Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [235]
We support greater autonomy for the NWFP and other provinces, but on one condition: that this demand must not be based on hatred and must not encourage conflicts with Punjabis, Baloch or other ethnic groups in Pakistan. If this plan is based on good relations and agreements with our ethnic neighbours, then we will support it. But ANP ideas create a real danger of ethnic conflict. That is especially true of all this talk of a Greater Pashtunistan taking in huge bits of Balochistan and Punjab. Of course other nationalities will oppose this.
For many years, the thoroughly pragmatic Islamism of the JUI and the equally pragmatic nationalism of the ANP have helped ensure that the great majority of Pathans have lived peacefully and not too unhappily within Pakistan. However, with both these parties now seriously discredited by their association with President Zardari and his alliance with the USA, the future of electoral politics in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is now an open question.
PART FOUR
The Taleban
11
The Pakistani Taleban
There arose one of those strange and formidable insurrections among the Pathans which from time to time sweep across the Frontier mountains like a forest fire, carrying all before them. As on previous occasions there followed a reaction, but the fire is not wholly put out. It continues to smoulder dully until a fresh wind blows.
(Olaf Caroe)1
As described in earlier chapters, the world of Sunni Islamist extremism in Pakistan embraces a range of different groups, with significantly different agendas. The sectarian extremists described have long been carrying out terrorist attacks against Pakistani Shia and Christians. These and others in 2008 – 10 also turned to increasingly savage terrorist attacks in alliance with the Pakistani Taleban against state targets, ‘Sufi’ shrines and the general public, in response to growing military offensives in Bajaur, Swat and Waziristan. The terrorist threat from Islamist extremists is therefore now present across Pakistan. It will almost certainly grow further, and may end by radically changing the Pakistani state.
As of 2010, however, Islamist rebellion is not widespread. So far, mass insurrection has been restricted to parts of the Pathan areas of Pakistan, and has been due more to specific local factors and traditions than to wider Islamist and Pakistani ones. Among the Pathans, the Taleban can draw upon traditions of Islamist resistance to the Soviets, and long before that to the British; and indeed on a hostility, which dates back to time immemorial, to the rule of any state. Just as the backbone of the Taleban and their allies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan is to be found among the Pathans, so any settlement of the conflict with the Taleban in both countries will have to be one which brings a majority of the Pathan population on board.
As explained in previous chapters, the deeper religious, ethnic and tribal roots of the Pakistani Taleban date back hundreds of years, and were revived by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the struggle against it. The upsurge of militancy among the Pakistani Pathans after 2001 was due overwhelmingly to the US invasion of Afghanistan, and the influence of the Afghan Taleban.
Contrary to a widespread belief, Pakistan was not responsible for the creation of the Taleban in Afghanistan. As recounted by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a member of the core Taleban leadership, they had their origin in groups of madrasah students from Kandahar and surrounding provinces, who came together in the early 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation and the Communist government. They were trained by the Pakistani military – but with arms supplied by the US. Men from these formations then gathered spontaneously in Kandahar province in 1994, in response to the dreadful anarchy which had gripped the region after the Mujahidin’s overthrow of the Afghan Communist regime in 1992.2
As of 1994, the Afghan group which