Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [257]
(Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898 – 1905)1
By the summer of 2008 things were therefore looking fairly bad in the Pathan areas. It was not of course as bad as the Western media portrayed it – I had been warned before travelling to Peshawar that the city was ‘under siege’ and close to falling, but in fact I spent a month based in the city and never felt under direct personal threat.
Nonetheless, the sense of crisis was real. It was to be felt above all in the business community, many of whose members were making plans to leave if it became necessary. For example, smaller businessmen who would never have dreamed of this in the past were beginning to sell property to finance their sons’ education in Britain or America, so as to lay the basis for the whole family to move later. Even a tough ex-brigadier of my acquaintance admitted to me later that he had sold some of his land and bought property in Karachi instead, ‘just in case’.
Big businessmen were also seriously worried. When I visited Noman Wazir, CEO of Frontier Foundries, the biggest steel-mill in the NWFP, he broke off in the middle of our interview to give orders to his chief of staff, a retired military officer, about buying Kalashnikovs. ‘We have to get arms. Talk to the SSP [Senior Superintendent of Police]. Use any kind of political pressure to get the licences. You know what to do.’
Mr Wazir’s factory is situated on the Jamrud Industrial Estate in Hayatabad, the western suburb of Peshawar on the very edge of the Khyber Tribal Agency. Naturally, therefore, of all the areas of Peshawar Hayatabad is the most lawless and the most penetrated by the Taleban. Beside the main road I saw a sign – a common one in Peshawar these days: ‘My husband Shahir Ishaq has been kidnapped for three months and the government has done nothing.’
I asked Mr Wazir if he had given up completely on the police. ‘No, not completely,’ he replied.
But they desperately need help. Look, there are about 22,000 police in the NWFP, with about 8,000 modern weapons for all of them, very few vehicles, very poor communications and terrible pay. So it’s hardly surprising they are not doing well. Even if the government had much more money, it would take years to improve them. So the private sector has to look after itself.
When I returned to Peshawar almost a year later, in July 2009, the mood had improved considerably. This was odd in a way, because terrorism in the city had actually got much worse. The Pearl Continental Hotel had been wrecked by a car bomb despite its heavy security, suicide bombings were growing in scale and becoming more indiscriminate, and the number of kidnappings and murders had risen to the point where I was told even by more resilient friends that to stay in my usual guest-house would be extremely dangerous (so I stayed most gratefully at the Frontier Constabulary Mess instead). Since then, bombs on an unprecedented scale have caused hundreds of casualties. The terrorists have also become far more indiscriminate, planting bombs in bazaars and outside hospitals, rather than, as before, concentrating on state and military targets.
The difference was not the level of violence, but the end of the sense of helpless drift that had gripped the city during my visit in 2008: the feeling that the army and the government (state and provincial) were more and more losing the initiative to the Taleban, and had no plan at all for getting it back. In fact, a determined counter-offensive had already begun in the Bajaur Agency to the north of Peshawar, but it was not clear if it would continue or would end in negotiations like so many military offensives before it. Above all, the growing Taleban hold on the district of Swat seemed to herald a move of the rebels out from FATA (which after all had never been under real state authority) and into the ‘settled areas