Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [243]
The then Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, saw this coming. He told me in early May 2007:
It’s true that we shouldn’t have allowed things to go so far at the Lal Masjid, but you see we really don’t want to see body-bags of the people there appearing on television, least of all of women from the age of ten up. Then the same editors who are criticizing us for inaction would criticize us for brutality, ordinary people would be disgusted, and terrorism and extremism in the country would certainly increase enormously. So far, these people at the mosque are not carrying out terrorist attacks. They are an irritant, not a menace, and so we will try to negotiate a peaceful end to all this if we possibly can.11
Much criticized at the time by Pakistani and Western liberals, these turned out in retrospect to have been very sensible words.
As Shaukat Aziz predicted, the storming of the mosque led to a wave of insurgency in the Pathan areas, a huge increase in terrorism, and a revulsion in Pakistani public opinion which helped lead to the downfall of the Musharraf administration. In reaction, militants in Waziristan called off a truce with the army, in force for the previous ten months, and launched a new wave of attacks on military and official targets. All over Pakistan, sympathizers with the Taleban with whom I talked used this incident to justify Taleban terrorism against the state.
In December 2007, different militant groups operating in the Pathan areas came together to form the Pakistani Taleban (TTP), a loose alliance with Beitullah Mahsud as amir or overall leader. The TTP declared itself to be an ally both of the Afghan Taleban and of Al Qaeda in a defensive jihad against the US occupation of Afghanistan. Their statements on Pakistan have varied considerably. On occasions they have declared that they have no quarrel with Pakistan and are only fighting the Pakistani army because it attacked them on US orders. On other occasions, however, they have declared their hostility to the existing Pakistani state as such, and their determination to achieve an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
As a senior Pakistani general said to me, ‘We on our side should avoid calling these Pakistani militants “Taleban”. It’s exactly what they want. It means that they are associated with religion, study of religion and above all what our people see as the legitimate jihad against the foreign occupation of Afghanistan.’ And indeed, the view of the mass of the Pakistani population on Afghanistan was summed up pretty well by Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, leader of one faction of the JUI:
If a dog fell into your well, would you remove the dog or would you empty the well? Once a red dog fell into the Afghan well, and the international community helped to get the dog out. Now a white dog has fallen in, and what are they doing? Trying to empty the well, one bucket at a time. Haven’t they learned anything from Afghan history? But our people, the Pakistanis, support those who are trying to remove the dog.
In order to understand the growth of militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan, it is essential to understand the weak nature of the border dividing the Pathan tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan: weak in terms of physical control by the two states, but even more importantly in the minds of the tribesmen themselves. As noted, the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s weakened this border still further, with Pakistani Pathans encouraged by both Pakistan and the West to see Afghan refugees and the Afghan Mujahidin as their brothers and to fight alongside them.
Furthermore, while the Afghan Taleban have not explicitly drawn on Pathan nationalism since 2001, and their propaganda avoids insults against other ethnicities (in the hope of winning over the non-Pathan ethnicies of Afghanistan), their identity and propaganda are nonetheless suffused with Pathan culture, imagery and identity. The importance of motifs of resistance and Islam in that culture gives the Taleban