On the boundary between Pakistan-controlled Peshawar and insurgency-hit regions of the tribal areas, the global fight against the Taliban has turned former neighbours in this once sleepy rural setting into mortal enemies.

On March 9, a powerful human bomb exploded during a funeral procession outside Adezai, a village on the outskirts of Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northwest frontier; 37 people were killed, and another 100 injured. The blast was so powerful that many of the victims couldn’t be identified. Sandals, shredded bits of clothing and some human remains were scattered around the blast site like confetti, making it impossible to provide a speedy burial for the victims in keeping with Muslim tradition.

Although no one has claimed responsibility for the blast, there are strong suspicions that the Pakistani Taliban is involved. The target, after all, was the funeral of the wife of a senior anti-Taliban leader from Adezai. Adezai is literally the final settled outpost of Peshawar before the rugged, dusty terrain of Khyber Agency, the ancient gateway to Afghanistan that has played host to a myriad of conquerors from Alexander the Great to US and NATO forces. The famed Khyber Pass snakes across the landscape, and is the single largest supply route for troops in Afghanistan, including over 130,000 international troops.

Once a quiet little hamlet, Adezai now looks more like a medieval fortress, a veritable Alamo looking out on a sparse wilderness leading to tribal and semi-autonomous regions where control fluctuates between Pakistan and the Taliban. Dusty roads are lined with mud brick buildings, with only the occasional oasis of green fields dotting the landscape, surrounded by greyish-blue skies.

Entering this part of Pakistan requires discreet travel in the company of locals, a point made abundantly clear by the damaged buildings that line the road leading into Adezai. Two homes we passed on the edge of the village were blown up by the Taliban the previous night. Only a few months earlier, the village’s only girls’ school was destroyed by a suspected remote-controlled bomb.

As we enter the centre of the village, the powerful whirl of an Army helicopter blares out from above as it heads off on an anti-Taliban operation on the border with Afghanistan. Surrounding us are imposing mud walls that have clearly been peppered with machine gun fire.

A posse of local men, all armed to the teeth, are waiting to greet us. ‘I think that our village is a battlefield,’ says Irshad a tall, handsome young man with more than a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn. He says he left his job as a driver for a luxury hotel in Dubai to defend his home from the almost nightly raids that have seen scores kidnapped or killed. This is a rural society and most of those living here are farmers. But over the past three years, they’ve formed a militia, or lashkar, to defend Adezai against rival tribes in neighbouring Khyber tribal agency and Dera Dum Khel, which are aligned with the Taliban.

I ask what would happen if one of the residents of the village travelled to a neighbouring area, just ten minutes away by car. ‘They’ll kill us, it’s very simple,’ Irshad says. And if the men of Adezai capture one of their enemies? ‘We will kill them because they are our enemies, and the enemies of our country,’ he adds.

Local rivalries aside, it’s no exaggeration to say losing Adezai would result in an uptick in terrorism in Peshawar and the rest of Pakistan. ‘We feel we’ve saved Peshawar, because we are on the frontline,’ village chief Dilawar Khan says confidently as we survey the region from a tower looking out over the horizon. But he also tells me that Adezai receives little support from the Army or government authorities, and he has threatened to disband the lashkar if increased support – mostly money, fuel and ammunition – isn’t forthcoming.

This may have something to do with the fact that Adezai is aligned with the Pakistan Muslim League Quaid. Once the favoured political party of then-President Pervez Musharraf, the PML-Q is now in opposition, and Khan claims rival villages aligned with the Taliban are also getting support from local legislators. A smartly dressed, clean shaven man in his mid-forties, Dilawar answers my questions in between constant phone calls that are dispatched almost as quickly on a Bluetooth headset that seems surgically attached to his ear.

‘The Taliban fire rockets at us from those hills,’ he says, pointing out two mound-like hills that divide the farmlands of Adezai from the dusty plains of the tribal areas beyond. ‘If the village falls,’ an elder adds, ‘the Taliban would be free to infiltrate into urban Peshawar.’

That may sound outlandish, and perhaps the threat is exaggerated, but Adezai lays an easy 30-minute drive outside Peshawar. Although this year and last have both been relatively quiet in Pakistan’s frontier capital, it’s still surrounded by regions gripped by insurgency. According to police officials, the threat of suicide and remote-controlled bombs is an everyday concern in Peshawar, even during the cold season when hostilities traditionally ease off. Scores have died in Peshawar this winter in the sporadic attacks.

Here in Adezai, meanwhile, the security situation means that all the able-bodied men in the village must take turns patrolling the perimeter in the darkest, coldest hours of the night. Compounding the danger is the fact that their enemies are no strangers to them.

‘Yes, we know quite a few Taliban,’ says Hafiz Sajid Raza, a young Islamic scholar with a flowing henna-red beard and piercing blue eyes. Once a renowned local athlete, he’s one of Adezai’s best fighters. ‘Some of the Taliban came from our village, and I know most of the militants from neighbouring villages because I was involved in local elections and in sporting tournaments from before the fighting,’ he says. Some, like the feared Taliban commander Qari Ayub, used to teach in the local school.

‘People used to be very scared of the Taliban, that’s why they joined them,’ Hafiz Raza explains. I ask if he’s ever killed a Taliban. Yes, he answers casually, ‘the man who killed my father in Karachi, he was Taliban. After killing my father he called to tell me. He said “you must be very sad now because he’s dead.”’

