Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [270]
A historian of Swat, Sultan-i-Rome, writes that while under the old system the Wali and officials took direct responsibility for government, under the Pakistani system no one did. Merger led to ruthless exploitation of forests and plunder of natural resources and a huge increase in corruption. This amounted to ‘a sort of colonization of Swat by which it lost its separate identity, which had stood for centuries, if not millennia’.10
This history is of immense importance in explaining what happened in Swat, and why the militants’ temporary seizure of power in Swat is not necessarily a forerunner of similar developments elsewhere. Maulana Fazlullah, who in 2007 placed his movement under the aegis of the Pakistani Taleban, seems to have dreamed of re-creating the princely state as an independent Islamic emirate like Afghanistan under the Taleban, with himself as Emir.
The memory of Swat state left the population with a deep sense not only of the corruption and injustice but of the basic illegitimacy of the Pakistani judicial system. In consequence, within a couple of years of the merger with Pakistan, local figures were already calling for the adoption of the Shariah instead of Pakistani state law. These included men such as Dani Gul, who had led the democratic opposition to the Wali’s autocracy, but soon became bitterly disillusioned with Pakistan.
These feelings were increased by the twists and turns in Swat’s constitutional position within Pakistan, and especially its judicial system. From 1969 until 1974, Swat had no constitutionally recognized judicial code at all. In 1974, Swat and the other former Pathan princely states were named Provincially Administered Tribal Areas, or PATA. They came under the NWFP, but had a different legal system, including a stronger role for jirgas. Then in 1994, the Pakistani Supreme Court declared this arrangement unconstitutional and decreed the full incorporation of these territories into the Pakistani judicial order.
In response, in 1995, a local Islamist group, the Tehriq-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi (TNSM) or Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, launched mass protests in Swat and other areas of the Malakand Division in support of their demand for Shariah law. The protests blocked roads and government offices were seized. Several dozen people were killed, mostly in the resulting state crackdown. However, the national government of Benazir Bhutto backed down and agreed to a limited role for the Shariah in the administration of justice in the Malakand. The Nizam-e-Adl agreement of 2009 was therefore not nearly as new or as radical as most people assumed.
The TNSM’s founder, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, was a former local Jamaat Islami leader who had split from the party in 1992 in disgust at its opposition to armed revolution. Sufi Muhammad was arrested in 1994 but later released when he ordered his followers to call off their protests, and (doubtless with official encouragement) in the course of the 1990s became a prominent local mobilizer of support for the Afghan Taleban.
The TNSM also had close links with the Pakistani militant groups in Kashmir, where one of Sufi Muhammad’s chief lieutenants, Ibn-e-Amin, fought with Jaish-e-Mohammed in the 1990s. He and other TNSM commanders had previously fought with the Mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s – and one reason, I was told, why agitation for Shariah law had not happened much earlier was that so many local militants were away in Afghanistan.
The role of TNSM leaders in these conflicts involved close links to the ISI; and while I do not believe that the ISI promoted the TNSM in Swat for nefarious reasons of its own, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that they intervened on occasions in 2007 – 8 to save particular TNSM leaders (presumably old allies) from being arrested by the army or police. Less clear is whether