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Editorial: The Taliban jitters

The ultimatum by the Taliban warlord, Baitullah Mehsud, to the NWFP government has been followed by a declaration from the Swat warlord Fazlullah that the dialogue with the NWFP government is now off and suicide-bombers are ready to attack Peshawar. After having already dynamited a girls’ school and burnt down a market in Swat, Mr Fazlullah delivered himself of the following impossible-to-implement condition: “We are determined to continue our efforts for Islamisation not only in Swat and Pakistan, but also throughout the world”.

Those who want to negotiate the terms of “Islamisation” with them should know from the deeds of Mr Fazlullah what kind of system he has in mind. Islamic Swat would have no female education, no music, no sport, no entertainment of any kind and no tourism, however harmless, which the Taliban regard as fahashi. Now that Peshawar itself is threatened, Mr Fazlullah too has raised his voice. The NWFP government, which was greatly offended when it heard many responsible people say that Peshawar was besieged, should think again and review its policy of smoking the peace pipe with outlaws. The sad fact is that so far the outlaws have been allowed to get the upper hand. Pakistan has the military capability to confront the menace but its army doesn’t want to risk taking on the warlords when the elected politicians are not fully willing to endorse military action.

The electronic media, too, must put on its thinking cap and review its policy of getting reporters to go to Peshawar and stand in front of a market and report that all was normal with the city and it was not under siege. Now that the suicide-bombers are coming, there will be no doubt about whether they were “bribed and sent by India” or by the warlords that march under the banner of Pakistani Taliban. The modus operandi of the Taliban is known all over the world. The well known Muslim commentator Ziauddin Sardar, said on Monday:

“The Taliban have been in total control of FATA for almost a decade. Peshawar will be the jewel in their crown. And if Peshawar goes, the rest of Pakistan would not be far away. The Taliban may look invincible, but they are nothing more than a marauding band of zealous puritans. A typical Taliban commander is a warlord with fewer than a hundred armed men. He pays them with money earned from drugs or extortion. He takes over an area, ruthlessly imposes taxes, administers summary and brutal justice, and declares himself the ruler. He murders his opponents and kidnaps others for ransom. Any Pakistani soldiers captured are slaughtered in the most barbaric way”.

Mr Sardar goes on to cast suspicion on the Pakistani state itself and implies that it suffers from a split personality vis-à-vis the Taliban whom it has been using in the past and might still want to use against the Karzai government in Kabul . He concludes: “The Taliban are a Pakistani problem, created and nourished by Pakistan itself. To defeat the Taliban and defeat them truly, Pakistan must find a way to cure itself”.

Loss of territory happens when an entire nation begins to think alike and speaks from emotion rather than objective observation. Pakistan lost one half of itself when a consensus developed against the rights of a polity with a nationally elected leadership. That was the time for cool calculation but that didn’t happen and the army was used against the people of East Pakistan. Today, another kind of “consensus” seems to be developing in favour of the Taliban whose legitimacy doesn’t come even close to the legitimacy that the people of East Pakistan had. But we are once again on the brink of losing territory.

Despite the lack of political consensus, however, police action is producing effective results. On a daily basis, suicide-bombers are arrested, munitions uncovered and terrorists identified. The Taliban succeed only when they infiltrate their men into a population whose sympathies have been bought with force, fear and intimidation. The politicians who don’t want to face up to the situation could be presented a fait accompli like the one in East Pakistan. Only the difference will be that the Taliban will not be able to survive as rulers of the Tribal Areas and the NWFP alone. They will have to take the rest of the country to stay in power. The politicians may grow beards and reconcile even with that, but the world will not allow a nuclearised Pakistan to fall into the hands of these Taliban. *

Second Editorial: ISI fiasco

The PPP government has rescinded its decision to shift part of the operations of the ISI to the interior ministry. The status quo will remain. Apparently, the military big-wigs called up the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, in the US and told him their views in no uncertain terms. Consequently, the government had to backtrack, claiming a “misunderstanding”, which was duly echoed by the brass in order to enable the government to save face. This is, without doubt, the fiasco of the year.

Conspiracy theories abound. One says the government did it on the eve of the prime minister’s visit to Washington to please the Americans who are unhappy with the ISI’s role in Afghanistan. Another claims that Mr Zardari’s obsession with the ISI’s potential for interference in the politics of the country lay behind the decision to try and tame it. There are also those who think that perhaps Mr Rehman Malik wants greater responsibility for both internal and external security because the two are inextricably linked in the current environment and can’t get this without bringing the IB and ISI under his personal control.

Whatever the facts, the government has shot itself in the foot. This is no way to go about bringing the ISI under civilian control. The whole issue of the ISI is linked to the larger issue of civil-military power relations and the nature of the national security state that we have built up over the years. Only a long drawn out and mature transition to functional democracy by wise civilian leaders will resolve that issue. Until then, it would be better to refrain from such half-clever measures. *

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