Pakistan is a country at war, but you wouldn’t know it when this reporter walked into the reading hall of the Lahore Press Club in the afternoon of Friday, May 15^th.  A number of journalists were reading yesterday’s paper. Some were slowly stirring their tea. One of them was sleeping, laying on the paper with the stories he wrote for yesterday’s edition.
Lahore is about 500 kilometers from the war zone in Swat Valley. “But the Islamic militants will not leave us alone”, leading author Mr. Ahmed Rashid gave assurance on Sunday, May 24^th.  A few months ago, Mr. Rashid published The Descent into Chaos, in which he explained how American mistakes caused Afghanistan and Pakistan to be infiltrated by armed groups of Muslim extremists of different kinds.
Three days later, reality proved him right. The Taliban exploded an enormous car bomb in the heart of Lahore, resulting in 23 casualties and nearly 300 injured. The next day, the Taliban’s spokesman, Mr. Hakimulah Mehsud, claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to Reuters. He added that more bomb attacks will follow and that the inhabitants of Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Multan would be wise to move away from their cities. Less than one hour after that call, Taliban militants committed three more attacks in the North-Western city of Peshawar. Mr. Mehsud’s short list of cities, with Peshawar added– that is the exact trajectory this reporter had been following in the two weeks preceding the attacks in Pakistan.   

Dreams and nightmares

“Today is the worst memory in my life”, says Mr. Abdul Mohammed. He is sitting uncomfortably on a chair in the shadow of a plum tree. Each shadow is a blessing in the burning heat that is torturing Pakistan. “When I was 20,” he said, “I had it all: a house, a family, a future. All of that is gone”. He used to live in the Bajaur district, one of the tribal areas near the Afghan border which was overrun by armed Islamist militias in 2001.
After years of indecisive reaction, the Pakistani army started fighting the local Taliban this spring. Because of the action, Mr. Mohammed lost his right eye, all of his property, and a part of his family. In short, his whole life. Just like half a million other inhabitants of the tribal regions, he fled and ended up on the outskirts of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Punjabi people refer to it as “the capital of the Wild West”, strongly disapproving the lawlessness in this region bordering Afghanistan.
A few minutes later, in the same garden, came the story of ten year old Saida. She and her family originated from Mohmand, another tribal area. Her dream is to become a teacher, she says. “Then I could educate children who would otherwise never get a chance to go to school.” Her mother was sitting next to her during the interview, dressed in a black burqa. Photography is not permitted, even though she remained completely wrapped under the Pashtu veil. However, she does agree with young Saida. “Because we had to flee to this city, I saw educated, independently working women for the first time in my life”, she says. “This is the kind of life I want for my daughter as well.” In North West Pakistan, Saida and her mother’s dream are further away than Mr. Abdul Mohammed’s nightmare.
Responsible for that sorry state of affairs is the tangible presence of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistani (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban, led by Mr. Baitullah Mehsud. On May 28th, his Islamic militias committed three attacks in Peshawar. On May 22nd, they blew up a movie theater, and a week before that, a bomb exploded in a crowded market place. And then on June 9th, they blew up the five star Pearl Continental Hotel. This bombing campaign proves, especially to foreigners, that the Taliban can strike anywhere and at any time. But there’s more to it.  

Daily terror

‘Yesterday, three Uzbeks were arrested in Bajaur.’ With that statement, a health worker opens the daily morning round of news exchange with other health workers. It is May 21^st.  Her colleagues then add to what sounds like a never ending litany of sorrows: nine people playing cards in Peshawar were arrested by the Taliban and deported to the tribal areas.  People living in regions where there is still no military action are holding their breath and starting to leave their homes, after Prime Minister Asif Ali Zardari said that “Swat is only the beginning; we will wipe the other areas clean as well”.
The army is more and more active in the refugee camps and is now even handing out mosquito nets, thereby blurring the lines with humanitarian workers.  The number of police raids is increasing in Peshawar. Banks and insurance companies asked their employees to come to work dressed in salwaar kameez, the traditional male clothing in Pakistan, after repeated threats expressed by the Taliban.
In short, the Taliban don’t even need to commit attacks in order to install daily terror in the city, even in places which they don’t control. In places they have taken power, they implement their so called pure Islamic rule by force and violence. If anyone needed proof, it was provided by the infamous video in which seventeen year-old Chand Bibi from the Swat Valley was lashed for the alleged improper behavior.
The release of the video, in which the screaming girl was tortured with a whip by the imperturbable militants, shocked Pakistan out of its complacency and made the first deep dent in the public image of the Taliban. When the Taliban, only a few days after the “final peace agreement” had been signed by the president and almost unanimously approved by parliament, violated the agreement and conquered more territory instead of handing in their weapons, the tide of public opinion reversed completely.  Then, the army started the operation in Swat.  

