A volatile mix of US-led military action in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the government’s misguided fostering of jihadi groups threatens the stability of the entire region.
Just over a year ago, in February 2008, I travelled by car across the length and breadth of Pakistan to cover the country’s first serious election since General Pervez Musharraf seized power in 1999. The rightwing press had been predicting violence and bloodshed, but at the time I travelled in safety throughout the country and was struck by the country’s fortitude in the face of adversity. The story I wrote at the time for the New York Review of Books was optimistic.
“Like most other people given the option, Pakistanis clearly want the ability to choose their own rulers, and to determine their own future,” I wrote. “The country I saw over the last few days on a long road trip was not a failed state, nor anything even approaching ‘the most dangerous country in the world … almost beyond repair’ as the Spectator (among many others) recently suggested … By and large, the countryside I passed through was calm and beautiful, and not obviously less prosperous-looking than its subcontinental neighbour. It was certainly a far cry from the terminal lawlessness and instability of post-occupation Iraq or Afghanistan.”
A year on, however, the situation could hardly be more different, or more grim. In just over a year, Asif Ali Zardari’s inept government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban’s Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Yesterday’s ambush of the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, which killed six policemen and injured seven players and officials, combined with the defeat of the Pakistani army in Swat and the subsequent capitulation to the Taliban there, and the recent kidnapping of John Solecki, head of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Quetta, during an attack that killed his driver, underscores the seriousness of the situation.
Few had very high expectations of Zardari, the notorious playboy widower of Benazir Bhutto. Nevertheless, the speed of the collapse that has taken place on his watch has amazed almost all observers. Across much of the North-West Frontier Province – around a fifth of Pakistan – women have now been forced to wear the burka, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards and more than 140 girls’ schools have been blown up or burned down. From the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city’s elite, along with its musicians, have decamped to what had, until yesterday’s attack, been regarded as the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of ordinary people from the surrounding hills of the semi-autonomous tribal belt – the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) that run along the Afghan border – have fled from the conflict zones, blasted by missiles from unmanned American Predator drones and strafed by Pakistani helicopter gunships, to the tent camps now ringing Peshawar.
The tribal areas have never been fully under the control of any Pakistani government, and have always been unruly, but they have now been radicalised as never before. The rain of armaments from US drones and Pakistani ground forces, which have caused extensive civilian casualties, daily add a steady stream of angry foot soldiers to the insurgency. Elsewhere in Pakistan, anti-western religious and political extremism continues to flourish, and there are increasing signs that the instability is now spreading from the Frontier Province to the relatively settled confines of Lahore and the Punjab.
The most alarming manifestation of this was the ease with which a highly trained jihadi group, almost certainly supplied and provisioned in Pakistan – probably by the nominally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organisation that aims to restore Muslim rule in Kashmir – attacked neighbouring India in November. They murdered 173 innocent people in Mumbai, injured more than 600 and brought the two nuclear-armed rivals once again to the brink of war. Now Lashkar is being named as the principle suspect in yesterday’s attack in Lahore.
Four months ago, in November on a trip to Pakistan, I tried to visit Peshawar, which functions as both the capital of the North-West Frontier Province and the administrative centre for Fata along the Afghan border. But for the first time in 25 years, I was warned by Pakistani journalist friends not even to attempt going. In one week, an unprecedented series of events made up my mind for me.
On the Monday 11 November, some 60 militants identified with the Pakistani Taliban looted 13 trucks carrying military supplies and a fleet of Humvees going up the Khyber Pass to US troops in Afghanistan. Twenty-six people were kidnapped. The next day, a suicide bomber narrowly missed killing the governor and some of the ministers of the NWFP as they left a stadium. Three people were killed in the attack. On Wednesday of that week, unidentified gunmen killed Stephen Vance, a US aid worker, and kidnapped an Iranian diplomat, who joined the Chinese engineers, Pakistani truck drivers and senior Afghan diplomat being held in Taliban captivity. On the Thursday, two journalists – one Japanese, the other Afghan – were shot and wounded. And this was just one week in one single provincial town. Peshawar suddenly seemed to be becoming as violent as Baghdad at the height of the insurgency three years ago.
All this took place in the vacuum created by the temporary flight from the province of the chief minister and leader of the NWFP’s ruling Awami National party, Asfandyar Wali Khan. This followed a suicide bombing on 2 October that killed three guests and a member of his staff while he was greeting visitors during Eid celebrations marking the end of Ramadan. Immediately after the bombing, a rattled Khan fled from the province in a helicopter sent to him by Zardari, then flew straight on to Britain. He was persuaded to return only with some difficulty.
