Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [268]
It is difficult to say whether it was the army, the federal government under the PPP and President Zardari, or the NWFP government of the ANP who took the initiative in pressing for a counter-offensive, because, when it turned out to be a success, all tried to claim the chief responsibility. In fact, what seems to have happened is that all of these groups contained leading figures who for the past year had been pressing for a counter-attack; and the Taleban seizure of Buner empowered them to push this through against the resistance of hesitant colleagues.
The result was not just a counter-offensive in Buner and Swat, and then in south Waziristan, the Mohmand Agency and elsewhere, but a general tightening of policy and behaviour across the board. The army rigorously excluded journalists from the fighting zones, ensuring that they could not report Taleban views. Moreover (so I have been told by journalists) they used commentators and television anchors with military links to persuade or pressure them into supporting the military operations, making the same approach to media owners – who by this stage were themselves becoming alarmed by the Taleban’s rise, and the possible effects on their own fortunes.
A senior journalist in Peshawar described to me how on 27 April General Kayani invited him and eleven other Pathan journalists to see him and asked them for their backing in the coming military operation in Swat. Above all, he asked them in their reporting to play down the issue of collateral damage and civilian casualties, which had made previous operations so unpopular, and this they promised to do.
The change in media coverage was crucial to the change in Pakistani public opinion. Prior to this, the media had given extensive coverage to Taleban statements, and indeed had often given them equal time with official statements by the government and military. Contrary to allegations by Pakistani liberal publications like the Friday Times, this was not in general because of outright ideological support for the Taleban, but rather a reflection of Pakistani public opinion in general, which was prepared to see certain good sides in the Taleban and which tended to blame the Taleban and the government equally for violence.
The media of course also love a good scoop, which interviews with the Taleban often gave them. Finally, the media are just as addicted to conspiracy theories as the rest of Pakistani society and, like that society, for years had tended to accompany reports of Taleban terrorism with heavy hints about ‘foreign hands’ and conspiracies by the Pakistani intelligence services – which is only to say that before April 2009 the Pakistani media in their coverage of the Taleban were neither better nor worse than the society from which they came. All of this changed considerably when the army and state finally put their feet down.
The ANP also belatedly began to exercise real leadership as far as its own supporters and activists were concerned, ordering them to support the military operation and to stop criticizing the military for civilian casualties or alleged ties to the Taleban. Instead, ANP propaganda began stressing the number of ANP politicians who had been killed by the Taleban, and the Taleban’s threat to democracy in the NWFP. The change in the language of my ANP acquaintances concerning the army between August 2008 and July 2009 was truly astonishing. An additional reason, in the view of Major-General Ishfaq Ahmed, commanding the army in the Malakand division, was that ‘the new Chief of Army Staff [i.e. General Kayani] played a big part in this, because he made clear that he is not interested in a political role, so the politicians are no longer scared of us’.8
THE BACKGROUND TO REVOLT IN SWAT
The Islamist militants’ takeover in Swat in 2007 – 9 was widely seen