A ticking time bomb

The first consequence of the military actions in the Swat Valley and its neighboring districts Buner and Dir was a sudden flood of refugees, swelling to more than two million people in May – in addition to the 500,000 people who had escaped earlier on from the tribal areas. Near the borders of the Malakand Division (the part of NWFP to which Swat belongs), small and medium sized tent camps were set up. The authorities, UN refugee organizations, Pakistani organizations, individuals and international NGOs all do their very best to offer a humane shelter to the flood of people.
In Mazdoorabad, a small village between the city of Mardan and the Swat Valley, 5,000 men, women and children found shelter in a tent camp, provided with medical aid by the Belgian branch of Doctors Without Borders (MsF). While a war is being fought in their home villages, refugees here are fighting the heat and the shock of alienation.
Women are trying to maintain their dignity and  carry out their tasks as mothers in an unknown environment, no longer protected by the familiar walls of their homes in the villages that enclose and protect them. Men are condemned to sit by idle and see their pride and dignity crumble into dependency and ignorance.
“The day the army operation will stop, we will return immediately”, claims one of the young men who hide from the scorching sun under one of the newly constructed shelters. “But does the military want to permanently destroy the Taliban? Or do they merely want to teach them a lesson, enabling them to regroup in another area? With this army, one never can be sure,” he says. He is not afraid of the Taliban because they never did any wrong to him, he claims, to the consenting nodding and humming of all the boys and men around him.
But perhaps the militants will consider their escape as a sort of collaboration with the army, so he is not really convinced that the cohabitation with the Taliban will then work as easily as he claims it went before the military operation.  
The vast majority of refugees – 85 percent, according to the government’s own estimates– avoid the tent camps. Over 1.5 million people are given shelter by relatives, friends and just random citizens. The solidarity and hospitality of the host families is limited, however, by these families’ own poverty.
“If the government is not capable of supporting both the refugees and their host families, then the victory over the Swat-Taliban could turn out to be a defeat on the public forum”, says Mr. Abbas Rashid, a columnist working for The Daily Times.  He expresses the opinion of many. “The government and the army planned this operation, so they also should have planned for the shelter for the refugee flood. This is not a natural disaster, like the Kashmir earthquake in 2005. Right now, public opinion is still behind the army. But if the refugees feel neglected, we are risking an alienation from the state on a scale we have never witnessed before.”

The Constitution instead of the sharia

‘Rubbish!’ Ms. Samina Ahmed, exclaimed.  She is the director of the South Asian desk of the International Crisis Group, and she does not need many words to counter the suggestions, made by colleagues-analysts, that there was a demand in the Swat Valley and neighboring districts for the introduction sharia, the Islamic legal system. According to her, the real problem is the confidence crisis between the people and the authorities in the Malakand Division.
“The Awami National Party, who is running the provincial government of the NWFP, concluded the peace agreement with the Taliban and Sufi Mohammed without even consulting its own deputies”, she explained. “The army is currently involved in a large operation, but people fear that the Taliban is just being relocated and that they will soon again be exposed to the Taliban’s brutal intimidations and ‘legal’ systems. Even the Taliban’s FM radio stations are still broadcasting. How is this possible, if the army really wants to break their rebellion?” 
Ms. Ahmed admits, upon insisting, that there was a call for a better functioning judicial system. And perhaps there might have been some nostalgia for the jurisprudence existing before the region became an integral part of Pakistan, which was remotely based on the sharia. “But what the people really called for, was a quick and impartial implementation of the constitution, not the sharia and surely not the sharia as interpreted by the Taliban”, she persists. “Besides, if people are so much in favor of the introduction of the sharia, then why did they vote massively for secular parties during the 2008 elections?”
That is the argument most widely used in progressive circles to disparage the rise of radical Islam in Pakistan. Islamic parties never obtained good scores in Pakistani elections. The only exception was between 1999 and 2008, when General Pervez Musharraf sidelined all big political parties and the whole of civil society.  

