Journalism is a dangerous profession in Pakistan. But a vibrant, relatively free press still exists in this volatile country

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 December 2009 18:00 GMT

For as long as anyone cares to remember, journalism has been a dangerous profession in Pakistan. Although of late much of the attention has focused on the risks to foreign journalists, the situation for local reporters is equally, if not more, parlous.

First consider that virtually all the on-the-ground news you read from Pakistan, especially from conflict zones, has been gathered by a local reporter under considerable personal risk. That is certainly the case for journalists working in the northwest frontier where the Taliban are most active. “I [do some] work for Voice of America,” one veteran reporter, who requested anonymity, told me in the safety of a hotel room in Islamabad. “Even now, I do not tell [the Taliban he interviews] that. It would mean certain death.”

Only last week, the Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and two other journalists were kidnapped by an unknown gang in a region bordering Pakistan’s tribal areas. Although they were thankfully released on Wednesday, many others have not been so lucky.

Despite the risks, journalists like Abdul-Ahad remain a vital part of keeping the powerful accountable. Earlier this year, for instance, the media was at the forefront of exposing attempts by the current and previous Pakistan government to crack down on supporters of the current chief justice of Pakistan. Other scandals, like illegal commodity syndicates allegedly involving the ruling elite, have also been brought to public attention thanks to independent media.

Of course, Pakistan’s press is far from perfect. Although this year most outlets have exposed the brutalities of the Pakistan Taliban, over the past eight years that the insurgency has existed many either voiced sympathy for them or ignored their excesses. Even now many commentators refuse to refer to the insurgents as Taliban and instead suggest that there are foreign hands in most everything that occurs in this country.

The government has also on occasion criticised the media for broadcasting graphic images of the violence that has rocked the major cities for exacerbating the fears of an already panicked population. It has also shut out independent reporting from the frontlines, making it difficult to determine the success or destructiveness of army operations.

Some journalists have even been threatened or killed in mysterious circumstances, leaving many to suspect covert government involvement.

Kamran Shafi, the noted columnist from the Dawn newspaper, had bullets fired into his Islamabad home last month in what is widely believed to be an attempt by Pakistan’s security establishment, or elements within it, to silence one of the more independent and critical voices in the media.

A decade earlier, Najam Sethi, another veteran journalist, was detained by federal intelligence agents because of the perceived “anti-Pakistan” bias of his reporting. Sethi was released owing largely to his high profile and international lobbying. But most journalists do not have these protections.

Back in February, the bullet-ridden body of Musa Khankhel was found in the Swat valley a day after reporting on a peace deal between a pro-Taliban cleric and the government. Although no conclusive investigations were held, Khankhel’s employer GeoTV believes state intelligence murdered Khankhel out of fear he would expose the reality that the peace agreement was actually aiding the Taliban’s advance into the region. Khankhel had previously survived two assassination attempts by what he claimed were state security forces.

The government is not monolithically opposed to the press. Nor is it the only one that intimidates journalists. Expose the misdemeanours of gangsters or religious groups and you could face anything from death threats to rent-a-crowd mobs outside your residence, hurling profanities and garbage.

How is it then that a vibrant, relatively free press has survived in such a volatile country with a long history of autocratic rule? There appears to be three main reasons. First, the media are the modern incarnation of the subcontinent’s ancient literary traditions where laureates reflected the moods and aspirations of entire communities. It helps that Pakistan’s poetic languages describe the most heinous and beautiful of things in highly allegorical terms. This heritage finds a natural ally in the popular media.

Second, with power so highly concentrated, the media has been one of the only ways that information ever seeps out of the elite and into the mainstream. Allied to this is the third reason: the powerful are so dependent on the weak – be they servants, functionaries or relatives – that it is near impossible to keep things secret.

All the more reason why journalists don’t die of boredom in Pakistan.

The Diplomat’s Pakistan correspondent, Mustafa Qadri, meets refugees from the conflict in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and finds anger, trepidation and hope as they return home after this summer’s counter-Taliban military offensive.

Travelling along the road leading to the Swat valley is a memorable experience. As the narrow dual carriageway snakes around impossibly steep mountain ranges, the breathtaking vista of snow-capped peaks come into view as they loom over an emerald green valley pierced by the Swat River. It looks too perfect to be natural.

‘The beauty of Swat is unmatched in the world,’ says Ashraf, a Swati villager and journalist who agreed to take me to the region. When I ask if anyone maintains the near perfectly manicured grasslands and pine forests he laughs and shakes his head. Described in local poetry as heaven on earth, for centuries Swat has been home to saints and soothsayers–first those hailing from Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and in more recent centuries mystical Sufi Islam.

But these mountains can be treacherous too, something I realise after I dare to glance down at the unfenced road where the rusting wreckage of cars and trucks litter the foot of the mountains. Still, given this breathtaking backdrop and its history, it is hard to imagine that this once tranquil alpine resort could become the site for a savage battle for Pakistan’s soul.

‘We had everything, flowers, forests, factories… But everything has been devastated–our businesses, our communities… we [lost] everything because of the Taliban and the Army,’ says Purmanri, a small business owner from Mingora, the region’s largest city.

With the Soviet withdrawal, Sufi returned to his native Swat where he vigorously lobbied for the enactment of an Islamic legal system that would only a few years later reach global notoriety under the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In July 2007, local militias claiming to fight in the name of the Taliban initiated a string of bombings, taking local police and paramilitaries completely by surprise. In the chaos and confusion they quickly installed a parallel government demanding taxes from civilians and the prohibition of music shops and other practices such as folk poetry and ‘un-Islamic’ dance.

This was not the first time that ultra conservative Islam had been aggressively imposed on the region. In 1989, as Russian tanks began rolling out of Afghanistan, disillusioned religious hardliner Sufi Mohammad Khan left the Jamiat-e-Islami political party, Pakistan’s largest mainstream religious political party, to establish Tehreek-e-Nifaaz-e-Shariat-Mohammadi or Movement for the Promotion of Islamic Law. Sufi had spent the late 1980s fighting and recruiting young men for the anti-Communist mujahedeen in what was one of the dirtiest of Cold War conflicts.

Five years later, in 1994, TSNM activists blocked the main highway linking the entire Malakand Division of northwest Pakistan (which includes Swat) from the rest of the country. Government authorities, wary of the destabilising effects of continued violence on what was then a major source of tourism in Pakistan, acquiesced to Sufi’s demands.

This rapid acquiescence was an early indicator for Pakistani Islamists that when pressure was placed on the state, the state would give in to their demands. In truth, the Pakistan state itself was largely to blame for this dangerous blowback, after the Army under military dictator Gen. Zia ul Haq spent the previous decade developing a militant infrastructure in the tribal frontier that borders Afghanistan.

A veteran politician from Swat, speaking anonymously out of fear of retribution, told me that Sufi had always maintained close links with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. As they shifted their focus away from Afghanistan and towards Kashmir, the Inter Services Intelligence, the Pakistan Army’s clandestine operations agency, sought to maintain the same recruitment infrastructure that had proved so devastatingly effective against the Soviets.

