own servants.

He said that he had not heard of any preaching or other activity by the Taleban in the neighbourhood, and he was sure they did not have majority support. ‘If the government real y wants to get rid of the Taleban it can; it just needs to be ruthless. In the end, they are just a few troublemakers.’ But as the shadows lengthened, so his mood darkened:

It is true that the local police have largely given up, so nobody is doing much to stop the Taleban. People think that the present government and al the political parties are corrupt, and do nothing for the people, and the worst thing is that it is true. So people may not support the Taleban, but they have become indifferent, and that is also bad ...

This, remember, as of September 2008 was supposed to be not a Taleban area, but a peaceful area under government control. By the end of my stay I had come to the conclusion that al this real y meant was that, unlike in Swat or other areas, the Pakistani Taleban had not publicly announced their takeover or attacked government positions.

Yet already, in a nearby vil age, the Taleban had seized the hujra of a local malik politician from the ANP and turned it into a Shariah court, and the malik and his family had had to flee to Peshawar. ‘And they wil never come back,’ I was told, ‘because once you have shown that you are scared, people don’t respect you any more, so you can no longer lead even if the Taleban are defeated one day.’ I was reminded of a saying I had once heard about life in an American prison, that this was a world in which, ‘if you once take a step back, you wil never take another step forward’.

As far as public opposition, state authority or the power of the maliks and their mul ahs were concerned, there seemed little enough to stop the Taleban if they did decide to take over in that vil age.

Remembering my Russian landowning ancestors in similar circumstances, I was left with the hope that perhaps old ties of kinship and respect would mean that the local Taleban would not directly target their maliks, or at the least would eventual y al ow them to depart in peace.

However, as wil be described in the next chapter, this pessimism proved exaggerated. The Pakistani state and army stil do have the resources to fight back effectively against the Taleban; and perhaps, equal y importantly, the Taleban, like many revolutionary movements, are chronical y given to overestimating their strength and overplaying their hand. In the spring and summer of 2009, this hubris led to nemesis for the Taleban of the Swat val ey.

12

Defeating the Taleban?

No patchwork scheme, and all our recent schemes, blockades, allowances
etc.
are mere patchwork, will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steam roller has passed over the country from end to end will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start the machine.

(Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898 – 1905)1

By the summer of 2008 things were therefore looking fairly bad in the Pathan areas. It was not of course as bad as the Western media portrayed it – I had been warned before travel ing to Peshawar that the city was ‘under siege’ and close to fal ing, but in fact I spent a month based in the city and never felt under direct personal threat.

Nonetheless, the sense of crisis was real. It was to be felt above al in the business community, many of whose members were making plans to leave if it became necessary. For example, smal er businessmen who would never have dreamed of this in the past were beginning to sel property to finance their sons’ education in Britain or America, so as to lay the basis for the whole family to move later. Even a tough ex-brigadier of my acquaintance admitted to me later that he had sold some of his land and bought property in Karachi instead, ‘just in case’.

Big businessmen were also seriously worried. When I visited Noman Wazir, CEO of Frontier Foundries, the biggest steel-mil in the NWFP, he broke off in the middle of our interview to give orders to his chief of staff, a retired military officer, about buying Kalashnikovs. ‘We have to get arms. Talk to the SSP [Senior Superintendent of Police].

Use any kind of political pressure to get the licences. You know what to do.’

Mr Wazir’s factory is situated on the Jamrud Industrial Estate in Hayatabad, the western suburb of Peshawar on the very edge of the Khyber Tribal Agency. Natural y, therefore, of al the areas of Peshawar Hayatabad is the most lawless and the most penetrated by the Taleban. Beside the main road I saw a sign – a common one in Peshawar these days: ‘My husband Shahir Ishaq has been kidnapped for three months and the government has done nothing.’

I asked Mr Wazir if he had given up completely on the police. ‘No, not completely,’ he replied.

But they desperately need help. Look, there are about 22,000

police in the NWFP, with about 8,000 modern weapons for al of them, very few vehicles, very poor communications and terrible pay. So it’s hardly surprising they are not doing wel .

Even if the government had much more money, it would take years to improve them. So the private sector has to look after itself.

