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.

Mustafa Qadri,
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 March 2011 20:00 GMT

Despite repeated climbdowns by the Pakistan government to appease extremists over the blasphemy laws, the minorities minister’s assassination proves there is no room for compromise. It is time for Pakistan authorities to bring perpetrators of violence to justice.

The federal government was quick to respond to the murder of Shahbaz Bhatti with much stronger criticism of extremism than that which followed Salmaan Taseer’s murder on January 4. President Asif Zardari condemned the “heinous act” and vowed that the government would continue to “stand firm” against extremists. But the Pakistan government has been on the back foot for the past few months: it has largely retreated from any talk of addressing the widely recognised problems with the blasphemy laws; it has failed to “stand firm” against violence from radical groups, and it has, by and large, failed to protect and promote the rule of law.

Sadly, Pakistan’s most powerful institution, the army, remains silent on this issue as it did following Taseer’s assassination, even though it has issued statements on other matters of national interest in the past. The country’s largest opposition political party, the Pakistan Muslim League, has also stayed quiet.

A Pakistan Taliban spokesperson who later claimed responsibility for the murder was not so shy, nor was a note apparently left by the killers alongside Bhatti’s body. Both stated that he was being killed for criticising Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

The most ominous aspect of the Bhatti murder is that he himself was so clearly aware of the risks, but still did not receive sufficient protection. Bhatti, the Catholic son of a former army soldier and schoolteacher, had continued to receive death threats this year.According to one report a month ago, Bhatti’s security detail was far smaller than that accorded to other federal cabinet ministers despite the threats that arguably made him the most targeted government politician after the president and prime minister.

“I met him only last week and he was terrified for his safety,” says Asma Jahangir, former chair of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and currently president of the Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association. “In fact, he told me to be more careful and not to travel without security.”

The media’s coverage of the murder has been relatively subdued. One channel with links to radical religious groups claimed Bhatti’s murder was an inside job aimed at deflecting attention away from the trial of American intelligence contractor Raymond Davis . Others have ignored the note left by Bhatti’s killers claiming to be acting for Al al-Qaeida in the Punjab and Fidayeen-e-Muhammad, a militant group linked to the Pakistan Taliban. Most of the coverage has focused on Bhatti’s minimal security.

The solution to this malaise is not greater security, although it is vital that people against whom violence is threatened are provided with adequate protection. Neither is burying our collective heads in the toxic sands of conspiracy. At its heart the Bhatti murder, like that of Taseer, is about the abdication of government responsibility in the face of mob and political violence crudely justified as defence of Islam.

Amnesty International has called on the Pakistan government to bring Bhatti’s killers to justice. Such crimes, and a flood of incitements to violence against those calling for honest reform of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, thrive in the atmosphere of impunity and irresponsibility fostered by the government’s failure to uphold its human rights obligations.

It is a sentiment shared across Pakistan’s civil society.

“The government must take up this task wholeheartedly,” Jahanghir adds, “but I fear it hasn’t got the strength to do that.”

That may be so, but despite the sobering situation there have been signals of an emerging realisation that perpetrators of violence must be held accountable. A group of parliamentarians has issued a resolution condemning the murder of Taseer and promoting the principles of equality, tolerance, pluralism and democracy in Pakistan. Although it did not expressly criticise the blasphemy laws, the resolution mentioned the vital point that authorities must put a stop to the violence justified in the name of religion, which erodes the rule of law and sets the stage for further abuses.

Based on the immediate reaction of Pakistan’s media, particularly its highly influential private television stations, Bhatti’s assassination did not make a major impression on the Pakistani public. That may change in the next few days. But for the Pakistan government, it sure must set off tremendous alarm bells. Now is the time for the government, with the public backing of the army, to take bold steps to defend human rights and the rule of law.

[This article first appeared in The Guardian on March 2, 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/02/shahbaz-bahtti-pakistan-violence.]

Mustafa Qadri,
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 February 2011 18:43 GMT

The murder of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer by his own guardhas prompted an ever growing witch-hunt, driven by religious groups but controlled by no one. The threat of this uncontested vigilantism posing as Islamic empowerment should be taken as seriously as the Taliban.

There was a moment last weekend that juxtaposed beautifully with the latest crisis faced by Pakistan. As hundreds of thousands – Islamists and Marxists, centrists and otherwise apolitical working men and women – marched for democratic regime change in Egypt, 40,000 mostly men marched in Pakistan’s heartland city of Lahore to protest against changes to the country’s controversial blasphemy law regime. Protesters in Lahore threatened to cause greater anarchy if the blasphemy laws were changed – threats reminiscent of the Pakistan Taliban.

