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Talibanisation takes root on Pakistan’s frontier

ISLAMABAD: Barbers are scared to shave customers’ chins; alleged thieves with blackened faces are paraded through the streets in shame; and suspected spies for the US are found beheaded in a ditch.

Tales of Taliban-style justice in Pakistani border regions are proliferating - a sign that an area already serving as a base for militants fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan is slipping further out of government control. This week, the United States voiced growing concern that Al Qaeda was regrouping in the area. US intelligence chief Mike McConnell said on Tuesday that Osama Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, were believed to be hiding in northwestern Pakistan, trying to set up an operations base there. A day earlier, US Vice President Dick Cheney - on a brief visit to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad - delivered a message of concern to Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf’s recent strategy of seeking peace with pro-Taliban tribesmen, in preference to military confrontation, appears to have backfired.

“The pro-Taliban militants are making their presence felt in some very ugly ways,” said Samina Ahmed, South Asia director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group think tank. “They seem to be dictating the agenda.” Residents of Miranshah, the main town in Pakistan’s North Waziristan area and a militant stronghold, say the Taliban run an office where inhabitants can file complaints and receive a quick ruling based on Islamic law from a 10-member committee. The committee has reputedly dealt with family feuds and seized suspected thieves.

Shopkeepers say three men accused of stealing cars were driven through jeering crowds in the nearby town of Mir Ali last week, their faces blackened and heads shaved. The committee has not yet dealt with any major crimes - partly because the fear of Taliban justice has succeeded in curbing lawlessness, at least in the main towns, residents say. Further north, several barbers in the Bajur district recently said they would no longer shave customers’ beards after receiving a warning that it was “un-Islamic” and being threatened with unspecified punishment. More ominous are the cases of scores of people who were accused of being aligned with Pakistan’s government or being foreign agents, and were later found shot or beheaded, their bodies dumped beside country roads.

In the latest such incident, a schoolteacher’s body was found on Tuesday in a sack on a roadside in South Waziristan. A note found with the corpse identified the slain man as “Akhtar Usman, the one who spied for America”. The word “hypocrite” was scrawled on the temple of his severed head in Urdu, Pakistan’s main language. There is little indication that authorities are willing or able to confront such developments in an area steeped in Islamic radicalism since it was a base for the mujahidin war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Taliban fighters and Al Qaeda militants - including Arabs and Central Asians - poured into Pakistan’s rugged border zone in 2001 and 2002 as US-led forces drove them from Afghanistan. They found refuge in the fortress-like houses of sympathetic tribes and Afghan refugee communities.

Under US pressure, Musharraf sent his army into the semiautonomous tribal agencies for the first time in Pakistan’s 60-year history to pursue the militants. Hundreds were killed on both sides in scores of operations in the tribal belt, mostly since 2004. Musharraf then changed tack. A peace deal struck in North Waziristan in September demanded that militants stop attacks into Afghanistan and halt “Talibanisation” in return for Pakistani troops moving out of towns like Miranshah, while retaining a presence at the border.

A peace agreement also was signed in South Waziristan in 2005. Ali Mohammed Jan Aurakzai, the top government official in northwestern Pakistan, has defended the peace deal approach. He recently said that reports of barbers refusing to shave beards and Taliban-style courts were isolated incidents that reflect the area’s Pashtun tribal tradition, rather than a fundamentalist takeover.

But tribal elders who act as guarantors for the North Waziristan deal appear powerless to enforce it. Even Musharraf has acknowledged that some of his security forces have been turning a blind eye to militant infiltration. US and Afghan officials complain of rising cross-border attacks, and American intelligence director McConnell said on Tuesday in Washington that the September deal was helping Al Qaeda’s efforts to establish training camps and other operations there. It remains difficult to verify that statement. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao denied it on Wednesday, saying the US had shared no such information with Pakistan. ap

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