That relationship appeared to change after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. Dramatically transformed from pariah state to key ally in the new War on Terror, Pakistan’s Gen. Pervez Musharraf ordered TSNM to be banned and Sufi imprisoned after he led a group of 10,000 men into Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban against pro-US forces in Afghanistan.

Yet in the intervening years, Sufi’s son-in-law, Fazlullah, continued where his father’s fiery sermons had left off. When in 2004 Fazlullah began incendiary clandestine radio broadcasts decrying Pakistan’s support for the US occupation of Afghanistan and threatening women and music shop owners with violence, authorities looked the other way.

In July 2007, emboldened by the state’s inaction, Fazlullah launched a surprise offensive against police and security forces throughout Malakand, setting up a parallel administration that taxed non-Muslims, closed down music shops and forbade women from attending schools and colleges. It took the Pakistan Army until October to finally send troops into what became a bloody town-to-town battle during which military operations and a string of audacious suicide bombings claimed hundreds of lives. Although the Army regained several key areas, the overall stalemate and public hostility towards the operations compelled top generals to sue for peace with Fazlullah’s Taliban.

But the peace proved short lived as the Taliban insurgency, now spreading to the neighbouring Bajaur tribal area, a key transit point bordering Afghanistan, continued to expand across the Swat valley. Under a mix of international and domestic pressure, the Army commenced a second, much larger operation in July 2008. Backed by jets, helicopter gunships and counterinsurgency training, primarily from the United States, the Army managed to retake many of the largest towns.

But the war was taking an increasingly devastating toll on civilians. Desperate for an end to hostilities, many called for a detailed peace agreement in the hope that the Taliban and its TSNM allies would cease hostilities if their key demand, the application of Sharia Law, was accepted across Malakand. With the Army engaged in an unpopular war, the government—facing immense political pressure due to rising inflation and nationwide energy shortfalls—finally caved.

Although the Swat valley is often described as a settled part of Pakistan, it has more in common with the tribal areas that abut the border with Afghanistan than the urban centres of Punjab and Sindh. Most Swatis are Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group of Pakistan’s tribal areas. Although the laws of Pakistan are meant to apply in Swat (unlike in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that include South Waziristan, headquarters of the Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud), the judiciary and civil administration was considered corrupt and inefficient.

That history is a living, breathing legacy that connects past disenfranchisement with today’s poverty, ignorance and desperation, ills that gave the Taliban and TSNM a casus belli for confronting the state. They promised stability in exchange for their version of Islam.

For many locals, the peace deal’s announcement was hugely welcome. In the streets of the Malakand region, villagers distributed sweets, a common expression of joy usually reserved for celebrations at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. As a sign that the peace deal represented a victory for the Islamists, Sufi Mohammad led members of the TSNM on a march through Mingora, the largest city in the Swat valley. Most of those marching—an estimated 15,000—wore black turbans, the signature dress item of the Taliban.

But dark clouds of repression quickly formed over Swat. ‘We’ve lost the battle against the militants. We’ve seen day by day how the government and army have [been] weakened, how they have finally been reduced to talk and to deal…’ one local woman told Shuja Nawaz from the Atlantic Council. ‘Someone said to me the other day, “Don’t complain, because the one you complain to will be your enemy,”’ she added.

‘[The government of] Pakistan has betrayed us,’ says a middle ranking commander of the Swat Taliban with the nom de guerre Mullah Noor Alam. We are speaking at a secret meeting conducted at a remote Swat village in the dead of the night. ‘Ultimately, we want Sharia over all of Pakistan. But, first of all, here in Swat,’ he says determinedly. ‘Once Islam has been established in Pakistan, you will see there will no longer be any strife.’

But strife has become synonymous with the Taliban. As the Army stepped into Swat again in late April under intense pressure to remove the Taliban, the mutilated corpses of captured soldiers and others like dancers and music shop owners considered apostate littered the streets of Mingora. ‘In all of our Pashtun history, we never saw such barbarism,’ says Abdur Raheem Mundokhel from the Pakhtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party. ‘We have a history [of] people being killed in blood feuds, but still they would give honour even to their enemies.’

The government has responded with its own brand of ruthlessness. Taliban fighters are not the only ones targeted. Family members, even those who played no part in the conflict, and others forced by circumstance to support the insurgents, have been killed. Key Taliban commanders who surrendered to authorities have only days later been found dead, with officials claiming they had never been in their custody in the first place. Corpses have been discovered floating down the rivers while others dangle from electricity poles with notes warning of dire consequences for the Taliban and its supporters. Some villagers claim that state security forces have even warned them against giving a Muslim burial to fallen Taliban fighters (in Islam the dead are supposed to be buried immediately). Others say that family members have been kidnapped by security forces and threatened with death if their militant relatives, currently in hiding, do not turn themselves over to the authorities.

And the army has been accused of arresting tribal Pashtuns not linked to the militancy simply because they belong to clans associated with the Taliban. They also stand accused of a widespread and systematic campaign of murder and intimidation of those perceived to be sympathetic to the Taliban. According to eyewitnesses and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Army and state paramilitaries have carried out reprisal killings on a mass scale.

Before the April offensive, some estimates placed the Taliban as occupying 11% of Pakistan, almost all of which was in the North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas that are presently the focus of military operations being conducted by Pakistan and US forces. Now the main districts of the Swat valley, including Mingora, are firmly under Army control. The government says it hopes to repatriate the displaced over the coming months, emboldened by a raft of aid packages from the United States and other foreign governments, as well as support from international institutions known as the Friends of a Democratic Pakistan.

The task ahead is massive. Many of their communities now lie in ruins. Hundreds of schools and hospitals have been destroyed by Taliban or Army bombardment. It is a trauma that many find too difficult to discuss openly. Some, like young schoolgirl Mannu, use song to express their grief.

My sweet land has caught fire,
Not just from one side but from everywhere.
The fire has engulfed everything,
Our people, our customs, our schools, our markets.
My beautiful land, with its valleys and peaks, its perfumed flowers,
All have lost their lustre.
In every direction there is war.
The people, who laughed, who sang, are now silent.
The once majestic and peaceful River Swat has dried up.
I pray to you God, bring back the paradise, the peaceful Swat I remember.

Emboldened by her recital, Mannu feels comfortable enough to express her thoughts about the situation in Swat. ‘The Taliban say they want sharia, but what kind of sharia is this–killing and looting? It’s just a game to them,’ she says. Mannu has dared to seek an education in a region of Swat where the Taliban openly forbade women from doing so. ‘I’m not afraid of going to school,’ she says defiantly when asked about her studies. Risking physical harm as the Taliban destroyed more than 200 schools, Mannu continued to attend one of the few schools that remained open before eventually fleeing with her family.