It is important to note that, as an instrument for protecting the honour of Islam, Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have been an abject failure. As rights groups point out, the laws are vaguely defined and do not require accusers to prove criminal intent. Police rarely investigate before arresting alleged blasphemers. Taseer’s murderer may say he killed him for committing blasphemy, but there is no evidence he ever did anything of the sort. Taseer’s only crime was to highlight the severe failings of the blasphemy laws, a point lost on many who endorsed his murder.

“If a campaign were to be carried out on all the electronic media explaining exactly what the blasphemy laws are, the fact that vigilantes have murdered other people due to political, economic or other rivalries and motives, people would not favour it,” says veteran journalist and human rights campaigner Beena Sarwar.

Since the current laws made defiling the Qur’an and defaming the prophet crimes punishable respectively by life imprisonment and death in 1986, anywhere between 300 and 3,000 people have been accused of blasphemy. Of these, roughly 50% belong to religious minorities, a group that constitutes only 3% of Pakistan’s 180 million population.

But the blasphemy laws do not just target religious minorities and the poor. The slain Taseer, a wealthy businessman and key ally of President Asif Zardari is testament to that. But even Muslims are not safe from the witch-hunt. During a visit to a village in the Punjab late last year, I was told that local Sufi Muslims had charged “a young Wahhabi” with blasphemy for arguing that Prophet Muhammad was a human being and that prayers should not be directed to him or venerated saints but only Allah.

Last Saturday a magistrate remanded a 17-year-old boy on charges of blasphemy after he allegedly wrote insulting comments about the Prophet during an exam more than eight months ago. Most disturbing, the charges were brought by the intermediate board of education in Karachi. The board noted that the boy confessed to the “unpardonable sin” and blamed it on frustration over inability to answer an exam question and the influence of a discussion about Islam he had with some cousins from Norway.

In a society where the law and order system is already fragile and amenable to vigilantism, the blasphemy law has opened up a Pandora’s box of opportunities for people to take the law into their own hands, or force fearful police and courts to provide a rubber stamp to their vendettas. None of Pakistan’s major politicians or its powerful army chief, not traditionally averse to making public statements on matters of national interest, has condemned Taseer’s murder or the misuse of the blasphemy laws.

Political parties were glaringly absent from public prayers organised for the slain Taseer over the weekend. In response to a request to attend one of them, Senator Abdul Rahim Khan Mandokhel from Balochistan said, “he [Taseer] met his fate. This is our religion. You have to accept it or leave Pakistan.” In an open letter, a broad coalition of citizens called the Citizens for Democracy condemned the remarks and urged the president of the senate to take disciplinary measures against Mandokhel if he did not offer a public apology. Others have called on the courts and police to charge people who have publicly called for victims of the blasphemy laws or advocates for their reform to be murdered.

It is arguable that even more dangerous are those like Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer’s murderer, who act out of a genuine belief that, armed just with God’s command, any citizen has the right to commit murder based on rumour and slander.

On Monday, Pakistan’s prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani reiterated his government’s refusal to amend the blasphemy laws, noting proudly that it was his predecessor Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who “introduced this law in Pakistan”. True, Gilani’s government is besieged and in no position to pick a losing battle. But if more Pakistanis do not wage a war for sanity all of us will lose.

[This article originally appeared in the Guardian on February 3, 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/03/pakistan-blasphemy-laws-taliban]

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 May 2010 19.00 BST

The well-worn maxim that all publicity is good publicity does not immediately spring to mind in Pakistan. But given the country’s frontline position in the fight against global terrorism, the involvement of yet another Pakistani in a plot to bomb a major international city will be a boon for everyone in favour of continued war in the “AfPak” region. For the rest of us, the alleged attempt by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad to bomb New York’s Times Square has been a disaster.

Whatever goodwill Pakistan had accrued in the bruising conflict against Islamist militancy evaporated when a young man decided to bomb New York. Like the rest of the world, Pakistanis are exasperated by the revelation that one of their own attempted such a foolhardy crime. Remember, for a moment, that Shahzad is not a poor man from the slums but the privileged son of a former senior military officer with a wife and two young children. What did he ever hope to achieve? Did he seriously consider how his actions would affect his young family and future life? Such are the deranged fantasies of the would-be Islamist revolutionary in this case and in numerous others that we may never know about.