When I returned to Peshawar almost a year later, in July 2009, the mood had improved considerably. This was odd in a way, because terrorism in the city had actual y got much worse. The Pearl Continental Hotel had been wrecked by a car bomb despite its heavy security, suicide bombings were growing in scale and becoming more indiscriminate, and the number of kidnappings and murders had risen to the point where I was told even by more resilient friends that to stay in my usual guest-house would be extremely dangerous (so I stayed most grateful y at the Frontier Constabulary Mess instead). Since then, bombs on an unprecedented scale have caused hundreds of casualties. The terrorists have also become far more indiscriminate, planting bombs in bazaars and outside hospitals, rather than, as before, concentrating on state and military targets.

The difference was not the level of violence, but the end of the sense of helpless drift that had gripped the city during my visit in 2008: the feeling that the army and the government (state and provincial) were more and more losing the initiative to the Taleban, and had no plan at al for getting it back. In fact, a determined counter-offensive had already begun in the Bajaur Agency to the north of Peshawar, but it was not clear if it would continue or would end in negotiations like so many military offensives before it. Above al , the growing Taleban hold on the district of Swat seemed to herald a move of the rebels out from FATA (which after al had never been under real state authority) and into the ‘settled areas’ of the NWFP.

In July and August 2009, by contrast, despite the insecurity and violence, there was a general feeling that the military and the authorities had final y got a grip on the situation and demonstrated that they were determined to fight, and that, whatever happened, the Taleban would not be al owed to seize control of Peshawar and its val ey. Business confidence had returned, and there was less talk of people leaving. For this, a range of new state policies and actions was responsible – but above al , it was due to the military counter-offensive in Swat in the late spring and summer of 2009.

The counter-offensive against the Taleban indeed provides something of a classic example of the Pakistani response to real y serious threats: the eventual selection, from the hordes of more or less useless Pakistani public servants, of a smal number of brave and able men; the concentration, from Pakistan’s heaps of squandered public finances, of enough money to support a major operation; the belated unity of the political, economic, administrative and military elites in the face of a common existential danger; the brutal but in the end brutal y effective manner in which the struggle has been conducted; the way in which most of the operation has been conducted outside the constitution, the law and the regular administrative and political structures; and the central role of the army not just in the military operation but every other area.

Unity among the elites was essential, because the near-paralysis of the summer of 2008 in the Pathan areas affected every area of the state, and was largely due to the bitter divisions between the political parties, the military and the civil service. For this various factors were responsible: the slow death of the Musharraf presidency (he resigned on 18 August 2008) and the struggle over the succession, which dominated the attention of the political party leaderships and governments; the tradition of bitter distrust between the military and the ruling parties in both Islamabad and Peshawar; and the awareness of everyone concerned that tough military operations against the Taleban were opposed by the majority of the population, especial y in the Pathan areas.

PUBLIC OPINION AND THE TALEBAN

The fol owing fact has been widely ignored in the West, probably because it raises a very uncomfortable issue: namely, that Western governments and the Western media believe that they want to promote democracy in Pakistan, but that they have pressed upon Pakistani governments a cooperation with the West in the ‘war on terror’ which most Pakistani voters detest. Pakistani politicians, however – who need those voters’ votes – obviously could not be indifferent to this dilemma, or, at least, not until the threat from the Taleban to themselves became so grave and so obvious that they felt that they had no choice but to fight back. For a long time, therefore, al the main actors on the Pakistani political stage, including Musharraf, the military, the intel igence agencies and the political parties, tried to avoid tough action against the Pakistani Taleban, while at the same time not breaking with the United States. Each at the same time tried to put the blame on the others for the failure to confront the Taleban.

For reasons that have already been explained, these feelings were especial y strong among the Pathans, and are closely related to their opinions of the Afghan Taleban struggle. I thought that I might find some more hopeful signs at Peshawar University, which is both a centre of ANP and PPP support, and the site of whatever progressive feeling exists among Pathan youth in the province. In any case, it is always nice to visit Peshawar University. Its green and beautiful grounds are like a drop of perfume squeezed out as if by God’s hand from the hard and gritty fabric of Peshawar. They remind one why, for al the great monotheistic religions that emerged from the arid Middle East, paradise is a garden.