‘We’re not afraid because we are doing the right thing,’ says Ziauddin Yousufzai, a school teacher from Swat, when I asked him if he feared for his life when he chose to continue instructing both boys and girls after the Taliban issued death threats against him. ‘Islam tells us that getting an education is compulsory for every girl, wife, for every woman and man. This is the teaching of the holy Prophet. I own Islam as much as it is owned by the Taliban. Why I should I be dictated [to] by the Taliban, why should I follow the Taliban model of Islam? The Holy Koran is my book as well. I have a right to act on it. Allah hasn’t said to me that I must follow the Taliban type of Islam. So that is why it’s very clear and Islam allows me, Islam rather motivates me to give education to my children because education is light and ignorance is darkness. And we must go from darkness into light.’

At an August meeting of high-level diplomats and international agency officials in Islamabad Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari spoke of the need to determine the ‘how and why’ of the Taliban’s encroachment into Malakand. But the real question is whether authorities will manage to confront the Army’s historical support for militancy, or whether the generals themselves have the ability to break links that, after 30 years of patronage, have firmed into strong personal and institutional bonds.

‘I don’t think this is the Taliban [fighting Pakistan forces in Swat],’ a young Army officer tells me in Rawalpindi. He says that colleagues who served as military advisers to Mullah Omar’s Taliban government in Afghanistan before September 2001 praised the Islamists for their austere and honest lifestyles. ‘They [the Taliban] couldn’t be behind the attacks.’

Yet the region remains home to many young men who either fight or have fought with the Taliban and other jihadi organisations in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Some, like 25-year-old Farooq (not his real name) refuse to take part in the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan. ‘This is my country, I have fought for it [in Kashmir], I won’t murder my own people,’ he says. Now a member of the Tableeghi Jamaat, a Muslim preaching movement that while ostensibly non-violent maintains close links with militant organisations, he has married and turned to a simple life of prayer, meditation and working the family farm. ‘I became ill while fighting [in Kashmir]. After my platoon was martyred by the Indians I managed to escape,’ he recalls. ‘My parents were in total shock when I returned. I hadn’t seen them for months… After that, they forbade me from returning to the jihad.’

This is a reflection of the Army and government’s speedy reconstruction of infrastructure such as roads and electricity grids that were heavily damaged during the past two years of fighting. ‘The military has done a wonderful job this time,’ remarks Suhail from Mingora, the largest city in Swat. ‘I’m sure [the Army] will be able to clear the rest of Swat as they did in Mingora.

Government authorities have been quick to repair roads, electricity grids and other civil infrastructure, even in places that were raging fronts in this brutal conflict only days earlier. The risks of continued violence are also high, but over 100,000 families have already returned and many of those interviewed were upbeat about the future.

‘When I was living in Mardan as IDP, I was so frustrated that I could never imagine my beautiful valley would return to normal,’ says university graduate Abdullah, who recently returned to his town of Saidu Sharif. ‘I can hear the music coming through the waves of the cool breeze of Swat valley at home. Everything seems to be fine…[there is] no food shortage, [and] markets have reopened, roads are safe again too. We feel secure now.’

Our house and shop both are safe, and we are really happy returning home after several months in the IDP camps.’

‘We’ll never forget what happened to us,’ he adds, ‘but we are really happy that the Taliban have been punished.’

His is a sentiment shared by many here. ‘Listening to the morning assembly of kids in the just opened schools is amazing. I’m really feeling excited…we are regaining our paradise,’ a gleeful Mohammad Rome from the town of Spalbandai exclaims, remembering times, under Taliban rule, when many schools were destroyed and coeducation and girls schools were strictly forbidden.

Citizens have even started thronging to their District Police Department hoping to be recruited as community police officers, something that was unthinkable even last April when the Taliban would warn policemen against going to work on pain of death.

‘Fear of Taliban is diminishing with each passing day,’ says community elder Hazer Gul from Salampur.

But returning the Swat valley to its former pristine self is a massive task that will take years of planning and funding. While the Pakistan Government has already paid Rs25,000 ($US300) each to 125,000 displaced families, the United States a further $US415 million in humanitarian aid for the displaced, and Britain $US36 million, the United Nations estimates that the cost of completely rehabilitating these former war zones will cost billions.

On paper, total aid pledged to Pakistan thus far appears impressive. Pakistan has secured over $US5 billion in pledges from the Friends of Democratic Pakistan group that includes the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and the United Nations, as well as $US7.5 billion over the next five years from the United States and a further $US11.7 billion from the International Monetary Fund. But Pakistan government bureaucrats familiar with the aid packages privately express doubts that all of the pledges will be met, and there is scepticism about Pakistan’s capacity to administer the necessary funding and services.

Ordinary village and townsfolk also remain wary of Pakistan’s formal democratic process. Wealthy and influential locals, including politicians, quickly fled once the fighting erupted, leaving them exposed to the Taliban’s excesses. They remain fearful of returning to their communities even now that the Army appears to have vanquished the Taliban.

And the threat of a return to violence is ever present. Although the army has physically reclaimed most of the Swat valley and either killed or captured senior insurgent leaders, many remain at large while huge pockets of remote mountainous terrain make a possible future return a real threat. There is also sporadic terrorism, like the suicide bombing of an army convoy in a busy market place in early October that claimed 27 lives.

According to residents throughout Malakand, including the Buner district, which remains the closest the Taliban has ever come to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, and Dir on the cusp of the Afghan border, the Taliban have recommenced their clandestine radio broadcasts after a two-month hiatus, and started to distribute propaganda audio and video tapes recording their claimed victories against the Pakistan Army and international forces in Afghanistan. Adding to the drama is the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Swat Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah. Although reportedly cornered by security forces in a remote mountain range in September there has been no word about his capture.

Yet despite this grim picture there are glimmers of hope. One positive development is the formation of Aman Tehreek, or Peace Movement, a grassroots network established by teachers, trading bodies and ordinary citizens with the express objective of seeking a peaceful and sustainable resolution to the current conflict. Peace groups have proliferated in several towns recently liberated in the tribal areas, often with the aim of brokering ceasefire agreements between security forces and local pro-Taliban fighters or to assist communities in the rehabilitation process. Like these other groups, Aman Tehreek’s immediate concern is trying to facilitate humanitarian assistance and rehabilitation for the war-torn communities of the North West Frontier Province. But what makes it unique is its longer-term objective of seeking to prevent future radicalisation. It hopes to achieve this by promoting education, development, and traditional Pashtun culture—like music, dance and poetry—long suppressed by militant Islamism.

‘There’s a social, moral and political breakdown of Pakistani society,’ said Raza Rabbani, a Pakistan Peoples Party senator in the federal parliament, at a recent Aman Tehreek gathering in Islamabad. Ziauddin Yousufzai, the local school teacher, is also a member and coordinator of Aman Tehreek. Education, he notes, is the key to preventing future extremism. He should know. Working at one of the last schools to defy Taliban edicts and teach girls in Swat, he has witnessed how low levels of literacy, poor employment prospects and the marginalisation of women have been wellsprings of opportunity for extremists.