In retaliation, Hafiz Raza and a few others from Adezai tracked down the brother of his father’s killer, who he says was also involved with the Taliban, to the neighbouring region of Bora. ‘I rang him (his father’s killer) to say I had captured his brother,’ he says. ‘I told him that if you are so brave and don’t fear death, come and rescue him.’

But the Taliban didn’t come to rescue their compatriot, so the men of Adezai shot him in the head. ‘We aren’t cruel, we didn’t mistreat or torture him, it was a quick death,’ Hafiz Raza tells me.

According to Pashtun tradition, a family must avenge the murder of their kin, a deadly obligation that has made it impossible for people here to escape the cycle of violence that sees endless skirmishes during the winter heat up along with the temperature into full blown warfare every summer. Judging from yesterday’s devastating suicide bombing targeting the people of Adezai, that could mean this will be a particularly bloody year.

Although Adezai technically isn’t part of the tribal areas, the ethnic Pashtuns here still adhere to the Pakhtunwali, an ancient tribal code that has governed relations within and between different tribes for centuries. The sudden US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the influx of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters into Pakistan’s tribal areas that followed it, may have disrupted much of the traditional Pashtun tribal structure. But in many ways, the current conflict is merely the latest in a long line of inter-tribe disputes that have engulfed foreign empires from the British to the Mughals, and now Pakistan.

As the call to prayer rings out at dusk, dark begins to fall on the village. In the hujra, something of a community safe house in the heart of Adezai village, young men gather to play cards and watch Bollywood films as they wait to begin their shift in the night patrols. Eventually, just after midnight, it’s my turn to go on patrol with Irshad, Hafiz Raza and a few other men.

Outside the hujra, a fine mist hovers close to the ground. The almost total silence is broken only by the rhythmic grinding of the gravelly earth under our sandals as we walk in single file, and the occasional piercing sound of distant gunfire. We trudge around the village through narrow streets and alleyways flanked by the mud boundary walls that separate the different family estates of Adezai.

We travel in almost total darkness so as not to give Taliban snipers an easy target, but the black of night presents problems of its own – at least for me, as I struggle to keep up with the lashkar. After each kilometre or so, we reach a clearing. The most exposed parts of Adezai, these areas are guarded all night by men who will later work the adjoining fields. ‘I’ll stand here until 5am,’ says Noor Malik. ‘Every night.’

After traversing the village and spending time with several night patrols, we return to the hujra in the early hours of the morning. The sun is slowly rising and another night draws to a close. Thankfully, this night has passed with few disruptions. But it’s only a matter of time before the fighting begins again. Two days after I left Adezai, the Taliban again bombed the girls’ school. Like the deadly bombing that killed and maimed so many that same month, it’s a reminder that for the people of Adezai, this conflict isn’t some vague, distant war, but an everyday struggle for survival.

Mustafa Qadri is a Pakistan-based journalist.

http://the-diplomat.com/2011/03/18/when-two-tribes-go-to-war/

By Mustafa Qadri

It has been a relatively quiet winter in Peshawar with few bombings. There’s a sense that life is slowly returning to normal. But take a short drive north of the city and the situation is quite different.

The village of Adezai marks the boundary between Peshawar city and the tribal areas and is under constant attack from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or the Pakistan Taliban Movement.

Once a quiet little hamlet, Adezai now looks more like a medieval fortress, a veritable Alamo looking out towards the Khyber Pass and regions under Taliban control. A point not lost on Lashkar member Irshad who takes me up a tower that looks like it could very well be part of a medieval castle.

“I think that our village is a battlefield,” Irshad said. “We are fighting for our village and everyone is trying their best. Inshallah Taliban is finished quickly, because before Taliban was coming from these front two mountains. So we started firing from this gun and from every home. This two, three hundred home, from all home they are firing, they [Taliban] run away from here. They are not doing anything.”

The night before suspected Taliban militants blew up two homes on the outskirts of Adezai. Only a few months earlier the local girls’ school was also blown up.

The situation has forced the men of Adezai, mostly farmers and day labourers, to become soldiers. Irshad and others even left their jobs overseas to defend their homes.

“We are thinking that we have saved Peshawar from destruction because we are in the frontline,” Irshad said. “If you see in Matani, Sarakhoa that is near Peshawar, they have no Taliban. Because of us, because we are in the frontline.

As we talk, the hum of an Army helicopter is heard from above — heading off on an operation against the Taliban in Khyber tribal agency.

Mustafa Qadri: What would happen to you if you went to one of the neighbouring tribal areas?
Irshad: Our neighbouring areas are Taliban.
Mustafa Qadri: What would they do to you?
Irshad: They will kill us. If we go there in Dera Dum Khel they will kill us. It is very simple.
Mustafa Qadri: And if you capture one of them?
Irshad: Yeah we kill them because they are the enemies of Islam, they are enemies of our country, they are enemies of us.
Mustafa Qadri: It is a stark equation – kill or be killed – made ever more stark by the fact that the men of Adezai personally know many of the people who fight with the Taliban, as lashkar member Hafiz Sajid Raza explains.

“Yes we still know quite a few Taliban, some came from our village and those from outside our village I know about 80 percent because I was involved in local elections and in sporting tournaments from before the fighting, volleyball and cricket, you get to know people better,” Hafiz said. “There’s one man called Qari Ayub, he’s also a school teacher. He used to come to our school here frequently when I was a student, and at volleyball tournaments. Now he’s a Taliban commander.”

Mustafa Qadri: Have you ever killed any Taliban?
Hafiz: Yes, the Taliban who killed my father in Karachi. We captured his brother, who is also involved in the Taliban, and we killed him. Just one bullet to the head and he was dead.

