Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [273]
The reason for the British expedition had been to force the expulsion from the region of a group of Islamist militants (the surviving followers of Syed Ahmed Barelvi, mentioned in Chapter 1), whom the British called ‘Wahabis’ and ‘Hindustan fanatics’. These had been raiding British-controlled territory and attempting to stir up rebellions among other Pathans. How the hopelessly outgunned Swatis managed this is easy enough to see: the bare mountains rise almost sheer from the valley below, and a road hacked out from the mountainside crawls along their face. Viewed from the opposite hillside, the trucks carrying refugees back to their homes in Swat looked small as beetles. Then you cross the pass, and look down into the beautiful Swat valley, a sort of giant oasis with the Swat river meandering through it, fringed by willows and clumps of waving feather grass. In August 2010, this river became a raging torrent of destruction.
One of the reasons the floods of 2010 were so destructive is that the population has grown so much and settled in places always known to be vulnerable to flooding. The capital, Mingora – still quite a small town when I visited it in the 1980s – has suffered like everywhere else from the runaway growth of Pakistan’s population, and now is just another overcrowded semi-slum with between 300,000 and 450,000 people (as usual, no one knows for sure). When I first arrived, it smelled terrible, because of uncollected rubbish; but, by the time I left, municipal workers in laminated jackets were beginning to clear things up. Damage in Mingora itself was very limited; the Taleban had not tried to make a stand in the town, and the army had taken care not to bombard it.
Talking to people on the streets in Mingora was not very enlightening. Fear of the army was very obvious, and I had a strong sense of everyone looking over their shoulders to see who might be listening. Everyone said that they supported the military and hated the Taleban. Interviews with people from Swat in the Jalozai camp for displaced people near Peshawar a fortnight earlier had given a rather different impression (the ones conducted out of the hearing of the camp administration, that is).
They all described how popular the TNSM had been when the movement first started, because of their advocacy of the Shariah, their administration of harsh but fair justice, and their actions against corrupt and oppressive local politicians and landlords; but also because of the great prestige that many local people attached to their participation in the jihads in Afghanistan and Kashmir. All said that they supported Shariah law for Swat and wanted the Nizam-e-Adl agreement to remain in force.
A large majority said that their sympathy for the Taleban had declined sharply over the previous year. For this they gave various reasons. Among the most common were that after the Nizam-e-Adl agreement the Taleban had shown that they were not really interested in the Shariah but in power for themselves. Many people mentioned the petty and not-so-petty harassment of local people and the offences against local traditions of dancing and singing at weddings, and so on. Particular offence had been caused by young Taleban boys stopping older men in the street in front of their families and ordering them to stop trimming their beards. ‘In our Pashtun culture, we show respect to our elders,’ one man growled.
The TNSM/Taleban also established a growing reputation for savagery, which frightened people into silence but also deeply shocked them. The IDPs (Internally Dispaced Persons) mentioned two cases in particular (not, interestingly enough, the public caning of the girl which caused so much offence among educated people elsewhere in Pakistan). One was when the Taleban publicly hanged four local policemen in the main bazaar in Mingora to frighten