Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [245]
The Taleban also gain credit for crude but tough and effective enforcement of their version of the law. One of the reasons why the Taleban is popular, including with many small businessmen from FATA and Peshawar with whom I talked, is that they have cracked down very hard on freelance kidnapping, and on local drug-dealing which helps fuel crime. They also sort out small-scale business disputes. In Peshawar, I talked to a ceramics trader from Landi Khotal in the Khyber Agency. He deeply disliked the Taleban, and despite his limited means had sent his son to study in Britain for fear that he might fall under their influence or just be conscripted to help them. However, he also described how for almost fifteen years he had been trying to recover a Rs800,000 debt from another businessman through the Pakistani courts: ‘bribe after bribe, and nothing happened; because of course the other side was bribing too, and so the case was delayed and delayed’.
Eventually, he went to the Taleban, ‘and they sorted it out in a week’. His erstwhile partner had to pay him Rs500,000. The Taleban asked for 10 per cent of that as a fee for their help, ‘but I thought it wise to give them 15 per cent,’ he said with a rather melancholy twinkle. This kind of thing can sometimes be accompanied by a rough humour which appeals to Pathan sensibilities. Faced with two cousins who had been quarrelling for many years over some land, an independent Islamist warlord named Mangal Bagh locked them in the same room and told them that they would stay there till they came to an agreement – which they did.
My friend in ceramics said that while the Taleban tax the drugs trade passing through their territories (‘because they don’t care if Westerners take drugs’), they crack down very hard on local drug-dealing, thereby earning much credit in the local population and especially from parents. So if the Taleban are bandits, they are often what Max Weber called ‘rational bandits’ – and rational banditry in his view was the original basis of taxation and the state.
It is critically important to remember that in the propaganda of the Pakistani Taleban, and in the view of the majority of Pathans and Punjabis with whom I have spoken, the Pakistani Taleban war is not intended as a war against Pakistan and was not initiated by Beitullah Mahsud and his allies but by the Pakistani government and army. These Pakistanis portray this struggle as a defensive action to protect the legitimate Afghan jihad from a treacherous stab in the back by the Pakistani servants of America, who also ‘massacred innocent Muslims’ at the Red Mosque.
This is not to say that a majority of the people with whom I spoke in Peshawar, Abbotabad and the towns of the Peshawar valley actively support the Pakistani Taleban – if that were so, then the situation in the region would be much worse than it is. The overwhelming level of sympathy for the Afghan Taleban does not result in similar levels of support for the Pakistani Taleban. Outside the tribal areas, a large majority of the people I met denounced both the harshness of the Taleban’s implementation of the Shariah, and their terrorism and attacks on the Pakistani army and police – even if, as stated, they often qualified this by saying that such attacks are really the work of Indians or Americans, since ‘Muslims would not do this.’
Rather, the notion of a defensive jihad helps create a sense of moral equivalence between the Pakistani Taleban and the Pakistani army, in which people criticize both sides, and mass support for tough military action against the Pakistani Taleban is undermined to the point