The blunt calculation is not so uncertain. People globally will not remember the thousands of Pakistanis who have lost their lives in acts of terrorism or counterterrorism – assuming they knew in the first place – or the thousands more who have died defending our country and, by extension, the rest of the world. All it takes to reduce Pakistan back to the old “terror central” stereotype is a poorly executed bombing attempt by a misguided young man.

That message rings clear and loud for all of us who are of Pakistani origin. Shahzad fits a remarkably consistent profile of educated, middle-class young men who have decided to commit acts of terrorism in the west. Thanks to a statistically small fraction of the young male population, the vast majority of us can expect even greater scrutiny at airports and prominent public spaces around the world. American neocon Joe Lieberman has even called for terrorism suspects to be stripped of citizenship – a suggestion that will be celebrated by conservatives and Islamists alike.

Such chauvinism aside, however, there is no clear formula for preventing others like Shahzad. No matter how many profiles are generated at our airports, there is simply no way to predict who will decide to commit an act of terrorism and where, except in the most general terms.

It is a measure of how troubled we are in Pakistan that our worst tendencies and most misguided citizens are also our international emblems. Who would immediately associate Pakistan with judicial activism, a rich history of poetry and song, or a good curry? Perhaps many people do, but the spectre of terrorism has a way of overshadowing all that.

In the wake of Shahzad’s arrest, there will be a tendency in Pakistan to apportion blame to others. Some will even claim he had nothing to do with us, that he was a product of America’s ills or even that the CIA was behind it all. But such excuses ring increasingly hollow for most of us now. We are frustrated with this violent distraction from the endless power shortages and cronyism that stifle daily life.

In a feeble attempt to remain relevant, the increasingly isolated Pakistan Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing. US investigators believe Shahzad received training in the Waziristan tribal area that is the insurgency’s home. But whatever training Shahzad received could not have been very good judging by his poorly constructed bomb and how easily he was identified by the authorities. As with all other foiled bombings we have civilian investigators to thank rather than the multibillion dollar arsenals that have rained death and destruction on Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan over the last decade.

Paradoxically, the US and its Nato allies will, nevertheless, use this latest bomb plot as a justification for more wars that will claim more lives. As gruesome as it is to contemplate, the fact is that Shahzad’s botched attack is as much a boon for military planners at the Pentagon and in Rawalpindi as it is for fatalistic Islamists who see no other option but to bomb and terrorise their way to the negotiating table.

For us ordinary people there is another option. Pakistani Americans have been deeply embarrassed by the Shahzad fiasco. And as with other attempts, a Muslim was instrumental in foiling the Shahzad bombing. In Pakistan, investigators have been quick to interrogate Shahzad’s family and several others possibly involved.

The lesson from all of this is clear. There must be zero tolerance for the jihadi myth-makers who prey on the impressionable like Shahzad. We owe that much to our rich culture and heritage, not to mention our compatriots who have made and will continue to make the difficult journey to the west in search of a better life.

[This article was first published at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/06/terrorists-overshadow-real-pakistan]

Pakistan’s divided Taliban

Despite internal divisions and a bloody army crackdown, the Pakistani Taliban are a long way from being defeated

• • Mustafa Qadri
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 June 2009 16.00 BST
  • Article history

Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban warlord from Pakistan‘s South Waziristan tribal agency, often described as Emir Baitullah, is widely seen as the movement’s leader in the country. For at least the past two years, Pakistani authorities have sought to attribute most of the terrorism that occurs in this troubled nation to him. According to the North West Frontier Province governor Owais Ahmed Ghani, Baitullah is “the root cause of all the evil”.

Perhaps that is why he was targeted in what was probably the latest and deadliest US drone attack in Pakistan. While the strike failed to kill Mehsud, it did leave the charred remains of anywhere between 40 and 100 people scattered amid the wreckage of a South Waziristan mosque. This has become a dirty war, and neither insurgents nor counterinsurgents have hesitated to attack places of worship.

Mehsud had gathered along with hundreds of others to mourn the death of Qari Hussein, a key lieutenant and his presumptive heir who had himself been killed in an earlier drone attack. But Hussein was not the only Taliban leader-in-the-wings to have been killed of late.

