Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [267]
On 19 April, Sufi Muhammad Hassan, an Islamist leader whom the government had released from jail in return for a promise to negotiate a settlement with his son-in-law, Swati Taleban leader Maulana Fazlullah, made a speech in Swat in which he declared that ‘We hate democracy ... We want Islam in the entire world. Islam does not permit democracy or election.’ He also stated that there could be no appeal from Shariah courts in Swat to Pakistan’s higher courts (he had been saying the same things for many years, but the Pakistani media had never really taken notice before). Also widely reported in the media, this showed Pakistanis that the Taleban were by no means just good Muslims interested in promoting Islamic behaviour and Islamic justice (which many non-Islamists throughout the NWFP and Punjab had persisted in believing), but aimed at overthrowing the existing state and imposing their own rule.
It must be said, though, that, to judge by my interviews, the effect of all this among the Pakistani masses was somewhat less than government and military propaganda have suggested. So these developments alone would not have provoked a mass backlash or a strong counter-offensive against the Taleban. The tipping-point came in the second week of April 2009 when the Taleban sent hundreds of their fighters from Swat across the mountains into the neighbouring district of Buner, to the south-east. A completely insignificant place in itself (historically part of the Swat princely state) Buner therefore came to play an important role in Pakistani history.
Although Buner is only 70 miles from Islamabad, there are an awful lot of mountains in between, and no one in Pakistan seriously thought that its fall indicated that the Taleban were simply going to sweep on and take the capital. However, the capture of Buner brought the Taleban much closer to the motorway linking Islamabad and Peshawar, and to the Tarbela dam, which provides northern Pakistan with much of its electricity. The immediate and complete collapse of the local police in the face of the Taleban, and the easy routing of a local lashkar, were profoundly worrying. ‘They really seemed all set to go on to take Mansehra and Abbotabad,’ Major Tahir, a staff officer in Swat, told me later.
Most of all, I was told by officers, the fall of Buner produced a feeling in the army high command that the military’s prestige was now on the line; that if they failed to fight back now, people would begin to think that they would never fight. Not just ordinary Pakistanis but even Pakistani soldiers (especially in the Frontier Corps) would begin to look on the Taleban as the winning side, whom it would be wise to conciliate or even to join. At the same time, the army was encouraged by what officers described to me as a ‘180-degree change’ in the attitude of the ANP government and local politicians to military action.
Finally, the fall of Buner made it even more difficult to resist the growing pressure from Washington to take tougher action against the Pakistani Taleban. Pakistanis were stung by a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on 6 March describing the internal security situation in Pakistan as ‘threatening’ and hinting that it might collapse as a state. The fact that Pakistan desperately needed US aid, and goodwill in producing international aid, of course contributed greatly to the belief in the Pakistani establishment that something had to be done to please Washington. China, too, previously fairly relaxed about the growth of militancy in Pakistan, reportedly became alarmed by the Taleban’s takeover in Buner, and communicated this alarm to the Pakistani government.7 However, this outside pressure