Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [256]
Although appointed by the maliks, the mullah of the family mosque, Zewar, endorsed these views.
That afternoon, I went out to talk to people on the streets and in the shops of the village and, with rare exceptions, it was the same picture. I talked to forty-eight people in all in that village, and every single one of them sympathized with the Afghan Taleban. All but seven also sympathized with the Pakistani Taleban. Those seven – local shopkeepers plus one visiting minor civil servant – condemned them categorically for their attacks on the Pakistani army and police. But it was difficult to say just how deep this condemnation went, since they too – as far as I could make out from the shouting match which developed on several occasions – often blamed such actions on Indian agents.
As afternoon drew towards evening, I sat with my hosts on their verandah as the family of the mullah came to pay their respects, with a mixture of deference and affectionate familiarity. Some of the herd of clerical offspring came to be admired and patted on the head. Afterwards, my host, a compact middle-aged man in the neatly pressed shelwar of the civil servant, with a military-style clipped moustache, began to speak in confident tones of the struggle against the Taleban – and indeed it seemed that he had little idea of the state of feeling in the village, or even among his own servants.
He said that he had not heard of any preaching or other activity by the Taleban in the neighbourhood, and he was sure they did not have majority support. ‘If the government really wants to get rid of the Taleban it can; it just needs to be ruthless. In the end, they are just a few troublemakers.’ But as the shadows lengthened, so his mood darkened:
It is true that the local police have largely given up, so nobody is doing much to stop the Taleban. People think that the present government and all the political parties are corrupt, and do nothing for the people, and the worst thing is that it is true. So people may not support the Taleban, but they have become indifferent, and that is also bad ...
This, remember, as of September 2008 was supposed to be not a Taleban area, but a peaceful area under government control. By the end of my stay I had come to the conclusion that all this really meant was that, unlike in Swat or other areas, the Pakistani Taleban had not publicly announced their takeover or attacked government positions. Yet already, in a nearby village, the Taleban had seized the hujra of a local malik politician from the ANP and turned it into a Shariah court, and the malik and his family had had to flee to Peshawar. ‘And they will never come back,’ I was told, ‘because once you have shown that you are scared, people don’t respect you any more, so you can no longer lead even if the Taleban are defeated one day.’ I was reminded of a saying I had once heard about life in an American prison, that this was a world in which, ‘if you once take a step back, you will never take another step forward’.
As far as public opposition, state authority or the power of the maliks and their mullahs were concerned, there seemed little enough to stop the Taleban if they did decide to take over in that village. Remembering my Russian landowning ancestors in similar circumstances, I was left with the hope that perhaps old ties of kinship and respect would mean that the local Taleban would not directly target their maliks, or at the least would eventually allow them to depart in peace.
However, as will be described in the next chapter, this pessimism proved exaggerated. The Pakistani state and army still do have the resources to fight back effectively against the Taleban; and perhaps, equally importantly, the Taleban, like many revolutionary movements, are chronically given to overestimating their strength and overplaying their hand. In the spring and summer of 2009, this hubris led to nemesis for the Taleban of the Swat valley.
12
Defeating the Taleban?
No patchwork scheme, and all our recent schemes, blockades, allowances