In February 2008, Khan’s party had been elected with a huge majority, breaking the power of the MMA Islamist alliance, a coalition of Islamic groups that has been a major force in frontier politics, and that had ruled the province for the previous five years. The election seemed to mark a moment of hope for Pakistani secular democracy; but that hope was soon shattered by the apparently unstoppable advance of the Pakistani Taliban out of Fata.
Since then there have been several more suicide bombings and a number of attacks on US convoys and depots in and around Peshawar, including one that led to the burning of 200 trucks and dozens of Humvees and armoured personnel carriers, and another that led to the capture by the Taliban of 50 containers of supplies.
Far from the frontier, in Pakistan’s artistic capital of Lahore, the scene of yesterday’s attack, the usually resilient members of the liberal elite were more depressed than I have ever seen them, alarmed both by the news of the Taliban’s advances and by the economic difficulties that have recently led Pakistan to seek a $7.6bn loan from the IMF.
The night I arrived, I went to see Najam Sethi and his wife Jugnu, editors of the English-language Daily Times and Friday Times newspapers, who now found themselves directly in the Taliban’s crosshairs. Three weeks earlier, they had begun to receive faxes threatening them with violence if they didn’t stop attacking Islamist interests in their columns. The two have survived years of harassment by various governments and agencies, but now felt powerless to respond to these anonymous threats.
Another old friend in Lahore, the human rights campaigner Asma Jahangir, had also received faxed warnings – in her case to desist helping the victims of honour killings. Jahangir, who had bravely fought successive military governments, was at a loss about what to do: “Nobody is safe any more,” she told me. “If you are threatened by the government you can take them on legally. But with nonstate actors, when even members of the government are themselves not safe, who do you appeal to? Where do you look for protection?”
These events dramatically illustrate the central contention of Descent into Chaos, the latest book by Ahmed Rashid, who is widely regarded as the best-informed writer on both the Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani counterparts. He emphasises the degree to which, seven years after 9/11, “the US-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001″.
Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the advance of Hamas and Hezbollah, the wreckage of Iraq, with more than two million external refugees and the ethnic cleansing of its Christian population, the rise of Iran as a major regional power, and now the implosion of Afghanistan and Pakistan, probably the most dangerous development of all. While laying part of the blame for the current disaster on the “arrogance and ignorance” of the US administration, Rashid is also well aware of the large share of responsibility that must be put at the door of Pakistan’s army and its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, or ISI.
For more than 20 years, the ISI has, for its own purposes, deliberately and consistently funded and incubated a variety of Islamist groups, including in particular Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Since the days of the anti-Soviet mujahideen, the Pakistani army saw the jihadis as an ingenious and cost-effective means of both dominating Afghanistan – something they finally achieved with the Soviet retreat in 1987 – and bogging down the Indian army in Kashmir, something they succeeded in achieving from 1990 onward.
The army’s top brass were convinced until recently that they could control the militants whom they had fostered. In a taped conversation between then-General Musharraf and Muhammad Aziz Khan, his chief of general staff, which India released in 1999, Aziz said that the army had the jihadis by their tooti (their privates).
Yet while some in the ISI may still believe that they can use jihadis for their own ends, the Islamists have increasingly followed their own agendas, sending suicide bombers to attack not just members of Pakistan’s religious minorities and political leaders, but even the ISI’s headquarters at Camp Hamza itself, in apparent revenge for the army’s declared support for America’s war on terror and attacks made by the Pakistani military on Taliban strongholds in Fata. Ironically, as Rashid makes clear, it was exactly groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which were originally created by the ISI, that have now turned their guns on their creators, as well as brazenly launching well-equipped and well-trained teams of jihadis into Indian territory.
The speed with which the US lost interest in Afghanistan after its successful invasion and embarked on plans to invade Iraq, which clearly had no link with al-Qaida, convinced Pakistan’s military leaders that the US was not serious about a long-term commitment to Karzai’s regime. This in turn led to them keeping the Taliban in reserve to be used to reinstall a pro-Pakistani regime in Afghanistan once the Americans’ attention had been turned elsewhere and Karzai’s regime had crumbled.
By 2004, the US had filmed Pakistani army trucks delivering Taliban fighters to the Afghan border and taking them back a few days later, while wireless monitoring at the US base at Bagram picked up Taliban commanders arranging with Pakistani army officers at the border for safe passage as they came in and out of Afghanistan. By 2005 the Taliban, with covert Pakistani support, was launching a full-scale assault on Nato troops in Afghanistan.
As Rashid notes in his conclusion: “Today, seven years after 9/11, Mullah Omar and the original Afghan Taliban Shura still live in Baluchistan province. Afghan and Pakistani Taliban leaders live on further north, in Fata, as do the militias of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. Al-Qaida has a safe haven in Fata, and along with them reside a plethora of Asian and Arab terrorist groups who are now expanding their reach into Europe and the United States.”