In the afternoon, Lashkar members take me to a hilltop used by the Taliban to fire rockets at the village.

Mustafa Qadri: It’s such a beautiful landscape. It’s just green and sand colour. And there’s a bit of a dust, a mist on the horizon. It looks like you’re a few hundred years ago in the past. And only 20 minutes drive away from Peshawar city.
Irshad: This is a point they are coming from this side. We are doing duty every night here. That is a danger point because above this point is another village. They have no control nothing.

Irshad: Mustafa you see this one? It is rocket launcher is fired from our hujra. At night Taliban is coming to this mountain so we firing from our hujra and we targeted this space.
Mustafa Qadri: There’s a big, big hole in the ground!
Irshad: Yes this is big, big hole because this is rocket launcher.
Mustafa Qadri: The call to prayer rings out at dusk and night falls on the village … young men gather in the hujra, something of a community safe house at the heart of Adezai village, waiting for their turn in the night patrols.

Eventually, Irshad, tells me it is time to go.

It’s the dead of night right now. It’s about 11 if not 12 a.m. night. This is the time when the Taliban strike. We’ve just left the hujra which is the main meeting place in the village. We’re going to be scoping the entire village. You can see these big walls around. It’s like we’re basically about to patrol the edges of the castle. We’re really on the frontline here.

“You can see that every night people are doing duty from different, different homes,” Irshad said.

While on patrol I ask some of the lashkar members looking out for possible Taliban attacks what their guard duty entails. I ask Hafiz Sajid Raza, whom we met earlier, how often they do these patrols.

Mustafa Qadri: How often do you do this?
Hafiz: Every night, daily, two or three guys do a circuit around the village, check on the patrols. If there’s an emergency, they gather all the young men.
Mustafa Qadri: And how long have you been doing this?
Hafiz: It’s been around three years now, every night we go on patrol until at least 2 in the morning.

Another Lashkar member he is out on patrol until even later.

Lashkar member: Every night I am on duty until five in the morning.
Mustafa Qadri: Why?
Lashkar member: We are fighting against the Taliban to stop their atrocities.

Another night, another night patrol passes. This time thankfully with few disruptions.

But it is only a matter of time before the fighting commences again. Two days after I left Adezai, the Taliban again bombed the girls’ school that had already been damaged by an earlier attack.

A stark reminder that for the people of Adezai, this conflict is not a distant war but an everyday matter of survival.

[This report was first broadcast by Public Radio International (the global network of US National Public Radio) on March 10, 2011.

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws make it a crime to defile the Quran or to defame Prophet Mohammad, punishable by life imprisonment and death respectively. But the laws have been roundly criticised by civil rights groups as appropriate safeguards against misuse as they have become notorious for being used to settle petty private disputes.

Religious minorities have been especially vulnerable to the blasphemy laws with around half of all charges being brought against them — even though a mere 3 per cent of Pakistan’s population of Pakistan is non-Muslim.

Hundreds of blasphemy cases have been brought against minorities in Pakistan in the last 26 years. One of those was against Asia Bibi, a poor farm worker from rural Punjab sentenced to death for apparently defaming the Prophet after some Muslim co-workers refused to drink water with her because she is Christian. Asia’s case came to prominence globally when it was highlighted by the international media.

In Pakistan Salmaan Taseer was the most senior political figure to publicly appeal for Asia Bibi to be released and for the blasphemy law to be reformed. Taseer received almost daily death threats from religious zealots for his stand, but few could have predicted that one of his security guards would gun him down at close range. Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s murderer, freely admits to killing the late governor because of his criticism of the blasphemy law.

Most disturbing of all, it appears Qadri told other members of Taseer’s security detail about his plan, and they allowed him to shoot Taseer 27 times before dropping his weapon and surrendering.

Normally fractured Islamist groups have found common cause in supporting the murder of Taseer, the liberal governor of Punjab who was critical of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws — and their support is echoed by the Taliban. This unusual coalition has helped silence the already restricted debate on the blasphemy laws in Pakistan.

The murder of a high profile politician by a member of his own security detail has shaken the country in several significant ways.

Nothing has been more ominous than the way it has united Pakistan’s generally fractious Islamic groups. Although religious groups have consistently supported the blasphemy laws in their current form, in recent years rival Muslim sects have been in increasingly violent conflict with each other, conflict what has been punctuated by the murder of leading Wahabi and Sufi clerics whose deaths are blamed by both camps on each other’s followers. It is therefore notable that these otherwise warring groups united to endorse the murder of Taseer.

Their support for the blasphemy laws is shared by the Taliban. This confirms and indeed demonstrates an alarming nexus between the Taliban insurgency Pakistan is fighting along the border with Afghanistan and mainstream religious opinion in urban centres like Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.

As Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, co-Chair of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and son of Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, railed against the murderer of in London after the murder, members of the Pakistan Taliban insurgency sent out an ominous warning.

“We appreciate Mumtaz Qadri’s efforts in killing the blasphemer Taseer. The Taliban are also after other secular politicians and no one will be left, they will be killed the way Taseer was killed,” said Mullah Noor Alam, a middle-ranking Taliban commander currently in North Waziristan when he spoke exclusively to New Matilda. Alam said those were his personal views as well as those of the insurgency.

Such views are not isolated to the Taliban. A week after Taseer’s murder on 4 January, tens of thousands gathered in Karachi to support Mumtaz Qadri and similar rallies occurred in most major cities including one in Lahore this week that garnered 40,000 people. Alam’s comments were echoed by many who attended the Karachi rally. “Whoever blasphemes will face the same fate as Salmaan Taseer,” poor labourer Abdul Rehman told New Matilda.