Belief and ignorance

Dr. Mohammed Suheyl Umar, Director of the Iqbal Academy, a section of the Ministry of Culture that is dedicated to the study of the national poet Muhammad Iqbal, confirms this analysis. However, he can think of a few reasons why fanatic Islamists could claim the public’s sympathy. “For many years, the Islamists succeeded in presenting themselves as the real and pure believers”, says Dr. Umar.
“This led to increasing guilt and even encouraged brought some bad feelings among the majority of the Pakistani. Is it not in contradiction with the Qur’an if I pray in the sanctuary of a Sufi saint? Is music allowed? The extremists very strictly commit themselves to a limited number of rules and commands, and many Muslims, unaware of their own religion, are impressed by that. But when one measures the way the armed militants handle people, means, and power, one comes to the conclusion that not much of their religious status remains. When Taliban started to close and then blow up girls schools in Swat, their justification was that one doesn’t teach a goat how to read and write, either. Quotes like that opened the eyes of many people.”
Dr. Umar points out that the sharia has been recognized in the past decade as the ultimate standard for legislation and jurisprudence in Pakistan. But because of the long tradition of different legal schools in Islam, this has never led to the kind of totalitarian claims now made by the Taliban.
Mr. Ali Akbar Al-Azhari, chief editor of the monthly magazine Minhaj-ul-Qur’an (edited by the religious movement of the same name), emphasizes that Pakistan should be an Islamic nation and should be governed on the basis of sharia, though he unambiguously rejects the Taliban and their brand of political Islam.
Mr. Al-Azhari notes: “The conflict in the Swat Valley arose because of the stupidity of the Taliban and of the local religious leaders. Sufi Mohammed, the ‘politician’ who led the peace negotiations between the Taliban and the NWFP government, called the constitution and the entire judicial power un-Islamic and declared the whole democracy anti-religious in the same broad swipe. Even his traditional allies from the Deobandi School (a strict Islamic movement very similar to the Saudi Wahabism) renounced these statements.”
In May, Pakistani religious leaders, mostly from the other Sunni sect of Barelvi, gathered several times. At each of these occasions, their meeting was concluded with an unambiguous condemnation of the “Taliban Islam”.
If there’s one measure to be taken to save Pakistan, then a huge investment in education would become a top priority, according to Mr. Al-Azhari. In good education, that is. Today, such good education is only accessible to those who can afford to go to private schools. The vast majority of children in Pakistan go to school in religious madrassas or in public schools. Observers claim that as many religious prejudices and nationalistic nonsense are being taught in those public schools as in the notorious Deobandi-madrassa’s that have generated so many jihad warriors in the past decade.  

Blame thy neighbor

“Most Pakistanis are conservative, yet moderate Muslims’, says Mr. Khalid Mahmood, retired ambassador and head of the Pakistani Agency for Foreign Affairs between 2002 and 2007. “Today’s radical feelings in society are rooted in recent history. Already in the seventies, under President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the authorities began to patronize the politicized religious class. But General Zia ul-Haq, who drove Bhutto from power and later executed him, has taken this to unseen levels. Add to that the thirty-year war and instability in Afghanistan and the now thirty-year reign of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, then one can begin to understand the weight of Pakistan’s history in its difficult relations between religion and politics. 
But the ex-ambassador draws our attention to an even more important reason to explain the recent success of extremist propaganda. Pakistani authorities and citizens always fear international isolation. This fear is summarized in one word: India. It was this fear that motivated Pakistan to become involved so deeply in the battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then, as the first and one of the only countries in the world, to recognize the Taliban regime in Kabul.
According Mr. Ahmed Rashid and other political commentators, Pakistani military circles continued supporting the Afghan Taliban after 2001. The reason for that was to ensure themselves of having allies against the Northern Alliance -now dominating the government in Kabul-, supported by India and brought to power with American consent.