Still, Aman Tehreek and other grassroots initiatives to rebuild local communities perhaps explain why people like Mohammad Yahya, something of an elder statesman and former mayor of a town in the Swat valley, can remain optimistic. ‘This is our homeland. It is like heaven to us.’

Source Url: http://www.the-diplomat.com/featnwft0908.aspx

As Pakistan’s new campaign in Waziristan gears up, Mustafa Qadri examines the cost of the war for the increasingly dislocated civilian population

There was a time not so long ago when the violence emanating from Pakistan had a mythical quality. In no region of this troubled country has the hyperbole of terrorism been so thoroughly lathered than South Waziristan, the tribal agency bordering Afghanistan where, since last weekend, Pakistan’s army has been waging a massive campaign against the Taliban’s most robust stronghold.

The army says Operation Rah-e-Nijat, which means Road out of Misery, will end the “scourge of terrorism” that has drawn international attention to Pakistan since the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. But many wonder whether the misery in the region will only deepen with this new campaign.

The inconvenient truths of this narrative make for sobering reading. A spate of terrorist attacks in Lahore, Islamabad and Peshawar have reminded us that while it is very difficult to protect every square inch of a country beset by an insurgency, it is next to impossible to do so in Pakistan, where disposable young men with explosives strapped to their chest are all too readily recruited.

Hitherto, the Army’s operations in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and the Swat valley have had devastating consequences for the ethnic Pakhtun communities who live here. Close to 4 million people have been displaced during this war. And although some 2 million are estimated to have returned to other theatres, particularly the Swat valley, where the fighting had drastically reduced, over 200,000 have already fled the current battles in South Waziristan. Given that Waziristan’s total population is no more than 700,000, that constitutes a massive dislocation.

Dislocation has not been the only trauma for civilians caught in the fighting. When the Taliban seeped into their towns and villages from 2001 onwards, they killed hundreds of tribal chiefs and spurned ancient traditions considered unislamic, like poetry and dance. When Pakistani forces indiscriminately bombed them too, often deliberately to punish them merely for belonging to the same clans or tribes as the insurgents, the peoples of these regions lost their lives and livelihoods too.

As the war has continued, Pakistan’s operations have become more sophisticated and, authorities claim, civilian casualties have been greatly reduced. Certainly, on the face of it, that appears to be the case with the present Waziristan war. The army, in combination with local paramilitaries known as the Frontier Corps and Waziri militias formerly aligned with the Pakistan Taliban Movement, invaded the restive region from three directions, hoping to ensnare insurgents in a multiple pincer movement.

But the war has been complicated by several factors. For starters, the Army has imposed a total media blackout. It has also prevented aid agencies from entering South Waziristan and limited their provision of humanitarian assistance to the displaced for fear the supplies will be smuggled back to Taliban forces. Whether this concern is valid or not, it has placed refugees in a dire situation.
Intermittent reports of civilian casualties occasioned by massive, indiscriminate Army bombardments have also trickled out of South Waziristan. Like Israel’s war in Gaza and Sri Lanka’s war against its Tamil population, there appears to be perceptible a gulf between the respect the Army claims for civilians and the ugly reality on the ground.

Another problem for Pakistan has been the bizarre decision by NATO forces in Afghanistan to pull away from several key check posts immediately over the porous border from Waziristan which were formerly manned by Western and Afghan National Army troops. Pakistan rightly protested the move only to be met with the glib response that the check posts were too exposed. It is a breathtaking double standard. No doubt that if the roles were reversed Pakistani forces would be condemned for deliberately undermining the war effort.

Just how the Waziristan war fits into the broader picture will take time to emerge. Already, however, there are some key signals. Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have cobbled together an alliance of convenience with Taliban warlords hitherto loyal to Pakistan Taliban chief Hakimullah Mahsud. Yet these same forces remain fiercely loyal to Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban. It appears Pakistan’s security establishment still sees the Taliban as a military asset, so long as its guns are pointed away from Pakistan.

Western planners may not be too shocked to learn this, at least not anymore. As much could be understood by Australian Defence Minister John Faulkner’s very public admission that the government is keen to withdraw its forces as soon as possible. Every other Western defence planner has expressed similar sentiments.

Former President George Bush gained notoriety with his absurd declaration a mere three months after the Invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that the war was over. There will come a time, mark my word, when our own leaders will utter such absurdities. So too will the leaders of Pakistan.

But even if the guns are silenced, and our current foes cease their attacks on the powerful, what will be left of the ordinary people of Afghanistan and Pakistan whose countries have been so devastated by a war they didn’t start?

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/10/23/misery-ending-or-just-beginning

]]> http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/is-the-misery-ending-or-just-beginning/feed/ 0 http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/the-war-to-end-pakistans-woes/ http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/the-war-to-end-pakistans-woes/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:07:58 +0000 mustafa http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/?p=574

In the Pakistani army’s offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan, the line between victims and villains remains unclear

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 16.30 BST

The Pakistan army’s invasion of the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan this week brings few surprises. For years observers in Washington and Brussels have been pressing for an assault on this scale. The army says its aims in Operation Rah-e-Nijat (“Road out of Misery”) are to finally eliminate the main sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan and, according to army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the foreign and local “elements” that given them succour.

The army has fought several wars in Waziristan over the past five years – only on each occasion to be given a bloody nose and compelled to sign ceasefires that emboldened the Pakistani Taliban.

Naturally, there is more to this situation than immediately meets the eye. For independent observers such as journalists and aid organisations, gaining an accurate picture of events on the ground is not easy. Like the armies of Israel and Sri Lanka earlier this year, the Pakistan army has prevented journalists and other independent observers from travelling into the affected areas. According to its public relations office, 78 militants and seven members of the security forces have been killed. In contrast, Taliban spokesperson Azam Tariq made the unlikely claim that only one of their fighters had been killed thus far.

The truth looks to be another victim of this latest battle, and sadly there are plenty of those. More than 200,000 have fled the fighting in scenes reminiscent of earlier army operations in the Swat valley and Bajaur tribal agency in the north. “The mass migration is causing big problems for the people [of towns immediately outside Waziristan like Tank and Dera Ismail Khan],” explains senior local aid consultant Dr Marwat. Given that the total population of South Waziristan is at most 700,000, this is a massive dislocation.

Since July last year much of South Waziristan has also been laid waste by daily ground and air bombardments by US and Pakistani forces. Already 12 civilians have been reportedly been killed while fleeing the war zone. Although the army claims to have gone to great lengths not to harm civilians, in the past there have been many reports of civilians being killed and subsequently described as terrorists. In Swat, it is believed that up to 90% of those killed were civilians. Whether they will perish in similar numbers in Waziristan remains unclear.

Less uncertain are the divisions among the insurgents. Rifts between the Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud and warlord allies of the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar have been exploited by Pakistan’s security agencies. An agreement was reached last Saturday under which members of the Ahmedzai clan (one of eight major clans of the Wazir tribe that dominates North and South Waziristan), under the control of warlords Haji Nazir and Gul Bahadur, will support army troops against forces loyal to Hakimullah, himself from the Mahsud clan. In return the army will limit its attacks on areas under their control.

