Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [244]
I know that my power; my position; my wealth; and my family are in danger ... However, I am ready to sacrifice myself and I do not want to become the friend of non-Muslims, for non-Muslims are against all my beliefs and my religion ... I insist on sacrificing myself, and you should do likewise ... [I am] ready to leave everything and to believe only in Islam and in my Afghan bravery.12
The militants who later formed the Pakistani Taleban revolted in 2004 against the Pakistani army in order to defend what they saw as the legitimate jihad in Afghanistan, their sacred code of hospitality for Muslims and Pathans fleeing from infidel attack, and their own ancient tribal freedoms. We may well argue that what they did went horribly against the real interests of their own people. We cannot argue that they betrayed their own code.
So while the Afghan and Pakistani Talebans have separate leaderships and face in different directions, they draw their inspiration from the same sources. However, it does seem that as the struggle with the Pakistani state and army intensified after the storming of the Red Mosque in 2007, the Pakistani Taleban leadership may have become obsessed with this struggle to the detriment of the Afghan jihad.
Mullah Omar declared several times that the Pakistani state was not the enemy, and that Muslims should concentrate on fighting the real enemy, which he says is US forces and their allies in Afghanistan. This presumably reflected pressure on Mullah Omar from the Pakistani army, but by the same token it probably reflected genuine fear that the Pakistani Taleban might wreck his relationship with that army, and with it his chances of long-term victory in Afghanistan.
THE NATURE OF THE PAKISTANI TALEBAN
The Pakistani Taleban is not nearly as tight a movement as the decentralized Afghan Taleban, but is, rather, a loose alliance of autonomous Islamist radical groups and commanders, under the nominal leadership of an amir. The first amir was Beitullah Mahsud; when he was killed by a US drone in August 2009, Hakimullah Mahsud took over. Both are from the notoriously unruly and fanatical Mahsud tribe of south Waziristan, which was a thorn in the British empire’s flesh for 100 years.
Pakistani journalists who have travelled in the tribal areas have described needing passes and permissions from as many as half a dozen different local Taleban commanders in order to move from one Agency to another. Some of the local Pakistani Taleban groups are close to Al Qaeda and are heavily influenced by international jihadi agendas. Others, especially in Swat, have agendas more focused on local power and the transformation of local society. All, however, are committed to supporting the jihad in Afghanistan, and most seem capable of co-operating effectively against the Pakistani army when it penetrates their territory. While all now say that they are committed to Islamist revolution in Pakistan, all also claim – and probably believe – that their movement began as a defensive action against the Pakistani army’s ‘invasion’ of Waziristan in 2004, and against US drone attacks on FATA.
The Pakistani Taleban draw much of their funding from taxing the heroin trade and other illegal activities, and some are directly involved in kidnapping and other crimes. In the Taleban case the distinction between ‘taxation’ of local transport and business and ‘extortion’ is impossible to draw. In most areas of FATA it seems that their demands are not too heavy, or at least not heavy enough to drive the population into revolt against them.
After their association with what is seen as a legitimate jihad in Afghanistan, the other reason which every Taleban sympathizer I met gave for his