Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [276]
The Gujjars were originally a nomadic tribe in the plains of northern India. In Swat, they had traditionally been tenants of the Yusufzai Pathan tribe which had dominated the valley since the sixteenth century (indeed, in Swat and elsewhere, ‘Pathan’ and ‘landowning farmer’ were traditionally synonyms). The Kammis were a service caste of bakers, barbers, butchers, artisans, and so on, probably of Hindu origin. They had traditionally not farmed land or even owned their houses. However, with the breakdown of the old order, Gujjars and even Kammis had acquired land of their own, while remaining especially vulnerable to oppression by the Pathan khans.
The TNSM/Taleban never made an explicit public appeal to Gujjars and Kammis against the Yusufzai Pathans – they could not possibly have done, being overwhelmingly Yusufzais themselves. Given Yusufzai dominance, such an appeal would also have been fatal to the militants’ chances. Rather they did two things: by stressing their ideological commitment to an egalitarian community of all Muslims, they appealed to Gujjar and Kammi sentiments in a looser and vaguer way; and they redressed – often savagely – particular acts of oppression by khans against these communities.
Thus I was told that more than a decade before the TNSM rebellion began, the son of a khan had abducted and raped a Kammi girl, and had of course never been prosecuted for this. He had already fled, but the Taleban burned down his family home and drove them out, saying that this was overdue punishment for the rape, ‘and, of course, that got all the Kammis of the neighbourhood on their side’.
As a result of the army crushing the Taleban in Swat in 2009, the old khan families, good and bad, are coming back – and it remains to be seen if the bad ones have learned a lesson from what happened to them, or whether they will simply use the army to restore their power, take revenge on their enemies and resume their old oppressions. This is a danger which has some Pakistani soldiers of my acquaintance seriously worried. Structures of local wealth and authority in Swat have been further damaged by the floods of 2010. All of this suggests that while the army’s reconquest of Swat in the summer of 2009 has proved that it will fight to preserve Pakistan and that Pakistan will therefore be preserved, it will not be the end of Islamic militancy in this region.
This is also demonstrated by the progress of fighting in FATA. The Pakistan army’s reconquest of Swat was followed by offensives in south Waziristan and other areas of FATA which regained much territory and killed some 570 Pakistani Taleban fighters (76 soldiers also died). The Pakistani Taleban response was greatly to intensify their terrorist attacks inside Pakistan and make them even more indiscriminate.
By February 2010, according to official figures, 7,598 civilians had died in Pakistan, as a result of terrorist attacks, Taleban executions, military action, or US drone attacks. It is worth noting that this figure is two and a half times the number of Americans killed on 9/11. By that time, 2,351 soldiers had been killed – two and a half times US military deaths in Afghanistan.13 According to Pakistani official estimates (which may of course be exaggerated) by mid-2010 the conflict with the Pakistani Taleban and their allies had cost Pakistan some $35 billion dollars in state spending and economic losses – almost twice the $18 billion in US aid that Pakistan had received by that date.
During the same period, according to the Pakistani military, the Pakistani Taleban and their allies had lost 17,742 men killed or captured – though how many of these were real fighters rather than sympathizers is impossible to say. What can be said is that, despite all this, as of late 2010 the militants remained in control of much of FATA; and,