The agreement, reached in secret and passed over by most major news outlets, has army commanders confident of speedy success in the Waziristan operation. It also suggests that Pakistan has not severed contact with Afghan Taliban forces. In truth, it has little other option at present and Washington’s protestations will count for little unless and until the army feels it has regained influence over this lawless frontier region.

Still the question remains, once the guns have been silenced will Pakistan take steps to cleanse the tribal areas of the extremist poison? Perhaps such questions are premature. The battle still rages and Waziristan is an insurgent’s dream. Being remote and with its dense foliage, craggy mountains and limited infrastructure, it has proved an ideal stronghold for local Taliban.

“The terrain is much more difficult than [that Pakistan forces encountered] in Swat,” says Mansur Mahsud of the Fata Research Centre, who is himself from South Waziristan. Unlike Swat, which was part of Pakistan proper and close to major cities, Mansur adds, Waziristan is surrounded by other hostile tribal areas and there is much local support for warlords such as Hakimullah who hail from this region. The Pakistan Taliban movement was born here in 2007, although even before then jihadi groups throughout the tribal areas and North West Frontier Province invoked the Taliban label in their battle against the Pakistan state.

That the Waziristans sit immediately on the porous border with Afghanistan makes them a perfect launching pad for Taliban forces into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Along with remote Balochistan, the Waziristans are the least integrated parts of Pakistan and tribalism and terrorism have proven excellent foils for populations mired in poverty and deprivation. It is important to remember that as the rush to celebrate the liquidation of hitherto mysterious Taliban commanders ensues.

You cannot help wondering, though, if all of this is a giant “drama” – as one American businessman with investments in the oil fields of the tribal areas told me recently. Local and foreign observers wonder why the army is not invading Bahawalpur or Dera Ghazi Khan in the heart of the Punjab, where young men are daily recruited into the jihad.

Most ominous of all is the spectre of increased attacks in Pakistan’s major urban centres. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak, and the Taliban know of only one way to respond: through high-profile violence that will claim many innocent lives. As the Taliban loses its grip on the ideological and political framework of the Islamist insurgency in Pakistan, however, new outfits, particularly those drawn upon sectarian lines, can be expected to fill the breach. The attack on army headquarters by the anti-Shia Jaish Mohammad last week may be a signal of this disturbing trend.

Once again these are sobering times for Pakistan. In few countries can the line between victims and villains be so unclear.

[Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/20/pakistan-army-offensive-taliban-waziristan]

Investigative journalism can be a dangerous profession because, by its very nature, it seeks to uncover the lies and scandals that someone, somewhere, is trying to suppress. As work descriptions go, few civilians face as many life-threatening situations as those who aid foreign investigative reporters in conflict zones.

Generally known in the profession as “fixers” — but very often respected local journalists in their own right — these brave reporters are asked to arrange anything and everything required by a foreign media outlet: from interviews with hostile governments and militants in hiding, to transportation and accommodation. They risk their lives not only by working in dangerous situations but by virtue of fact that, being citizens of developing nations, the western media outlets that employ them generally place little value on their lives.

There was no more stark reminder of the dangers of the job than the recent murder of Afghan journalist Sultan Munadi as British forces sought to rescue the New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell, whom Munadi was working for. Both had a week earlier been kidnapped by the Taliban in a remote part of the northern province of Kunduz while investigating a NATO bombing that reportedly killed scores of civilians. To its credit, the New York Times gave some coverage to Munadi’s work while he was alive, and another NYT reporter, the American David Rohde, who had himself escaped Taliban captivity, wrote him a stirring obituary.

Yet NATO officials initially ignored Munadi’s death, only releasing a statement acknowledging his passing after many of his Afghan colleagues accused British forces of murdering him. Munadi’s death has caused a stir in Afghanistan, affirming the sentiment held by many that foreign forces place little value on Afghan lives.

Unfortunately, Munadi is but one example of the pitfalls for fixers in conflict zones. The Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan routinely kill fixers employed by local and international media to report from areas controlled by insurgents. It is not unusual for them to murder local journalists accompanying foreign reporters. Unlike foreign reporters, who are usually kept alive as valued bargaining chips, their local counterparts are considered traitors and of little value.

That is certainly the case for several of the journalists I’ve met who work in the Pashtun tribal frontier of Pakistan’s north west, where the Taliban are most active. “I [do some] work for Voice of America,” one veteran reporter, who cannot be named because it would endanger their life to do so, told me in the safety of a hotel room in Islamabad. “Even now, I do not tell [the Taliban he interviews] that. It would mean certain death.”

The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists adds that, as of July this year, 45 journalists had been killed since 2001, the year when the current conflict first started.

Sometimes governments also kill journalists for reporting on wars they’d rather people forget. A particularly harrowing example of this was the murder of Musa Khankhel, a journalist from Pakistan’s Swat valley who mysteriously disappeared while covering what was meant to be a peace rally in February. The rally had been organised by an ultra-conservative religious movement after it brokered a peace agreement between the Taliban and Pakistan authorities. Khankhel’s corpse, with hands and feet bound, was discovered the following day riddled with gunshot wounds to the body and head. Although no conclusive investigations have ever been held into the murder, it is widely believed that state intelligence agents murdered Khankhel because they believed the young journalist, who was noted for his fearless and independent reporting, would expose the reality that the peace agreement was actually aiding the Taliban’s advance into the region. Khankhel had previously survived two assassination attempts by what he had claimed were state security forces.

In occupied Palestine, local journalists are routinely imprisoned or abused by Israeli and Palestinian security forces who act in full knowledge that they lack a foreign passport or, more specifically, the protections of a powerful government that will stand up for their rights. When working in occupied Palestine last year, for example, I met a young Associated Press photojournalist in the West Bank city of Nablus who’d had his nose broken by Israeli soldiers on at least four separate occasions. Hundreds of Iranian journalists have been arrested following the disputed presidential elections held last June. Some, like the Iranian-American Roxana Saberi were lucky enough to be released. But most local journalists don’t have the luxury of dual citizenship and continue to languish in prison.

For other fixers, the risks are derived solely from being in the wrong place at the wrong time — and having the wrong skin colour. Abdul Aziz, a journalist reporting from Pakistan’s Swat valley, was killed after jets pounded a remote Taliban compound where he had been imprisoned by insurgents. “Journalists are the targets of violence and intimidation by all the belligerents in the Swat valley and the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” noted Reporters Without Borders. “We point out that, under the Geneva Conventions, combatants are obliged to protect civilians including journalists.”

Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al Hajj was kidnapped by pro-US forces in Afghanistan in 2001 and spent the next six years in Guantanamo Bay where he was brutally tortured but never charged. His ordeal, vividly recorded on the Prisoner 345 website, gruesomely reminds us that powerful, developed nations can be as dangerous for journalists as any other.