Facebook fanpages and other websites proliferated in the wake of Taseer’s murder, extolling the virtue of Qadri as a “ghazi” or warrior of Islam and defender of the Prophet. Although most of the Facebook sites have been taken down, a frenzy of apparent celebration has continued to sweep through Pakistan, including in Qadri’s hometown and Army headquarters Rawalpindi. The celebration is fed by conservative TVcommentators and a well organised religious lobby that can arrange public gatherings on short notice.

These sudden developments suggest that the battle against religious extremism in Pakistan is beyond the scope of military planners — whether in Rawalpindi or in international capitals.  Qadri openly admitted to killing Taseer but although he has already been brought before the federal Anti-Terrorism Court his trial has yet to commence. Pakistan’s judiciary has an opportunity to challenge self-proclaimed defenders of the faith from continuing down the spiral toward lawlessness by taking the law into their own hands.

But if anything Pakistan’s senior courts have shown a sympathy towards the Islamists, as several high profile recent developments demonstrate.

In November the Lahore High Court took the unprecedented and apparently unconstitutional step of barring Pakistan President Zardari from pardoning Asia Bibi until it hears an appeal against a sentence.That does not appear likely for some time given passions surrounding her case and the genuine fear that someone might try to kill her if she appears before the court.

During hearings into a recent constitutional amendment last year, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry of Pakistan’s Supreme Court said Islam and not the elected parliament was the highest authority in the land. Another judge on that bench wondered whether Pakistan could afford “afford to follow western parliaments which have decided in favour of gay marriages.” Both statements played to the strong Islamist sentiment here that liberal forces and greater secularity are a threat to Pakistan’s Islamic identity, a key argument of those who supported the murder of Taseer.

Along with the PPP’s Bilawal Zardari Bhutto, individual members of the Urdu-speaking community’s Muttahida Quami Movement and the ethnic Pashtun Awami National Party, the other major secular political parties in the country, have quietly condemned Taseer’s murder. But none of these parties have officially affirmed their support for reforming the blasphemy laws at the centre of the crisis.
The PPP-led federal government has gone even further to say it will defend the current laws from any reforms.

Civil society groups inside Pakistan have championed the cause with a slew of anti-blasphemy law rallies, websites and court petitions allowing the voices of moderate Pakistanis to be heard. These rallies were dwarfed by those organised in support of Mumtaz Qadri. Given the danger of openly opposing Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws these days — and how few political supporters there are for blasphemy law reform aside from former Information Minister Sherry Rehman and Bilawal Zardari Bhutto — such displays are a brave show of force. Some civil society groups even lodged complaints with police and the Supreme Court against local preachers for inciting the murder of Asia Bibi and Sherry Rehman. Still, the courts have an unreliable record in prosecuting those who commit acts of violence in the name of Islam.

And alone among mainstream Pakistani religious leaders, Javed Ahmed Ghamadi has called for the blasphemy laws to be repealed, arguing that they have no basis in Islamic law. But Ghamadi has lived in Malaysia since last year, when police discovered a plot to assassinate him. Such is the stifling environment in Pakistan now that even reasoned debate can have deadly consequences — and the implications of this local blasphemy debate in the wider region remain to be seen.

Pakistanis must challenge the routine prejudice that condemns an ancient transgender community to violence and ridicule

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 May 2010 18.30 BST

A great challenge for Pakistan has been crafting a sense of shared identity. But with much of the ensuing identity politics spiralling into sectarian and communal violence in recent decades, it isn’t surprising that minorities here face the worst forms of neglect and persecution.

There is no more maligned group of citizens in our country than those from its transgender community. Known variously as eunuchs, transgender or, in Urdu and Hindi, as hijras, they trace their origins to the pre-British royal courts of the Mughal empire and possibly even earlier, and are found not just in Pakistan but across the subcontinent. Under the Raj, the British tried to ban hijras as a breach of public decency but inevitably failed.

Although often described as eunuchs because some undergo castration, typically outside the clinical conditions of a hospital, many – if not most – do not.Hijras are in fact a diverse community of men (and some women) who happen to be hermaphrodites, transsexual, homosexual or have been castrated. Traditionally, hijras are viewed as having mystical powers – both good and bad – particularly with respect to marriage and fertility, which is why they are often found performing as dancers and soothsayers at weddings.

Sexuality is heavily regulated in Pakistan. Even for heterosexual couples relations are a hazardous affair, as brutally demonstrated by the recent murder of a British Pakistani family in Lahore last week – it is believed the murders were retribution for their son’s alleged infidelity. For queer and transgender Pakistanis, however, the risks are far more ubiquitous.

Today hijras are universally marginalised, forced to earn a living as beggars, prostitutes and dancers. It is common to see hijras asking for money at major traffic intersections and busy bazaars, yet, sadly, few of us ever know these people as family or friends. Because a high number work in the sex industry, hijras are, according to Family Health International, particularly vulnerable to STDs. They are also exposed to sexual abuse by customers. One young traditional male dancer I met in Islamabad recently, for instance, had his face brutally disfigured by acid when he refused advances from a male admirer at one of his performances.

Pakistan’s transgender community also faces persecution from the wider society. Brave activists like the She Male Association’s Almas Bobby criticise the police for routinely harassing members of the community, as demonstrated at a high-profile rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in January last year.