Qari Zainuddin, who hails from Baitullah’s powerful South Waziristan Mehsud clan, was assassinated earlier this week by a bodyguard believed to be a Baitullah infiltrator. Zainuddin was Baitullah’s most vocal critic from within the Pakistan Taliban movement and there are murmurs that Pakistan’s agencies were grooming him for a leadership challenge. Zainuddin’s death is highly significant for South Waziristan, and arguably the entire Federally Administered Tribal Areas, since the Taliban under Baitullah and other commanders such as the now deceased Nek Mohammad wiped out around 100 of Waziristan’s maliks or tribal elders from 2002 onwards. Waziristan has been a robust stronghold for the Taliban and al-Qaida ever since.

Zainuddin’s murder is also a setback to army attempts at reining in the insurgency. He was a significant thorn in Baitullah’s side because he hailed from the same powerful Mehsud clan and had strong support from the Battani, a rival of the Mehsuds. But at best he was an emerging leader and remained, up until his death, a marginal voice in the movement. The fact that one of his own guards effectively sacrificed his life to eliminate one of Baitullah’s enemies will resonate strongly with tribal communities steeped in the Pakhtunwali. It sends the message that Baitullah remains powerful and his men supremely loyal. That the Taliban leader has survived massive operations from a 150,000-strong Pakistan army force in the region, some of the most sophisticated warplanes in the United States arsenal, and a $5m bounty on his head will only heighten his prestige.

And it is precisely this prestige that Pakistani authorities have been seeking to eliminate. Divisions within the ranks of the Taliban and its allies in the NWFP are not new. From the very outset, around the time of the Taliban exodus from Afghanistan in October 2001, there were deep fissures between the different regional insurgency groups centred on tribal or warlord affiliations. Pakistan’s agencies have tried to exploit those divisions ever since.

Zainuddin was critical of Mehsud’s leadership, particularly the war within Pakistan that has seen scores of civilians, tribal chiefs and religious scholars murdered or intimidated over the past eight years. Significantly, he was not opposed to Taliban operations in Afghanistan. But he, along with a few allied commanders, accused Mehsud of being an agent of foreign powers.

Proponents of this view, such as the retired army colonel who spoke to me off the record recently, cite the chaotic nature of the region, its porous boundary with Afghanistan and the wide, largely empty deserts of Balochistan to the south that make it easy for covert foreign actors to infiltrate. Not to forget, of course, the past history of foreign intrigue in Pakistan which saw the United States, Saudi Arabia and even China and possibly Israel support militants inspired by Islam to wage war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Yet, at its core, the refusal to accept home-grown origins for the Taliban’s violence reflects the fact that the government has yet to acknowledge the radicalisation of the population, particularly among the poor in remote and rural Pakistan and the slums of its big cities. Nowhere is that more apparent than in regions of the NWFP and tribal areas nominally under government control. In the frontline area of Darra Adam Khel, tribal lashkars, or militias, have been formed to meet the Taliban threat. Some are seeking to negotiate an end to hostilities with the Taliban, but this alone is unlikely to end the insurgency because lashkars operate independent of state authorities and often have ideological sympathies with the Taliban.

In Swat, many rank-and-file Taliban have fled to remote mountain areas. Pakistan claims to have cornered the Swat Taliban’s chief leader Maulana Fazlullah and killed a key lieutenant, Shah Doran, who arranged the incendiary radio broadcasts threatening those who did not obey the Taliban’s strict social precepts. But Fazlullah and most of the other Swat leadership remain at large.

Pakistan authorities have had better success in the urban centres. Five alleged operatives of Baitullah Mehsud were arrested in Karachi this week. They stand accused of raising money through extortion and kidnapping operations in Pakistan’s major port city. The authorities also claim to have captured 43 Taliban in the Punjab and the nation’s capital Islamabad. Whether the crackdown will finally break the Taliban in Pakistan remains to be seen.

[First published: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/26/pakistan-taliban-army-crackdown]

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

At least 10 people have been killed in a suicide bombing in north-western Pakistan, local officials say.

Taming the Taliban

Mustafa Qadri

This month the world reacted with surprise and trepidation at the news that Pakistan had reached a peace agreement with religious groups closely aligned to the Taliban. The accord relates to the mountainous Malakand division of the North Western Frontier Province that borders Afghanistan. It covers the beautiful Swat valley, the onetime alpine honeymoon resort, that, since 2007, has been gripped by a Taliban insurgency.

In response to the deal, the Taliban said it would cease all hostilities for ten days. Soon after, the Pakistan Government claimed that the Taliban had agreed to a permanent ceasefire but the jihadi movement countered that it is still considering an extended truce.