Yet the power dynamic when foreign journalists employ local fixers is hugely unbalanced. In the most dangerous environments you become totally reliant on the fixer for everything because, after all, it is his or her country, language, and contacts that make the story. The credit, unfortunately, is all too regularly attributed to foreign journalists with their money and connections to big media. Although more senior fixers can command around $US500 a day for their services, most make a fraction of this. Added to that, foreign journalists have the freedom to leave whenever they feel like — often leading to what some veteran correspondents call “parachute journalism”.

But many fixers — journalists whose home lands happen to be war zones or whose nationality means they do not garner the same protection or recognition as their Western counterparts — remain unfazed by the risks of their profession. One such journalist who spoke to New Matilda and who routinely ventures into Taliban-controlled areas to get first-hand accounts from the insurgents in the knowledge that the militants, or the state’s security agents, may kill them if their reports are considered to be too critical.

It is these brave and usually nameless reporters we must thank for shining light on the crimes the powerful would much prefer we ignored.

More information on how you can support journalists at risk is available at Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/10/02/names-news-forgets

Last Updated: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:24:00 +1000

People in a Pakistani frontier region threatened by the Taliban are trying to preserve a culture rich in poetry and dance from religious extremism.

The culture of the ethnic Pashtun peoples often delights in worldly pleasures – like sex and alcohol – considered un-Islamic by religious conservatives.

In the Badaber district of North-West Frontier province, the poems of the great Pashto literary figure, Ghani Khan, are still recited.

Khan celebrated such pleasures as “my beloved, my youth, and a cup of wine”.

Promises

He also offers a more immediate answer to any preaching about rewards in paradise:

Give the promises of eternal bliss to the Mullah after my death;
Could dreams of nymphs in the afterlife ever satisfy the poor?
Give me here just one nymph, smart, exalted and mesmerizing;
O God, if you do not do this, then keep your heavenly bounties;
I need them neither here nor in the afterlife.

The Taliban and other militant groups that champion a strict interpretation of Islam challenge such poetry.

Elsewhere in Pakistan, in the Swat valley before its recapture by the Pakistani army, the Taliban murdered several dancers and soothsayers they deemed immoral.

In Badaber, members of an anti-Taliban lashkar, or army, defend the vitally strategic tribal region, where the Taliban and government security forces wrestle for control.

Fazal Maula, who works for a non-government aid organisation there, told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia that Badaber, surrounded by tribal areas and with Peshawar province also on one side, is “the gateway into Peshawar”.

“Hardly six to seven kilometre area, in other words, protect the whole Peshawar from militancy and terrorism,” he says.

Ghani Khan (1914-1996) was the eldest son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as the Frontier Gandhi, who led the Pathans of today’s Pakistani North-West Frontier against British colonialism.

Outdates

His poetry echoes a style of verse that outdates the Taliban by about a century.

It paints a very different picture of the Pashtun peoples, who have more recently become associated with extremism.

But local communities are forming networks across religious, gender and political lines to preserve their culture and protect their society.

Fazal Maula says: “The people of Badaber area constituted different committees on the grassroots level to become united and to face this terrorism in the area.

“In this mobilisation process, mullah were also involved.”

But with many decades of radicalisation to contend with, it will take some time for the great poets to be heard in full again.

http://australianetworknews.com/stories/200908/2664856.htm

· Mustafa Qadri

· guardian.co.uk, Saturday 25 July 2009 16.00 BST

There has been much soul-searching in Pakistan of late, and with good reason. Although the Army claims to have largely pushed the Taliban out of the Swat Valley, the most developed part of the country yet infiltrated by the insurgents, the war continues in all of its brutality and uncertainty.

Even in Swat it is unclear whether the Taliban are really vanquished. The government may have told the millions made homeless by this conflict that it is safe to return, but the army’s inability to eliminate key Swat Taliban leaders and the existence of huge pockets of remote mountainous terrain incapable of ever being properly secured make the possibility of a Taliban return a real threat.

According to residents in the region – from Buner some 60 miles from the national capital Islamabad to Dir on the cusp of the Afghan border – the Taliban have recommenced their now infamous radio broadcasts, after a two month hiatus, and distribute audio and video recordings demonstrating their grisly prowess.

As the violence persists, many are wondering what precisely the ultimate measure of success is. Is the aim to reconquer territory ostensibly controlled by the Taliban? Even at the worst of times the insurgents ruled discreetly, as guerrilla armies generally do, often with strong support from village communities resentful over decades of state marginalisation. And what about the Taliban’s roots: are the mainstream religious political parties that nurtured them ideologically and the army that developed Islamic militancy in the first place going to be called to account?

Those are some of the questions being posed by the Swat Valley’s Aman Tehreek, or the Peace Movement, established by Aryana Institute of Regional Research and Advocacy, teachers, community organisations and concerned citizens with the express objective of seeking a peaceful and sustainable resolution to the current conflict.

“There is a social, moral and political breakdown in Pakistani society,” said Raza Rabbani, a Pakistan Peoples party senator in the federal parliament, at a recent Aman Tehreek gathering in Islamabad.

Aman Tehreek is but one of several grassroots attempts to foster peace in Pakistan and especially the troubled North West Frontier province (NWFP). Peace committees have sprung up in several towns, typically to broker ceasefire agreements between the army and local Taliban insurgents.

In contrast, Aman Tehreek takes a broader view of the conflict. Its immediate concern is trying to facilitate humanitarian assistance and rehabilitation for the war-torn communities of NWFP. A longer-term objective is to promote traditional Pakhtun culture – like music, dance and poetry suppressed after years of militant Islamism often under state sponsorship, education and development to reduce the chances of future radicalisation.

This war has certainly seen its fair share of violence – the Taliban often mutilate the corpses of soldiers and those, like dancers and music shop owners, it considers apostates. The army, for its part, has been guilty of killing many hundreds if not thousands of civilian deaths (precise figures will never be known) owing to its use of overwhelming, sometimes indiscriminate force.

“In all of our Pashtun history, we never saw such barbarism,” says Abdur Raheem Mundokhel from the Pakhtoonkhwa Milli Awami party. “We have a history [of] people being killed in blood feuds, but still they would give honour even to their enemies.”

The army has been in the sights of Aman Tehreek for its role in the radicalisation and militarisation of Pakistan’s Pashtuns communities, and its recent decision to open garrisons in newly liberated parts of Swat and Buner, a move it sees as a stop-gap attempt to consolidate the military’s clout at the expense of more sustainable strategies for long-term peace.

Aman Tehreek also criticises the security authorities for arresting tribal Pashtuns not linked to the militancy simply because they belong to clans associated with the Taliban.

Education, according to Aman Tehreek member and teacher Ziauddin Yusufzai, is the key to preventing future extremism. He should know. A teacher at one of the last schools to defy Taliban edicts and teach girls in Swat, he notes low levels of literacy, poor employment prospects and marginalisation of women have been wellsprings of opportunity for extremists.

There are fears of internecine tribal feuds turning bloody in the aftermath of Taliban rule: civilians favoured by the insurgents or whose relatives joined the Taliban are fearful of reprisals from those who suffered during the conflict.