On Tuesday, police in Peshawar interrupted a wedding by arresting a businessman together with his “eunuch” bride and up to 43 guests. The couple had to be escorted by a heavy security detail to court to prevent onlookers from assaulting them. Although rare, this incident is not unique. In 2007, a couple were jailed for seeking to get married because the groom was a woman who had undergone sex-change surgery.

It should be no surprise that Tuesday’s arrest took place in a working-class neighbourhood of Peshawar. In Pakistan, the rich are generally free to do as they like. Although there are few recorded members of the transgender community among the elite, there is a vibrant if muted community of middle- and upper-class gay Pakistanis and one of the country’s most popular talkshows is hosted by a drag queen.

In a photographic exhibition in Islamabad this month, the Scottish photographer Malcolm Hutcheson shines a spotlight on this ancient community. “It is not that these individuals belong to the dark side of the society; rather it is society itself which is dark, where they tend to see them [hijras] as inferior and neglect them,” Hutcheson noted at the exhibition’s opening.

But along with the indignities they have faced, there has been progress towards respecting the rights of transgender Pakistanis as equal citizens. Last year Pakistan’s supreme court called on authorities to recognise hijras as a distinct gender that are entitled to inherit property, employment and to vote – albeit that these reforms will face stiff resistance in this deeply conservative country in which politicians are ever eager to display their Islamic credentials. In neighbouring India, a politician has suggested that a regiment of hijras should be established to act as security guards because of their “loyalty and integrity”.

Pakistani society is immensely diverse, but with an all-too-often monolithic and intolerant mainstream conception of national identity it is frighteningly easy to face extreme prejudice and violence. Rather than expressing outrage over images of the Prophet on networking sites, it is high time we, as Muslims and Pakistanis, challenge the routine prejudice that condemns our fellow citizens to a lifetime of violence and ridicule. Accepting the ancient hijra community as a legitimate and diverse part of our society would be a welcome start.

[This article was published in The Guardian. Url: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/26/pakistan-transgender-hijras-deserve-acceptance]

Already ravaged by high inflation, massive energy shortages and political turmoil, Pakistan has been shocked by bombings in most of its major cities, writes Mustafa Qadri

Pakistan is enduring the most brutal spate of political violence since the Punjab-dominated Army was implicated in mass slaughter in 1971. Despite military victories in large swathes of the tribal areas that are home to the Taliban, Pakistan’s major cities have been rocked by an escalating series of violent events that, according to one estimate, have claimed 544 lives in a little under three months.

Where once the bombings were primarily concentrated in or near the tribal areas, such as the cities of Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan, these recent bomb blasts and shootings have hit several of the largest cities in the country.

The bombings of the two biggest cities of the Punjab, the most populous and influential of Pakistan’s provinces — Lahore in May and Multan earlier this month — are a sign of this shift. The carnage in Multan was followed by an attack on a mosque in a heavily fortified part of Rawalpindi where many Army personnel traditionally gather for Friday prayers. This last attack left 40 dead, including a major-general and 16 children of senior military officers.

This was the second major attack on Rawalpindi, the city which houses the headquarters of Pakistan’s Army, in as many months. In October, militants attempted to breach Army headquarters, leading to a 22-hour siege and hostage crisis that badly humiliated the country’s senior generals.

The Taliban hail from the remote and poorly developed tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and not from the big cities. This makes claims that they are responsible for these recent bombings all the more destabilising for Pakistan — but it also has many here querying whether the Taliban actually is responsible for the well coordinated attacks.

Pakistan’s media, religious groups and government authorities rarely use the term “Taliban” when discussing the current violence. That is because in Pakistan the Taliban are still associated with the anti-US resistance in neighbouring Afghanistan. There is also a widespread perception that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that existed before the US-led invasion of 2001 was, although perhaps theologically primitive, an honest political broker that provided the troubled central Asian nation with an unprecedented level of stability and promoted the virtues of Islam.

For observers in the West this may sound absurd. But a little over two decades ago, Islamist militants waging what they considered a holy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were called “freedom fighters” by then US President Ronald Reagan, (not to mention by Rambo).

For many in Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban inherited the mantle of freedom fighters from the conflict in the 1980s. While the Pakistan security establishment has retained informal links with Afghan Taliban commanders and their allies after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, for their part, the Afghan Taliban has largely avoided the anti-Pakistan insurgency.

Noting this distinction, retired civil and military officials contacted by newmatilda.com say they are sceptical about Taliban involvement in the bombings inside Pakistan. They blame foreign governments, particularly India, the United States and Israel for the current violence.

According to Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik, the senior civilian bureaucrat charged with counterterrorism activities, India is responsible for much of the terrorism.

This claim was echoed by intelligence officials interviewed by newmatilda.com in the national capital of Islamabad and Peshawar, the largest and strategically important city on Pakistan’s northwest frontier. Mufti Zubair Usmani from the Jamia Darul Uloom, in Karachi, the largest mainstream religious seminary in the country, says the Pakistan Taliban “is an instrument of RAW [the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian Prime Minister’s Office, one of India’s top spy agencies] … Whoever is doing things in Pakistan is doing it to defeat Pakistan [which] happens to be in a strategic location [and] an atomic power. Because of this, the violence will continue.”

Provincial and federal intelligence officials interviewed by newmatilda.com privately deliver remarkably similar conclusions, citing secret intelligence from the interrogation of captured Taliban operatives and other sources that suggest Indian and Afghan government involvement.

