Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [262]
Abdul Akbar even hinted that it was the army itself, and not the Taleban, who were destroying girls’ schools in Swat (despite the fact that the Taleban had publicly taken responsibility, and in a number of cases had expelled the pupils and seized the schools as headquarters instead of destroying them). This was a charge which an ANP leader had made explicitly to me in private the previous week. ‘Why are the schools being destroyed not during the day, but in the night when there is a curfew and only the military can move freely?’ he had asked. ‘Isn’t the answer obvious?’
Perhaps the most striking example of the extremely complex ANP attitude to the Taleban and the army came in an interview I had in January 2009 with Bushra Gohar, an ANP member of the national parliament in Islamabad and a distinguished Pakistani feminist. Here, if anywhere, I expected to find a really tough approach to dealing with the Taleban, given their own savage hatred of everything that she represented.
Ms Gohar is indeed a striking individual, with an intelligent, humorous face, short iron-grey hair and a general style that reminded me somewhat of my younger sister, a barrister in London. Burbles and hoots from a small relative in the background were a cheerful descant to our rather grim discussion. For the first half hour we spoke about women’s issues, and she displayed a most impressive mixture of intelligence, commitment and pragmatism.
Then we got on to the Taleban, and for me at least the rationality of her views disintegrated. She declared that ‘we can’t talk to the Taleban unless they lay down their arms’, but on the question of how to make them do that, it seemed that the Pakistani army should do everything and nothing. She blamed the military for not attacking the Taleban, but also for using too much violence and killing civilians. She declared that the Pakistani army should act to shut the Afghan Taleban training camps in Waziristan, but also that she was firmly opposed to military operations in Waziristan. When I asked her how then the camps could be shut, she replied that ‘Everyone knows that they are run by the ISI. The ISI has only to give the order, and the camps will be shut.’4
THE POLICE AND THE ARMY
Given attitudes like these in the NWFP government, it was not surprising that morale in the NWFP police in the summer of 2008 had reached dangerously low levels. As one of the force’s commanders admitted:
We have largely lost the institutional memory that we used to have, and we have very little good intelligence coming in ... Real policing, going out and finding out what is happening, has become virtually non-existent. We are policing by the seat of our pants, not going about it in an organized and professional manner, but just reacting to what happens.
I interviewed some of the same junior police officers in both August 2008 and July 2009, and the change in their mood was a useful indicator of how things in general had changed in the city over the intervening year. In August 2008 I spoke to two assistant sub-inspectors of police (ASIs) from Hayatabad, the western suburb of Peshawar, about the situation in what the London police would call their ‘manor’. Both men were in their early twenties: Asif with a round, bearded face like a cheerful pirate, Mushtaq clean-shaven, darker and more formidable-looking. ‘Security here is getting worse day by day,’ Mushtaq said. ‘The Taleban drive by our police station in pick-up trucks, showing off their Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades, and we are not allowed to do anything about it. Our orders are not to arrest them, to shoot only if they shoot at us first. It’s terrible for our prestige!’
To which Asif replied urgently, ‘Yes, but, Mushtaq, they are