Underlying this is the social and economic divide between the mass of poor and the wealthy. In every conflict region, wealthy and influential feudal families and parliamentarians quickly fled leaving ordinary townsfolk exposed to the Taliban’s worst excesses. Yet even now after the army seems to have vanquished the Taliban, the elite remain fearful of returning to their communities. As a result, resentments fester and this, along with a lingering power vacuum, makes a Taliban return an ever-present threat. Recognising this, Aman Tehreek has called on parliamentarians from the newly liberated regions to accompany their communities back to their homes.

Most of them now lie in ruins. Hundreds of schools and hospitals have been destroyed by Taliban or army bombardment. Government authorities have scrambled to repair roads, electricity grids and other civil infrastructure, but it is a massive task that will take years of planning and funding. The UN estimates that the cost of totally rehabilitating these former war zones will be in the billions. The Pakistan government says it has already paid Rs25,000 (£180) each to 125,000 displaced families while the US has pledged a further $US165m in humanitarian aid for the displaced on top of $249m provided between May and June. The British government has given £22m.

The financial assistance is vital to redevelop this devastated land. Just as important, however, are efforts like those of Aman Tehreek in rebuilding the shattered cultural life of Pakistan’s displaced.

[Originally published at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/25/pakistan-taliban-frontier]

The following report was broadcast on Radio National Australia’s Connect Asia news and current affairs programme:

A snapshot of life in Pakistan’s refugees camps

Updated July 16, 2009 11:48:55

Although the fighting in Pakistan’s Swat valley has ended and some refugees have started to head home, many remain wary of returning.

An estimated 2 million fled the conflict between Pakistani troops and the Taliban, and some ended up at a displaced person camp two hours north of the capital Islamabad.

Presenter: Mustafa Qadri
Speakers: Purmanari, displaced person; Mohammad Yahya, a former town mayor; Ziauddin Yousufzai, School teacher; Mannu, school student

• Listen:
• Windows Media

(Sound of camp)

QADRI: At a camp in Risalpur, 80 kilometres south of the fiercest fighting, displaced people live rudimentary lives in cramp dwellings without running water or electricity.

This is Mohammad Yahya, a former mayor whose town was engulfed by the conflict.

YAHYA (translated): We travelled by foot from Mingora to Kokkari, then we went to Sangar, some 14 to 15 kilometres.

QADRI: Entire communities fled through high mountainous terrain. Almost all were forced to travel on foot because public transport was either too dangerous or expensive.

Mohammad Yahya explains.

YAHYA (translated): “One night mortar shells exploded in our village. Everyone was so frightened they decided to flee their homes. The Army fires its mortars without warning.”

QADRI: But being made homeless is only one of the effects of this war. Purmanari is a father of three.

PURMANARI (translated): I had a small rubber factory in Mingora … This battle for Islam and the state being waged by the Army and the Taliban has made us homeless.

QADRI: The Taliban transformed the scenic Swat valley into a fortress. It was only recaptured after devastating Army bombardments that, locals and unofficial Army sources say, killed more civilians than militants.

Purmanari again.

PURMANARI (translated): We had everything, flowers, forests, factories… But everything has been devastated – our businesses, our communities… we have had to leave everything because of the Taliban and the Army. Both have destroyed everything.

QADRI: The displaced also harbour deep resentment towards the Taliban for claiming to wage war for Islam.

PURMANARI (translated): These Taliban people say they fight for the rule of Islam. They say there is no Islam in Swat. But what, are we not Muslim? That is why the Taliban spread propaganda saying there is no Islam here… so they can say we are bringing Islam.

QADRI: One of the ramifications of Taliban rule was that girls were banned from attending school. But many bravely defied these bans.

School teacher Ziauddin Yousufzai explains:

YOUSUFZAI: Islam teaches us that getting an education is compulsory for every girl, wife, for every woman and man. This is the teaching of the holy Prophet. I own Islam as much as it is owned by the Taliban. Why I should I be dictated [to] by the Taliban, why should I follow the Taliban model of Islam? The Holy Koran is my book as well. I have a right to act on it. I have not been told by Allah that you will follow the Taliban type of Islam. So that is why it’s very clear and Islam allows me, Islam rather motivates me to give education to my children because education is a light and ignorance is a darkness. And we must go from darkness into light.”

QADRI: The darkness seems to have engulfed Swat and, indeed, most of Pakistan’s ethnic Pakhtun tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

One means through which people have tried to deal with the trauma of dislocation and war has been poetry. Here is Mannu, a young school student I met in the camps.

(singing)

QADRI: “My sweet Swat has caught on fire,” she sings “In every direction there is war. The people who laughed, who sang, are now silent. I pray to you God, bring back the paradise, the peaceful Swat I remember.”

Hers is a sentiment echoed by many of those displaced. Former town mayor Mohammad Yahya again.

YAHYA (translated): “We’d go back today if you could but right there is no point. But, God willing, we will return. It is our homeland. It is like heaven to us.”

]]> http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/a-snapshot-of-life-in-pakistans-refugee-camps/feed/ 0 http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/public-unites-against-taliban-in-pakistan/ http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/public-unites-against-taliban-in-pakistan/#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:37:39 +0000 mustafa http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/?p=542

Public Unites Against Taliban in Pakistan

Mustafa Qadri | 16 Jul 2009

KARACHI, Pakistan — There has been a perceptible shift in the battle against militancy in Pakistan. The massive army operations that recently concluded in the Swat valley, the largest ever conducted by Pakistan against the Taliban, are but one facet of it. For the first time, the government is also winning the propaganda war.

Ordinary citizens and political parties from across the spectrum — including religious ones — have rallied around the army. At a series of government-organized religious conferences in May, scholars denounced the Taliban as a perversion of Islamic teachings.

While stopping short of apologizing for their role in stoking the Taliban in the past, mainstream religious parties have had to tailor their rhetoric to reflect the change in popular sentiment. Where once parties like Jamaat-e-Islami would all but openly support the Taliban, they have now been forced to denounce the current spate of suicide bombings and other insurgent attacks against the army, government institutions and ordinary citizens as the work of “enemies of Pakistan” and Islam.

As part of its effort to rally its troops and the public, the Pakistan army has even set up a YouTube channel juxtaposing pop music with images of its soldiers engaged in operations against the Taliban. The nation’s satellite television channels are also broadcasting music videos decrying the spiraling violence.

Other efforts to shape public opinion include “Yeh hum naheen (This Is Not Us),” a movement set up by a number of Pakistani pop stars to combat terrorism and extremist interpretations of Islam, such as those preached by the Taliban and other groups.

It hasn’t always been this way.

Ever since the Taliban launched its insurgency against the Pakistan state in 2003, the population has oscillated between outright denial of its existence and resentment towards army operations seen as pitting countrymen against countrymen for the sake of foreign powers — especially the United States. Many have questioned whether it is really the Taliban that is committing atrocities in Pakistan, like the massive suicide bombing of the Marriot Hotel in September last year, or the destruction of hundreds of girls schools in the former resort area of Swat.