Adding intrigue to this already confusing situation, the Pakistan Taliban tends to deny responsibility for some of the bombings, especially those that kill high numbers of civilians. They have even blamed the private military contractor Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, and Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies for the most devastating attacks while taking responsibility for those that target the military.

Both the Army and the Taliban claim to fight in the name of Islam  so blaming foreigners and avoiding the more sobering and likely reality that Muslim Pakistanis are killing one another helps both sides rally popular support.

It’s little help in this volatile environment for the US to be openly speaking of escalating its highly destabilising drone war inside Pakistan. Last week, at least 15 people were killed by an American drone assault on a suspected military compound on the border with Afghanistan.

Powerless to control the spiraling violence, it is no wonder that many Pakistanis are convinced that foreigners, and not the Taliban, are the greatest source of instability in their country.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/12/22/who-behind-violence-pakistan

The Taliban Has No Plan B

By Mustafa Qadri

The Taliban is stepping up its violent attacks but ordinary Pakistanis have had enough and the organisation is losing popular support, reports Mustafa Qadri from near the Swat valley

This week, the Taliban finally responded to the massive army operation in the Swat valley with a string of bombings in Peshawar, Lahore and the tribal district of Dera Ismail Khan. As shocking as they were, however, the attacks were as predictably violent as all the others that have rocked Pakistan almost weekly for the past several years. With a key Taliban base about to be lost in Pakistan’s north-west, the recent attacks may well represent the beginning of a new wave of violence.

Four bombings rocked the troubled North West Frontier Province yesterday, three of those were in the markets of Peshawar where book, music and clothes shop owners have, since at least last year, been routinely threatened with bomb attacks by the Taliban for trading in “un-Islamic” goods.

Only a day earlier a gun and bomb attack in central Lahore killed at least 30 and injured close to 300 more. Among the dead were seven personnel of the powerful Inter Services Intelligence, including an officer. Rescue workers are continuing to unearth bodies from the rubble.

Although the ISI was the ostensible target in Lahore, the broader aim appears to have been to show that the Taliban is still a force to be reckoned with.

Pakistan’s many news channels were flooded with images of misery late Thursday evening. Along with the now familiar sight of entire mountain communities living in camps for displaced people, there were the pictures of the bloodied, injured survivors of Lahore and Peshawar.

Taliban spokesperson Hakimullah Mehsud said the Lahore attack was in response to “the innocent people killed [by the army] in Swat”. It was an obvious appeal to the estimated 2.5 million made homeless by the war with the Pakistan army in the tribal areas. If ethnic Pakhtuns in the tribal areas have to suffer, so the reasoning goes, so too should Punjabis who make up the bulk of the army.

These latest attacks are a sign of the Taliban’s weakness, not its strength. That it can only respond with violence — mostly against poor Muslims — says much about the Taliban’s long term vision and the veracity of its claims to be a vanguard for true Islam.

This week I have been travelling through displaced person camps just below the war zone in the Swat valley, which stretch all the way to Peshawar. Almost all the people I met spoke of their deep hatred for the Taliban. They were everyday people — mothers, bureaucrats, tradesmen and school kids — yet all spoke with a common purpose.

“If the war stopped tomorrow, I would go back home the very next day,” said Mohammad Yayha from the village of Kokari, near the main Swat city of Mingora where the army is currently engaged in bloody street battles with the Taliban.

Many said that the Taliban has been deliberately hiding among civilians, particularly in their villages, effectively turning them into human shields. They also noted the Taliban’s continuation of hostilities in outlying regions of Swat and the neighbouring areas of Dir and Buner after a peace deal was tenuously reached in February, well before the current operation commenced.

Although there is also anger at the army, it has — along with the Pakistan Government and numerous NGOs — been providing tents and supplies for the approximately 20 per cent of the displaced people who are believed to be living in the camps. The remaining 80 per cent have sought refuge among family, friends and community organisations in other parts of the country. Throughout the country, Pakistanis have opened their hearts and wallets to these people, despite attempts by some in Karachi to block the displaced from entering the city.

In a refuge on the outskirts of Peshawar, just seven kilometres from Taliban-controlled Dera Adam Khel, they sang ancient Pakhtun poems about wine and beautiful dancing girls. It was a far cry from the vision of Pakistan the Taliban promises to create.

Yet, as with the immediate future of stability in this country, many remain uncertain about whom they should be blaming for all this violence. One source of this uncertainty is continual denial about home grown militancy. Major religious parties like Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islami refuse to even use the word Taliban. And army spokesperson General Athar Abbas, Pakistan’s own version of a glib Pentagon spokesperson who issues daily press statements promising the enemy will soon be vanquished, has generally preferred to talk of “miscreants” rather than use the T word.

Even rank-and-file soldiers are uncertain about the enemy they are facing. One junior officer said he did not believe the Taliban were behind atrocities like the gruesome murder of captured army personnel.

The people of Swat I spoke to didn’t seem to have such misgivings. Under the banner of “Aman Tehreek” or Peace Movement, ordinary villagers, clerics and local NGOs from Swat have joined forces to demand a cohesive, long term strategy for defeating the Taliban and bringing justice, education and employment to Swat.

“We are inspired by our great leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan,” says Swat school teacher and activist Ziauddin Yusufzai in reference to the respected 20th century Pakhtun leader who is often described as the region’s Mahatma Gandhi.

“The movement was formed to denounce the three [forms of terrorism] — Taliban, sectarianism, and kidnappings [for ransom],” says NGO worker Fazal Maula.