Good and bad Taliban

The Indian threat runs through the many conversations on Islamists’ history and future in Pakistan as a refrain. But nobody sings that refrain as loud and extreme as Mr. Zaid Zalman Hamid, ex mujahedin fighter in the Afghanistan-Soviet war and nowadays head of BrassTacks, his own security consultancy company based in Rawalpindi. After the 2007 massive terror campaign that shocked Pakistan, the army drew the line.
“In higher military circles, it is believed that there are ‘good Taliban’ and ‘bad Taliban’. The first category consists of various armed groups, fighting in Afghanistan against Western occupation and against the India-supported government. Those groups are acting in the interest of the Pakistani State. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistani (TTP) however, is not fighting in Afghanistan. They point their missiles at, and use their bombs against, the State of Pakistan. Hence, they are declared public enemy number one.”
Furthermore, Mr. Hamid claims that the political support, the military material, and the necessary cash are being provided “from abroad”, more exactly by American, Indian and Russian sources. Other conspiracy experts point their fingers to China and Iran.
“There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories in Pakistan”, Mr. Rashid responds.  “Everybody claims to have proof or to have seen evidence showing India’s involvement in the violence which now tears our society apart. Yet no one has ever provided such evidence. People are desperately willing to believe that the violence does not have its origins in Pakistan, and that it surely could not have been Muslims who were mistreating and killing their brothers and sisters in the faith.”
Recent events in Pakistan make it more and more difficult to suppress and deny the truth, though. After the attacks in Lahore and Peshawar, new assaults followed in the end of May in Kohat and a mass-abduction of probably over 500 people took place in South Waziristan. In the mean time, the number of people escaping Malakand Division stills exceeds the number of those returning. “The militants will do anything to broaden the scale of the conflict. From the North-West to South Punjab, from the Tribal Areas all the way to Karachi”, says Mr. Rashid. It would appear there is no lack of groups and militants to make his predictions come true.

Powder Keg Pakistan

FATA

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a territory which was never placed under the rule of the Brittish colonial forces. The area served as a buffer against incontrollable Afghanistan and enjoyed a specific status in independent Pakistan. As a result, the government in Islamabad has only limited power in Khyber, Kurram, Bajaur, Mohmand, Orakzai, North- and South-Waziristan. Since the expulsion of the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001, the area became a shelter and a hiding place for Afghan Taliban (Pathans, like the majority of the FATA inhabitants) and the internationalists from Al Qaeda. The Pakistani Taliban gradually -and violently- replaced the traditional tribal chiefs as the ones in power.

Swat, Buner and Dir

The districts in the North West of Pakistan, where the army concluded a peace agreement with the Taliban groups led by Maulana Fazlullah on February 16^th and where the government made an arrangement with the radical Islamic leader Sufi Mohammad to allow the introduction of sharia courthouses. This region used to be a princely state, retaining a special status and an independent legal system (a combination of the sharia and common law). Since the region was fully integrated into Pakistan, a functioning legal system has been wanting. That made Swat inhabitants consider the Taliban’s demands for sharia as legitimate.  

Peshawar

The capital of the North West Frontier Province. It used to be the launching path for the Jihad during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the beginning of the eighties. That turned the city into a crossroad where a few million Afghani refugees, American and Saudi secret services and financiers, international aid organizations, Pakistani military and intelligence and international jihadivolunteers would meet and mutually influence each other. Since 2001, NATO forces in Afghanistan are being supplied through the Khyber pass, making Peshawar again a key strategic point in the new war as well. Nearly every week, NATO trucks are being attacked. In May alone, three bomb attacks took place. In June, the bombing of the Pearl Continental hotel was world news.