Given the high-stakes great-power politics of this region — Pakistan is a vital crossroads between Central and South Asia and the Middle East — conspiracy theories in the country abound. Yet ordinary Pakistanis remain largely ignorant of the extent to which their own army has for decades supported the Taliban and other militant groups, an issue that remains the “great white elephant” of Pakistani politics. That ignorance has led many to suspect an Indian, American or even Israeli hand in the almost-daily insurgent attacks mounted across the country — and especially in the North West Frontier Province that sits along Pakistan’s largely unguarded border with Afghanistan.

Yet even that ignorance has slowly started to be challenged. There has been no more dramatic example of this than President Asif Ali Zardari’s admission last week that militancy had been “created and nurtured” by the state with the help of the international community in the 1980s.

For years, there have been a minority of commentators and citizens, especially among the liberal educated elite, that have warned of the threats posed to Pakistan by extremism. Their voices have in recent months been joined by the broader community and politicians. What has caused this significant shift in perceptions? The answer lies in the Taliban itself.

There was country-wide support for the government when, in February, it announced a peace deal with the Taliban in the Swat valley, via a local cleric sympathetic to the movement. But when the Taliban continued its violent insurgency in neighboring districts like Buner and Bajaur, and when its spokesmen publicly justified the violent execution of those, like policemen and dancers, considered enemies of Islam, the public began to wake up to the threat.

There has been widespread outrage over Taliban attacks on fellow Muslims, such as the frequent bombing of mosques that have killed hundreds in the last three years alone. When a video of Taliban members flogging a young woman for allegedly eloping with a man went viral, ordinary Pakistanis were shocked into the realization that the Taliban did not reflect their experience of Islam.

Of course, even with the welcome shift in opinion, the situation remains dire in Pakistan.

The conflict has been a humanitarian disaster for the now 3.5 million Pakistanis displaced since last August, when the army commenced its latest major offensives. From close to the border with Afghanistan at Peshawar to the foothills above Islamabad, in Mardan and Swabi, a sea of human grief has been streaming down since the army started a massive, often indiscriminate bombing campaign on May 8.

The U.N. believes the mass exodus of civilians is the greatest since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and possibly even since the bloody partition of the subcontinent in August 1947. Few preparations were undertaken before the army started firing its mortars, although relief efforts from the government and the private sector have now begun in earnest. Welfare and political organizations, both secular and religious, have been involved in the massive relief effort, while appeals for donations have proliferated on shop windows and on television.

Those crammed into the squalid conditions of the displaced persons camps of the North West Frontier Province all speak of the need for relief and support from the government. A coherent policy is needed to provide humanitarian, economic and social rehabilitation to the displaced. Otherwise, as with previous army excursions into Taliban strongholds over the past four years, militancy will return, fueled by the unmet grievances of frustrated civilians. Without a coherent strategy, even the current wellspring of popular support will dry up.

Mustafa Qadri is Middle East and South Asia correspondent for The Diplomat and newmatilda.com. He also writes a weekly column on Pakistan for The Guardian newspaper’s Web site.

[Originally published at: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=4082]

Displaced Pakistanis speak out

by Mustafa Qadri

16 July 2009

Karachi, Pakistan – Pakistan is in the middle of its largest operation against the Taliban in the troubled Swat Valley and adjacent areas.

Although a small first wave of refugees has begun to return as part of the government’s efforts, up to 2.5 million people are believed to have fled the once quiet, scenic mountain ranges. At a camp in Risalpur, 50 miles south of some of the fiercest battle zones, I spoke with some of the displaced.

“We travelled by foot from Mingora to Kokkari, then we went to Sangar… some nine miles, [before taking a bus to Risalpur]“, says Mohammad Yahya, former mayor of a village near Mingora.

Entire communities, including women, children and the elderly, made the journey through high mountainous terrain. Almost all were forced to travel on foot because public transport was either too dangerous or expensive.

The displaced communities live a rudimentary life typically huddled together in cramped dwellings or tents without running water or electricity. Mountain dwellers their entire lives, they are not used to the extreme summer heat of the lower lying districts of Mardan and Risalpur, nor of Peshawar, some 55 miles south, where most have sought refuge. Diarrhoea and water borne diseases, exacerbated by the heat, are very common, particularly among the youngest.

“One night there was a series of explosions on the outskirts of the village”, says 11-year-old student Mannu, whom I met in one of the bare dwellings of Risalpur’s industrial area, donated to the displaced by local businessmen. Mannu’s entire village, around 13 families, approximately 200 people, decided to flee their homes the morning following the blasts.

But homelessness is only one of the impacts of this war. Swat is famous for its rich array of fruit and other cash crops. Because the conflict started at the height of the harvesting period last May, the largely agrarian population has lost much of its earnings for the year.

Mingora, the largest city in Swat and one of the epicentres of the clashes between the Taliban and army, was transformed into a fortress by the insurgents. It was only recaptured after devastating military bombardment that, according to locals and unofficial army sources, killed overwhelmingly more civilians than militants.

However, when asked who bears the responsibility for these crises, it appears that the displaced harbour deep resentment towards the Taliban for their role in annihilating their once peaceful neighbourhoods.

“These Taliban say they fight for the rule of Islam”, says Purmanari. “They say there is no Islam in Swat. But what, are we not Muslim?”

“The Taliban say they want shari’a (a legal system based on Islamic principles), but what kind of shari’a is this – killing and looting? It is just a game to them”, says Mannu.

Mannu dared to seek an education in a region of Swat where the Taliban openly forbade women from doing so. “I’m not afraid of going to school”, she says defiantly when asked about her studies. Risking physical harm as the Taliban destroyed over 200 schools, Mannu continued to attend one of the few schools that remained open before she eventually fled with her family.

“We are not afraid because we are doing the right thing”, says Ziauddin Yousufzai, a school teacher. “The people who are preventing our female students from getting an education, they should be afraid. Islam teaches us that getting an education is compulsory for everyone. This is the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad. I own Islam as much as it is owned by the Taliban. Why should I be dictated to by the Taliban? Islam instead motivates me to give education to my children because education is light and ignorance is darkness.”

The darkness seems to have engulfed Swat. Yet the displaced are using poetry, such as these words from Mannu, to brighten their plight:

“My sweet Swat has caught fire, not just from one side but from everywhere./ The fire has engulfed everything – our people, our customs, our schools, our markets./ My beautiful Swat, with its valleys and peaks, its perfumed flowers, all have lost their lustre./ In every direction there is war. The people, who laughed, who sang, are now silent./ The once majestic and peaceful River Swat has dried up./ I pray to you God, bring back the paradise, the peaceful Swat I remember.”

###

* Mustafa Qadri (mustafaqadri.net) is the Middle East and South Asia correspondent for The Diplomat magazine and newmatilda.com. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 14 July 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.

[First published at: http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=25880&lan=en&sid=1&sp=0&isNew=1]