“The army must eliminate the miscreants,” he adds, but only through carefully targeted operations that cause a minimum of harm to civilians. The group has called on authorities to be more responsible in its military campaign and develop a detailed program for reconstruction. With its emerald mines, lumber industry and scenic beauty, Aman Tehreek believes Swat could quickly be reinvigorated.

Appeals for donations are being made on television and in markets across Pakistan. The clear signal is that, for the first time, Pakistanis are rallying with the Government and against the Taliban’s violent crusade.

http://newmatilda.com/2009/05/29/taliban-has-no-plan-b

]]> http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/the-taliban-has-no-plan-b/feed/ 0 http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/isolating-the-taliban/ http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/isolating-the-taliban/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 09:42:46 +0000 mustafa http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/?p=517

Isolating the Taliban

Violence in Pakistan can only be tackled if the state listens to devastated communities and recognises the Taliban threat

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 18.30 BST

It was really only a matter of time before we would see this. A day after a bomb ripped through central Lahore, three explosions rocked Peshawar – two at the famous storytellers’ market, and another near the city’s railway station, destroying significant amounts of property, lives and livelihoods. It is too early to know what motivated these latest attacks in Peshawar. Like so much of the North-West Frontier Province, however, Peshawar businesses, particularly book music shops and women’s clothing stores, have been heavily hit, often after being told to shut for being unIslamic.

The motivation in Lahore appears to be clearer. Yesterday’s suicide gun and bomb attack killed around 30 people and injured more than 200 in Lahore. Among the dead were seven personnel of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, including one of its officers. The ISI may have been the ostensible target, but more than that, the aim was to prove that the Taliban are still relevant.

The images on Pakistan’s copious news networks of those fleeing the fighting in the Swat valley were joined by those of the pained faces of mourners in Lahore and Peshawar raising their hands to the heavens. The heavens are often invoked in this Pakistan’s latest internal conflict, but the machinations are tragically all too worldly.

When Taliban spokesman Hakimullah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the Lahore attack, he said it was in response to “the innocent people killed [by the army] in Swat”. It was an obvious appeal to the now 2.5 million made homeless by the war with the Pakistan army in the tribal areas. If ethnic Pashtuns in the tribal areas have to suffer, so the reasoning goes, so too should Punjabis who make up the bulk of the army.

That it can only respond through violence, and even that against fellow, mostly poor, Muslims, says much about the Taliban’s long-term vision and the veracity of their claims to be a vanguard for true Islam.

In short, as Basim Usmani astutely notes, these latest attacks are a sign of the Taliban’s weakness, not their strength. That can only mean more, not less, bombings and violence.

Like a gambler once enriched on the craps tables, the Taliban’s political capital is as spent as its actions have been morally bankrupt.

As I travelled through displaced person camps to the south and east of Swat, in Mardan, Jalallah and Peshawar, people spoke of their deep hatred for the Taliban. I spoke to around a hundred people from diverse backgrounds in four camps – to school kids, teachers, mothers, farmers, and small business owners. Many said that the Taliban have been deliberately hiding among civilians, particularly in their villages, effectively turning them into human shields. They also noted the Taliban’s continuation of hostilities in outlying regions of Swat and the neighbouring areas of Dir and Buner after a peace deal was tenuously reached in February, well before the current army operation commenced.

There is anger at the army too, but it has, along with the Pakistan government and NGOs too numerous to count, at least provided tents and supplies for some of the displaced – only 20% in all according to some estimates, but a significant number nevertheless. And while the hot, miserable conditions of the IDP camps cannot be overemphasised, there is an ever-growing national effort at rehabilitation.

The spectre of sectarianism is still in the air, particularly in Karachi where unions and political parties dominated by the Urdu-speaking community blocked displaced Pashtuns from entering the city. But that move looks to have turned into a political disaster for those trying to paint Pakistan’s Pashtun community as synonymous with extremism and the Taliban. The impression among the displaced could not have been more different.

In a camp on the outskirts of Peshawar, just 7km from Taliban-controlled Dera Adam Khel, they sang ancient Pashtun poems about wine and beautiful dancing girls. It was a far cry from the vision of Pakistan the Taliban promise to create.

Yet, as with the immediate future of stability in this country, many remain uncertain about whom they should be blaming for all this violence. One source of this uncertainty is continual denial about home-grown militancy. Major religious parties like Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islami refuse to even use the word Taliban. And army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas, our own version of a glib Pentagon spokesman, who issues daily press statements promising the enemy will soon be vanquished, has generally preferred to talk of “miscreants” rather than use the “T” word.

Even rank and file soldiers, whom I met quietly this week, earnestly proclaim that the culprits could not be the Taliban.

There aren’t as many concerns about the nomenclature among the displaced. Under the banner of “Aman Tehreek” or Peace Movement, ordinary villagers, clerics and local NGOs have come together demanding a cohesive, long-term strategy for defeating the Taliban.

“We are inspired by our great leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan,” says Swat school teacher and activist Ziauddin Yusufzai in reference to the respected 20th-century Pashtun leader who is often described as the region’s Mahatma Gandhi.

“The movement was formed to denounce the three [forms of terrorism] – Taliban, sectarianism, and kidnappings [for ransom],” says NGO worker Fazal Maula.

“The army must eliminate the miscreants,” he adds, but only through carefully targeted operations that do a minimum of harm to civilians. Aman Tehreek has prepared a detailed list of political and humanitarian demands that they hope will enable communities devastated by war to resist future Taliban encroachment.

Pakistani society is starting to recognise the existential threat from within. Whether the government and army can capitalise on the present mood by showing leadership and a long-term social strategy for the country remains unclear.

