The 9/11 Wars (65 page)

But still, even if senior spies and policy-makers were increasingly convinced that the ISI was playing what one official called ‘a long double game’, no one had yet evolved a policy to counter it. Western intelligence services remained still heavily dependent on the ISI for intelligence on al-Qaeda and were unable to operate in the FATA without the assistance of their Pakistani counterparts, who jealously restricted their allies’ freedom of movement and operation within their country. Equally, it was still only the Pakistani military which could move against any ‘safe havens’ for the international militants. The ISI continued to show every sign of believing they could still manage the radical groups that they had protected for so long in the Punjab or sent into Kashmir. There was little reason to believe the ISI intelligence service would cease their efforts to manage the Taliban, Haqqani and Hekmatyar in the near future either, whatever the pressure put on them. Their support to the insurgents had always been predicated on the analysis that the West’s effort in Afghanistan would eventually fail. The deteriorating situation across the border thus appeared only to vindicate the Pakistanis’ long-term strategy.

ANOTHER FRONT IN ANOTHER WAR

The man who had been immediately blamed for killing Bhutto was Baitullah Mehsud, a thirty-four-year-old Pashtun tribesman and militant from the FATA. The evidence against him was circumstantial – a telephone conversation picked up by satellite surveillance in which he accepted the congratulations of a cleric and appeared to say that those who had committed the attack were part of the group of fighters he led – but was accepted as proof of what was largely already suspected by most security services and many analysts.
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Mehsud, who led the rough coalition of groups known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan (Pakistan Taliban Union or TTP), publicly denied the killing but had already threatened to assassinate Bhutto.
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The various groups that made up the TTP – the coalition had formally been declared in the autumn of 2007 – had many qualities familiar from other parts of this narrative. Though numerous – the total force that could be mobilized at any one time was probably between 5,000 and 10,000 – it was still a tiny percentage of the overall population. The strong sense of cultural identity – reimagined, reconstituted and repackaged – was reminiscent of both the Afghan Taliban and the al-Mahdi Army in Iraq. The degree to which the groups found their broader rhetorical language in the debased global ‘single narrative’ popularized so widely in the Islamic world over the previous decade was also obvious. The economic growth enjoyed by Pakistan in the first years of the decade might have been largely confined to the eastern half of the country, but the new broadcast media certainly were accessible in the FATA. The way in which base manoeuvres for power, cash and influence were legitimized by appeal to a greater cause and the constant tensions between communities and militants seen in the FATA also had clear parallels elsewhere. So too had the nature of recruitment – flowing down lines of association, friendship, clan and family – rather than through any organized system. The conflict between the nation – it was after all the ‘Pakistani’ Taliban – and pan-Islamic identities was equally familiar. Two linked elements that were particularly clear in the character and internal dynamics of the Pakistani Taliban but were not often picked up in analysis at the time were the degree to which the militants drew much of their support from marginalized elements within their own societies and the way in which their rhetoric and ideology were informed by a socially revolutionary agenda. The striking fact about Mehsud and the men who he nominally led was not that they were ‘pure products’ of the traditions of the frontier but rather the effective collapse of such traditions in the new circumstances generated in part by the 9/11 Wars.

Mehsud, for example, came from elements within local Pashtun society which would never have had any power, influence or wealth only a decade or so before. Born near Bannu, a dusty town on the edge of the FATA, not a village in its heart, Mehsud came from a minor branch of a minor tribe, not a prestigious branch of a powerful or rich one.
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His parents were not wealthy – his father was a low-ranking cleric – and Mehsud himself had been patchily educated, attending both a number of different religious schools and several different public institutions.
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Though Mehsud liked to boast that he had fought with the Taliban, it appears he had in fact only spent a few months in the late 1990s guarding Kabul airport, so was denied even the prestige and social mobility that feats of arms might traditionally have afforded him. Even a hagiographic biography written by his deputy does not mention any combat role in the fighting during the fall of the Taliban regime, though it says that Mehsud assisted al-Qaeda fighters in escaping Afghanistan and finding secure havens across the border.
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When, in 2004, Mehsud had succeeded in assuming the leadership of several hundred fighters in the strategically crucial agency of South Waziristan, he did so in a very modern way: the position was effectively vacant because the previous incumbent, the charismatic Nek Mohammed, had been killed by a missile fired by an American unmanned drone after he had given away his location by using a satellite phone in one of the first such assassinations in the region. Other militant leaders in the frontier zone in the autumn of 2007 and in the summer of 2008 also would have stood little chance of any leadership role, wealth or influence under the old traditional frontier systems.
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Mangal Bagh, an independent militant leader in the Khyber Agency, was a former bus driver.
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One of the rising figures in the northern agencies – Maulana Fazlullah – was a former mechanic who once maintained a miniature ski-lift for tourists visiting the scenic Swat valley. Muslim Khan, Fazlullah’s close aide, was a secular-educated former PPP activist who had travelled widely in the Middle East and Europe as a merchant seaman, then spent years as a taxi driver in America before finally returning to his village shortly after the 9/11 attacks to open a drugstore.
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Other militant leaders included barbers, butchers, itinerant salesmen, petrol pump attendants, criminals or, in a region where levels of unemployment touched somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent, were simply the semi-retired veterans of a variety of conflicts.
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Leaders in Bajaur and in the valleys of Malakand and Swat made frequent promises to redistribute the often extensive properties of major landowners to those who had none, picking up historical local claims for land reform by agricultural day labourers going back to the 1970s and beyond.
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The militants were not, by local standards, ignorant men. All but four of a dozen captured militants the author interviewed in Peshawar in November 2008 had travelled widely in Pakistan, two had worked in the Gulf and one had spent several years in east Africa and in the Middle East working and, he said, ‘preaching’. Though their levels of religious knowledge and political understanding were relatively low, they were most definitely not farm boys who had picked up the family Kalashnikov. The militants fighting in the FATA were thus not the product of an ancient society resisting the modern but, like the Taliban across the frontier, a profoundly contemporary phenomenon.