Baluchistan

Baluchistan is the largest (58 percent of the territory) and poorest province of Pakistan. At the same time, much of Pakistan’s natural resources are found in Baluchi soil. For decades, a movement demanding more autonomy or even a separate state had been active politially. On 2 April, three Baluchi nationalistic leaders were abducted and later found murdered. Earlier on, in 2006, the traditional leader of the Baluchi nationalism had been killed by the army of Pakistan. Different sources have reported over 1,000 disappearances in Baluchistan, resulting in an explosive situation in this province.

Quetta

The capital of Baluchistan and the heart of the Baluchi nationalist movement. Quetta is also the operating basis for a part of the Afghani Taliban, as the Pathan city of Kandahar is only 150 km away. Mullah Omar is said to have had his head quarters here in the years following 2001.

South-West Punjab

The South of Punjab is traditionally an important recruiting area for jihadi groups, active since the nineties in Indian Kashmir. Well known groups are Lashkar-e-Toiba (blamed for planning and executing the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, even though it already was declared illegal; currently operating as a charity organization under the name of Jamaat-ul-Dawah), Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammed. After 9/11 these groups were more or less cut off form support they used to get form the State of Pakistan. Observers fear an increasing cooperation between these jihadi groups and the Taliban from the North. The 27 May assault in Punjab capital Lahore and further attacks in Punjab would appear to confirm this fear.

Karachi

Continuous tensions between the Pathan, Sindhi and Mohajir population in Karachi, a city with 18 million inhabitants, led to violent riots, during which 25 people were killed and 50 injured.
Confronted with an increasing refugee flood in the North West “MQM”, the largest Mohajir party in Karachi, opposed letting Pathan refugees into the city and demanded to stop and screen all, in order to separate the real refugees from Taliban infiltrators. The Mohajir are Urdu speaking migrants who left India after its independence in 1947.

Chitral

In the middle of March, American intelligence released their assesment that Osama Bin Laden would be hiding in one of the northern valleys of Chitral. This region, situated in the Hindu Kush mountains with peaks as high as 7,700 meters, borders the Afghan – Wakhan corridor. This is the point where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan are coming together. The population of Chitral consists of Shi’a and Sunni believers. The growing influence of the Deobandi madrassa’s and of mullahs on the Sunni population threatens the coexistence of these two groups, writes Magnus Marsden in Living Islam. Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier. 

Kashmir

The absolutely most important source of South-Asian instability since 1947 is Kashmir, a former princely state that was claimed by both Pakistan and India at the partition of the subcontinent on independence day. Having fought two wars over Kashmir, Pakistani intelligence changed their strategy in the nineties to using proxy fighters, paying armed Islamists to join the rebellion against Delhi. Without a sustainable solution for Kashmir, real peace between Pakistan and India is impossible.

Afghanistan

Pakistani support to Pathan warlords, namely to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani and later to mullah Omar’s Taliban was justified by Islamabad’s fear for an Afghan-Indian partnership. Islamabad wanted an alliance with Kabul, in order to create “strategic depth” in case a new war with India would break out. Based on the same consideration, Pakistan didn’t wipe the Taliban out when they had fled to Pakistan in 2001. The Northern Alliance, which came to power in December 2001 in Kabul, enjoyed the support of India, Iran, Uzbekistan and Russia during the late nineties.

India in Afghanistan

Since the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, India not only reopened its Kabul embassy, it also opened consulates in Herat, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad. In Pakistan, concern about that is so high that people route-inely refer to 13 new Indian consulates in Afghanistan and its 107 “information centres” and hundreds of staff members, who are said to be involved in support activities in favour of the Baluchi nationalists and the “bad” Taliban in Pakistan. In April this year Richard Holbrooke, the American special representative to the region, called this conspiracy theory completely off the mark.

Iran

On May 28th, 25 people were killed in an assault on a Shi’a mosque in Zahedan, the capital of the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan. As a reaction Iran closed the border with Pakistan, arrested three suspects and had them hanged immediately. Four days later, five people lost their lives in an attack on an organization closely related to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Main suspect for these violent acts (shortly before the elections in Iran) is Jundullah, a Sunni resistance movement which is said to operate from camps based on Pakistani territory.