Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [157]
With the exception of some journalists, most of my Lahore elite friends did indeed treat developments in the Pathan areas as if they were happening in a different country a long way off. This was still apparent even in January 2009, despite serious terrorist attacks in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. By July 2009, however, this complacency had been shattered by major attacks in Lahore itself, on the Sri Lankan cricket team and the police academy. Many more have followed. However, as this book has been at pains to point out, terrorism and insurgency are two very different things. Terrorist attacks can do great damage to Pakistan, but to overthrow the state would require an immense spread of the rebellions which broke out in some of the Pathan areas between 2001 and 2009. Above all, to seize power in Pakistan, Islamist militancy would have to seize Lahore.
During my visits to Lahore in 2007 – 2009, I was deeply worried by the lack of support among the mass of the population for tough action against the Pakistani Taleban – even in July 2009, by which time opinion in the elites had shifted very significantly. On the other hand, I could not find much significant support on the streets for the Taleban’s actual programme of Islamist revolution, even among the poor and the lower middle classes, the social heartland of Islamist radicalism in Punjab.
In January 2009, during the holiday which marks the festival of Moharram, I strolled across the park surrounding the Minar-e-Pakistan, the monument to Pakistan’s independence next to the Old City, mingling with the crowds and talking to people of different classes (from rickshaw drivers to members of the middle classes, but excluding the elite) about their views of their government, the economic situation, the Pakistani Taleban, the war in Afghanistan and anything else that they wanted to talk to me about.
This was a time when anti-Western feeling in Pakistan was running even higher than usual, owing to the Israeli attack on Gaza; and, as I have remarked elsewhere in this book, while it is difficult enough to argue with anti-Western Pakistanis when they are in the wrong, it is even more difficult to do so when they are in the right. So as might have been expected, I came in for a great deal of impassioned and radical-sounding rhetoric. Support for a military offensive against the Pakistani Taleban was extremely weak, and sympathy for the Afghan Taleban’s fight against the ‘US occupation’ of Afghanistan was universal.
Habib, an old scooter-driver, declared to murmurs of approval from the other drivers that,
The military should stop fighting against the Taleban in Swat and Bajaur. We are all Muslims after all. The Taleban are just trying to spread real Islam and bring peace and justice, and I don’t know why the army is trying to stop them. All over the world Muslims are under attack from the Jews and Americans, in Palestine, Afghanistan, everywhere. The Taleban are right to fight them.
Every single person I spoke with opposed Pakistani help to America in Afghanistan. Asghar, an educated, English-speaking youth in a baseball cap, declared, to the applause of his friends:
We have two opinions in our society: the government, which is for America, and the people, who are against America. How can any Muslim support US policies when they are helping Israel kill innocent Muslims? That is why the Taleban are carrying out terrorism in Pakistan, because of this gap between the government and the people. So we all think that the government should negotiate with the Taleban to end this conflict.
That said, a couple of serious qualifications need to be entered. The first is that in the great majority of cases people only started talking about the Taleban and the fight against them when I mentioned these themes (this was one thing which had changed by July, when Lahore had already come in for terrorist attacks). If I only asked what they were most concerned about, the