Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [261]
In part these conspiracy theories are the work of the army itself, which (so I have been told by senior officers in private) has been spreading the line about India’s role in an effort to discredit the Pakistani Taleban. This, however, seems to have backfired badly, in that so many people can now blame Taleban terrorism on ‘foreign hands’, and thereby continue to believe in the ‘good’ Taleban which does not do such things. Echoing similar views from a great many ordinary people, the correspondent for the Nation newspaper in Faisalabad, Ahmed Jamal Nizami, told me in January 2009:
All the suicide bombings in Pakistan are the result of operations in which Pakistani or US forces kill women and children; and some of them like the Marriott were carried out by RAW [the Indian government’s Research and Analysis Wing – i.e. the Indian intelligence service]. Pakistani agencies have proof that the truck came from the Indian embassy.3
This sort of attitude was very widespread among Pakistani journalists with whom I talked in 2008 – 9, and was obviously reflected or at least hinted at in their reports and analyses – with disastrous results for the willingness of their audiences to support military action against the Taleban. This explains why the army’s action after April 2009 in getting a grip on the Pakistani media was so important to the struggle against the Pakistani Taleban.
THE ANP AND THE TALEBAN
Responding to the views of its own followers, and of the Pathan and indeed Pakistani electorate in general, the ANP therefore stood in the elections of February 2008 on a platform of negotiating peace with the Taleban. This corresponded to the ANP’s Pathan nationalism, and horror at the thought of conducting what would amount to a Pathan civil war within Pakistan. The ANP was also influenced by its traditional hostility to both the United States and the Pakistani army, and its unwillingness to launch such a war in alliance with these forces.
These attitudes were so deeply rooted that they persisted for more than a year after ANP politicians in Swat and elsewhere began to be killed by the Taleban in large numbers. From their election to the NWFP government in February 2008 to the counter-offensive in Swat in May 2009 the ANP’s policy towards the Taleban therefore presented a picture of utter confusion, of calling for tougher military action while bitterly condemning every action that caused civilian casualties, and of attacking the military for covert links to the Taleban while continuing to pursue talks with the Taleban themselves. In the end, for political and cultural reasons that I will describe, this approach turned out much better than might have been expected; but in the summer of 2008 it contributed greatly to the mood of paralysis and pessimism gripping Peshawar.
This was very apparent from a debate on the conflict in Swat on 19 August 2008 in the Provincial Assembly in Peshawar that I attended. The building itself is splendid but also somewhat confusing, as so often in the former colonial territories of the Muslim world: gleaming white neo-classical columns support an ornate neo-Mughal roof covered with Urdu calligraphy. Somewhat to my alarm, my British passport and white face led to my car being waved through the security checkpoint with no search for explosives or weapons.
Speaker after speaker, from government and opposition alike, rose to lament the situation in Swat. The only things that almost all agreed on were that the Americans should withdraw from Afghanistan; that within Pakistan, the central government and above all the army were to blame, either for causing collateral damage, or for secretly helping the Taleban, or both; and that the Pakistani justice system needed radical reform, including through the extension of the Shariah.
Abdul Akbar Khan, the leader of the PPP in the assembly, took the strongest anti-military line of all – though he was the man who in theory should have been representing the central government, which had declared its desire for the closest co-operation with