The foot-dragging response of Zardari to the attacks on Mumbai last November shows the degree to which the two-faced dual-track policy of courting both the US and the various jihadi groups remains effectively in place with the Pakistani military. For the last decade, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, has been allowed to operate from Muridke, near Lahore. Although Lashkar has officially been banned in reaction to US pressure after 9/11, widely thought to continue to function under the name of Jamaat-ud Daawa, while Saeed is accused of continuing to incite attacks on India and western targets.
Even now, after the mass murder in Mumbai – although Saeed is himself now under house arrest on suspicion of masterminding the attacks (an accusation that he denies) – his organisation’s madrasas and facilities remain open and appear to benefit from patronage offered by Pakistan’s authorities. Only this year, the Zardari government cleared the purchase of a bulletproof Land Cruiser for him. Zardari does indeed seem to be in what the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, calls “a state of denial” about the involvement of Pakistani jihadi groups in the Mumbai massacres.
Yet, viewed in the light of Pakistani power politics, Zardari’s position has a certain dangerous logic. Army insiders say that General Ashfaq Kiyani, the current chief of staff, who is already involved in a full-scale conflict with the Pakistani Taliban in the frontier tribal areas, does not feel sufficiently strong to open a second front with the jihadis in the Punjab; while Zardari, even though he may wish to be rid of Lashkar and the Punjabi jihadis, cannot afford to be seen to cave in to Indian pressure. It is a classic South Asian catch-22, which allows Lashkar to continue functioning with only cosmetic restrictions, whose main function is to impress the US. Yet the fact remains that until firm action is taken against all such groups, and training camps are closed down, the slow collapse of the Pakistani state will continue, and with it the safety of western interests in the region.
Several factors will determine the future. Rashid makes it clear that only a radical change of policy by the US under Barack Obama can hope to begin turning things around. He writes: “South and Central Asia will not see stability unless there is a new global compact among the leading players … to help this region solve its problems, which range from settling the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan to funding a massive education and job-creation program in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan and along their borders with Central Asia.” As Obama has hinted, such an approach could be coupled with negotiations with some elements of the Afghan Taliban.
The second factor, of course, has to be reform of the ISI and the Pakistani military. The top Pakistani army officers must end their obsession with bleeding India by using an Islamist strategic doctrine entailing support of jihadists, and realise that such a policy is deeply damaging to Pakistan itself, threatening to turn Pakistan into a clone of Taliban-dominated Afghanistan rather than a potential partner of a future Indian superpower.
A third factor is somehow finding a way to stop the madrasa-inspired and Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam, which is directly linked to the spread of anti-western radicalisation.
On my last visit to Pakistan, it was very clear that while the Wahhabi-dominated north-west was on the verge of falling under the sway of the Taliban, the same was not true of the Sufi-dominated province of Sindh, which currently is quieter and safer than it has been for some time. Here in southern Pakistan, on the Indian border, Sufi Islam continues to act as a powerful defence against the puritanical fundamentalist Islam of the Wahhabi mullahs, which supports intolerance of all other faiths.
Visiting the popular Sufi shrine of Sehwan in Sindh last month, I was astonished by the strength of feeling expressed against the mullahs by the Sindhis who look to their great saints such a Lal Shabaz Qalander for guidance, and hate the Wahhabis who criticise the popular Islam of the Sufi saints as a form of shirk, or heresy: “All these mullahs should be damned,” said one old Sufi I talked to in the shrine.
“They read their books but they never understand the true message of love that the prophet preached. Men so blind as them cannot even see the shining sun.”
A Delhi friend who visited shortly before me, the former Guardian Africa correspondent James Astill, met a young man from Swat, in the NWFP, who said he had considered joining the militants, but their anti-Sufi attitude had put him off: “No one can deny us our respected saints of God,” he said.
The Saudis have invested intensively in Wahhabi madrasas in the NWFP and Punjab, with dramatic effect, radically changing the religious landscape of an entire region. The tolerant Sufi culture of Sindh has been able to defy this imported Wahhabi radicalism. The politically moderating effect of Sufism was recently described in a Rand Corporation report recommending support for Sufism as an “open, intellectual interpretation of Islam”. Here is an entirely indigenous and homegrown Islamic resistance movement to fundamentalism, with deep roots in South Asian culture. Its importance cannot be overestimated. Could it have a political effect in a country still dominated by military forces that continue to fund and train jihadi groups? It is one of the few sources of hope left in the increasingly bleak political landscape of this strategically crucial country.
Originally Published in The Guardian, 4th March, 2009
URL: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/254098.html
Filed under: Excerpts & Quotes, Politik , ISI, Pakistan, Peace, Taleban, War on Terror, William Dalrymple
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