(This article was published online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/28/facing-up-to-the-taliban)

13 May 2009 17:10:00 GMT

Written by: Mustafa Qadri

Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author’s alone.

A veteran of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan rues the misfortune of being homeless in his own country. Photo by Mustafa Qadri

Mustafa Qadri in Peshawar and Tahir Ali in Rangmala talk to civilians displaced by a Pakistani army offensive against Taliban militants in the Swat valley that has uprooted hundreds of thousands.

Since last Friday, the Pakistan army has been engaged in its largest offensive to date against Taliban forces in the country’s northwest. The assaults, focused mainly in the Swat valley and lower Dir districts of Malakand Tribal Agency, have driven village communities, some 500,000 or more men, women and children according to the United Nations, to flee mountainous homes that, once placid and beautiful, have been transformed into deadly frontlines in Pakistan’s latest battle with Islamic militancy.

This latest wave of displaced people join the close to a million already left homeless by other army operations against the Taliban since last August.

People have streamed down as far south as Peshawar, some 80 km (50 miles) from the Swat warzone. Here, in the outskirts of the city, displaced communities from several tribal conflict areas have settled at the Katcha Ghuri camp that was once home to refugees fleeing the 1980s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

“We are always hungry and there are many mosquitoes here,” says Izzat, a small business holder from Swat and father of four.

The situation has become so dire that people displaced from other regions last year have offered to leave to make space for new arrivals from the northwest.

“We are ready to leave (Katcha Ghuri) to make room for our brothers from Swat,” says Kushdhil, an old man from the Bajaur Agency district to the west of the current fighting.

However, most of the displaced remain trapped in southern parts of the Malakand Agency bordering the conflict, largely due to sporadic, often randomly announced army curfews.

“There is no proper warning (before) curfew is suddenly announced… People have very little chance to leave their homes for safer places,” says Naeema, a woman from the Kabal area of Swat that has become a site of intense fighting. Naeema is now living at a displaced persons camp in Rangmala.

With some 15,000 tents, the Rangmala camp was recently established with the help of non-governmental organisations and local residents who have provided fleeing villagers with vital humanitarian supplies like food, clothes and shoes.

People, mostly from the Swat valley and surrounding areas of neighbouring lower Dir district, have been forced to hop from village to village during the short periods, anywhere between a few hours to a day, when curfews are lifted.

Rukhsana left her home in Shamozai, Swat once fighting erupted there. She is currently staying in the Nagram area of lower Dir waiting for the curfew to be lifted.

“We were leading contented lives in our village,” Rukhsana recalls. “But now it is no longer safe to live there. I am a primary school teacher. First I was forced to leave my job due to threats from the Taliban. They do not want women to get an education.”

Many like Rukhsana claim the government is indiscriminately shelling villages, even when there are no militants in them.

“Now I am totally dejected. I’m leaving my sweet home, too,” she explains, visibly shaken. “Somehow we survived the shelling but we don’t know what the future holds. We are just moving, always moving from village to village.”

Although authorities have told people to leave their homes, no transportation has been provided.

“We were asked to leave our homes without any assistance (from the government). We managed to get out of the area,” says Zahid from Mingora, the Swat valley’s largest city and Taliban stronghold under intense army bombardment. He is now living in one of the largest camps for displaced people set up in Rangmala, Malakand Agency.

Private transporters have raised their fares beyond the reach of the poorest people.

“Transporters are charging very high prices that we can’t afford,” Zahid explains. “They left us behind (amid) heavy shelling from (army) helicopters.”

Many women and children, who rarely venture outside their villages without male relatives, have been marooned by the conflict. They hope to be repatriated with their families but, in the short term at least, the prospects look bleak.

“Four of our family members have managed to reach this area, but I am worried about my father who is still at village,” says Akram Shah, another displaced villager from Hayaserai in Maidan now staying in Badawan village in Lower Dir.

“This morning I contacted (my father) by telephone… He was worried because severe clashes were taking place between security forces and Taliban (who were) both using heavy weaponry.”

Asima, a six-year-old from Maidan Dir who lost her mother during the exodus, was one of the fortunate ones. She managed to find her relatives in the Rangmala camp. The rest of her family has shifted to Nowshehra, 50 km (30 miles) east of Peshawar, but due to ongoing army curfews, Asmia is still waiting to be repatriated.

Her story is typical of the tragedy unfolding in Pakistan’s northwest.

Despite the scale of army operations, local Taliban sources say their fighters and key commanders have not been subdued.

According to Muhammad Iqbal, spokesman for the Taliban in Mardan District, “the Taliban are going forward and security forces are on the run”.

“We feel sorry for the poor people being killed during the (army) assault… Our men are safe and are fighting with great enthusiasm and spirit,” Iqbal, speaking by phone from an undisclosed location, said.

“Military forces can’t face us on the ground (due to the mountainous terrain) and we have mined the whole of the area so they can’t come forward from their check posts.”

On Monday, the Pakistan government announced a 1 billion rupee injection of funds to aid those displaced by the conflict and a forthcoming donors conference to obtain further assistance. U.N. aid agencies said they are speeding up the delivery of humanitarian relief while in Washington, U.S. President Barak Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, urged legislators to okay an immediate aid package to Pakistan that would include economic, humanitarian and military assistance.

But even if greater humanitarian relief reaches those closest to the fighting, village communities in these remote and once sleepy parts of Pakistan may never recover.

http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/54127/2009/04/13-171046-1.htm