As in Afghanistan and Iraq, the violence in the FATA resembled a matrix of multiple ongoing conflicts. The radicalization seen in the early years of the 9/11 Wars saw many of these conflicts, some of which stretched back decades, re-energized. So in the northernmost tribal agency, Bajaur, the three major local tribes had split very differently in terms of allegiance and ideology by 2002 or 2003 and, from 2006 onwards had been in open or semi-open warfare with each other or with the government. The largest and poorest tribe remained broadly neutral. A second tribe, the Salarzai, who were mainly relatively wealthy farmers, had rallied to the government. A third, the Mahmund, were the only local community that could truly be said to be integrated into the ‘modern world’, largely, it is true, through smuggling, the arms and drugs business, exposure to various strands of contemporary Islamist thought, pilgrimages to the Gulf, remittances from overseas and through hosting itinerant preachers (and occasionally al-Qaeda leaders). It was the Mahmund who were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the militants in FATA.
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When not fighting the Pakistani military, the Mahmund fought either in Afghanistan or against the other two tribes of Bajaur.

The conflict in the FATA was thus, as in Afghanistan and in Iraq, in a large part a series of overlapping civil wars. Sometimes these took the form of an assault on traditional authority – hundreds, probably thousands, of traditional tribal elders were executed by militants between 2003 and 2008.
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Sometimes, such as in Kurram agency, the conflicts had a more sectarian flavour, pitting Sunnis against Shia. In Waziristan, fighters under a rival commander from a rival tribe took on those of Baitullah Mehsud in a battle sparked initially by differing attitudes to the presence of Uzbek and other central Asian militants in local villages but which degenerated into a straight struggle for power and resources. In the Khyber Pass, three different factions, divided by sub-tribe and religious observance, patched together different alliances, fought each other and the government and engaged in kidnap and racketeering. The presence of fugitive al-Qaeda leadership elements, in Bajaur as elsewhere, also fuelled such local conflicts, not necessarily because of the radicalizing effect the propaganda of such individuals had but because of the competition for the very large rent payments they were prepared to pay to anyone prepared to take the risk of providing shelter.
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Like the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani groups themselves faced a range of challenges, however. Their idea of government was largely inspired by that that their counterparts across the border had introduced during the late 1990s. But, though it was welcomed by some communities in the FATA for the same reasons that many in Afghanistan had supported the imposition of a rigorous and puritanical system there a decade earlier, the Pakistani militants were operating in a very different environment. Though old institutions such as the
jirga
, the consultative meeting of tribal elders, were breaking down in the FATA, most local people wanted them restored, not replaced by mediation by militant leaders or clerics.
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Militant leaders like Mehsud claimed to bring justice and security, setting up courts to rapidly resolve disputes, creating vigilante police forces and building makeshift jails into which ‘bandits’ were thrown, exactly as the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan, but, though these were initially popular, attacks on symbols of government authority or so-called ‘moral corruption’ were less well viewed. Despite the profound conservatism of the local tribesmen – over 90 per cent said that women should remain in the home, more than two-thirds backed honour killings, and a vast majority favoured the imposition of strict
sharia
law – there was a broad desire for education. The systematic destruction of hundreds of schools and the murder of scores of teachers thus did little to endear the militants to the local communities.
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Similarly the expulsion of all local and foreign NGOs from areas dominated by the radical groups was also unpopular. Successive surveys showed the local desire for the development such organizations could bring. Many of the local political figures targeted by the militants – often those linked to the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party who did well in the NWFP and in the FATA in the 2008 elections – were popular and respected figures.

If the Pakistani Taliban had been a more cohesive phenomenon or had had aims that went beyond dominating a particular valley, road or racket, such issues might have caused serious problems. But such tensions, which themselves remained highly localized, were far from a strategic threat to militancy in an environment as radicalized as that of the Pakistani–Afghan frontier in late 2008.
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One poll found that only 3 per cent of tribesmen saw the Taliban as terrorists. Equally, the clumsy tactics of the regular troops deployed to the periodic offensives in the FATA allowed, as had occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, the militants to pose as protectors of local communities or at the very least to benefit ambivalent popular sentiments. Army officers, trained only for conventional operations against massed Indian armoured units on the eastern frontier, were utterly ignorant of counter-insurgency doctrine, old or new. Drawn from elsewhere in Pakistan and officered largely by Punjabis, who often needed interpreters to speak to local people, the military were often seen as an alien presence.
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The army’s successive ‘cordon and sweep’ operations between 2003 and 2007 involved either unwitting or deliberate destruction of the homes of very large numbers of locals as a collective punishment. In their major campaign in South Waziristan in 2004, the army had bulldozed over eighty houses, destroyed local irrigation works and wells and killed scores of civilians.
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In January 2008, another major operation in the same area saw a further 4,000 houses reduced to ruins and bulldozers and explosives used to level one town’s bazaar.
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