Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [260]
Four thousand American mercenaries are operating in FATA. They are the ones carrying out the ruthless killings there, not the Taleban. We have proof of this. Four days ago, eighteen bodies of Americans were brought to the morgue in Peshawar. We know that they are not Taleban or Muslim because they are not circumcised. Russians, Chinese, Iranians are all supporting the Taleban against us, for their own reasons. As for Britain and the US, Professor Lawrence Freedman predicted that it is their policy to cause anarchy in Pakistan so as to achieve their goals.2
It was easy to check on this, since Sir Lawrence happens to be the vice-principal of my college in London. There was of course no truth in it – but then, there was no truth in the morgue story either. As to the American mercenaries, if Peshawari opinion is to be believed, FATA must be getting pretty crowded, since people there think that thousands of Indian Sikhs and Israeli agents are also there pretending to be Taleban, alongside the Russians, Chinese and Iranians. I also heard stories to the effect that the entire battle between the Pakistani military and the Taleban was faked and that all terrorist attacks were in fact being carried out by the ISI – and the people who told me this included not just uneducated people on the street but a lawyer and member of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission!
In fact, to my considerable chagrin as a British subject, the only major country not accused in my presence of sending its troops to pretend to be Taleban was Britain. I’d hoped that this was the result of Pathan hospitality and unwillingness to offend a guest, but I’m sorry to say that when I asked a Pathan friend about this he replied that ‘I’m afraid that it’s really that people here now see America and Britain as the same thing.’
That afternoon, I got another dose of conspiracy theory from someone at the other end of the political spectrum, Syed Zahir Shah, Professor of Botany at the Islamia College, a charming old man with a silken white beard, who his students told me is a member of the Jamaat party. To the same murmur of approval from colleagues as at the Area Studies Centre, he told me:
The Pakistani Taleban were created by the big powers, the US, Russia, Israel and India, so as to destroy Pakistan. It is not Pakistanis who are carrying out these terrorist attacks. It was the same with Benazir Bhutto. No Pakistani or Muslim killed her. She was killed because she was a strong political leader, and India, Israel and other foreign forces don’t want Pakistan to be stable.
Like many other people in Peshawar he produced for me ‘proof’ of a secret plan by the Bush administration to partition Pakistan. This turned out to be a map published by Ralph Peters, a retired US lt-colonel who writes a column for the New York Post, a tabloid, who has held no official position in any US administration. When I pointed out to the professor that the Pakistani Taleban had in fact taken public responsibility for the terrorist attack on the Pakistani munitions factory at Wah the previous week, which had killed almost 100 ordinary Pakistani workers, he changed tack and declared: ‘Yes, but they have their reasons. Their women and children have been killed by Pakistani bombs dropped on the orders of America.’
If these were the views and the intellectual standards of professors from both the secular and the Islamist parties, then it is hardly surprising that much of the general public also had much sympathy for the Taleban and none at all for the US, and that the entire public discourse in the NWFP is so sodden with ludicrous conspiracy theories as often to be barely