Life in the Swat valley may have returned to relative calm, but it remains a dangerous and lawless place. Last week the Taliban abducted Khushal Khan, a senior government official in Malakand, spokesman Muslim Khan explaining that he was merely their “guest”. He was later released in exchange for two Taliban militants.

“We have to discuss some issues with him,” Muslim Khan explained. “We will serve him with tea and then free him.” The abduction sends the clear signal that the Taliban remain beyond the authority of the state.

Journalist Musa Khel was also kidnapped, albeit without the benefit of discussion or tea, and was later found dead. The Taliban denied involvement in his murder, yet it was made all the more disturbing by the fact that Khel had been taken while reporting on a rally in support of the peace deal by pro-Taliban religious groups last Wednesday.

The ostensible aim of the agreement is to replace the secular regional and federal laws of Pakistan with the Sharia, or Islamic laws based on the Quran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. There have been concerns in Malakand that the secular justice system is slow and expensive. Those in favour of the Sharia system argue it will offer more efficient justice. But the move towards a religious justice system in a region dominated by extremely conservative interpretations of scripture and mores could prove disastrous for women, non-Muslims and more moderate Muslims whose social practises are deemed un-Islamic.

It is also an affirmation of one of the Taliban’s central tenets. The government hopes the arrangement will remove a key motivation for the Taliban’s violent insurgency.

But therein lies the problem with this agreement – it is silent on the Taliban’s recourse to violence: the destruction of around 200 girls schools and threats of acid attacks against women who dare to go to them, innumerable disappearances, and the murder of policemen trying to enforce the law and politicians who criticise them.

As the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan pointed out, “No dialogue is possible with a party that seeks to impose its fist at gunpoint.”

Yet with the Malakand peace agreement, the Taliban has effectively been rewarded for its violence.

How did the Taliban manage to infiltrate a region a mere four hours drive north of Pakistan’s capital Islamabad? President Asif Ali Zardari told CBS News in America that the Taliban’s success came down to the previous administration’s “denial” about the threat they posed.

Yet such claims ring largely hollow given that expressions of Islamic militancy have been known in these parts for decades.

Malakand was one of several parts of Pakistan where, under its US-backed dictator General Zia-ul Haq, the State recruited young, largely poor and semi-literate men to fight and die against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Soviets may have left Afghanistan in 1989, but Islamic militancy has remained in Pakistan.

Indeed, the central militant figure in the peace deal with the government, Maulana Sufi Mohammad, is very much a product of this history. The very year the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, he left the mainstream religious political party Jamaat-i-Islami to establish Tehreek-e-Nifaaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, or Movement for the Promulgation of Islamic Law. By 1994 Sufi Mohammad was in Malakand calling for the establishment a puritanical society akin to that which existed in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

In 2002 Sufi Mohammad was arrested by former President Pervez Musharraf for rallying young men to fight with the Taliban against the United States and Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. At his trial Mohammad reportedly refused to defend himself, saying he could not recognise the laws and courts of Pakistan because they were un-Islamic.

Although sentenced to ten years of prison he was released last year after publicly renouncing his past calls to violence. He also claimed to now support education for women and immunisation for children, both issues he strongly opposed before and still opposed by the Taliban. Now, with a promise to enact the Sharia in Malakand, Sufi hopes to convince the region’s Taliban to lay down their arms. The central figure in Malakand’s Taliban forces, Maulana Fazlullah, also happens to be Sufi’s son-in-law.

Unfortunately, the military option alone provides little comfort as an alternative response to the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan. When I visited Malakand last year I heard story after story about the brutal effects of the Pakistan army’s war with the Taliban. Almost all of the people I interviewed at displaced person camps throughout the North Western Frontier Province claimed that civilians had been deliberately targeted by the Pakistan army. It is a situation that has left civilians perilously exposed to army and militant brutality.

An army spokesperson whom I confronted with the allegations vehemently denied them. But regardless, the war with the Taliban has displaced as many as 900,000 people and killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians.

It is because of this devastation that it is impossible merely to dismiss the peace deal as a sham. To its credit, the Australian Government seems to have recognised this.

Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, who was in Pakistan last week, gave qualified support to the arrangement, saying he hoped it would be “a positive development”. His views were echoed by US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates who noted that a similar deal could possibly be reached with moderate elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Australia has also offered counter-insurgency training to Pakistani forces. Along with increasing economic aid, our government will quadruple the number of Pakistani army officers it trains. This assistance is vital for Pakistan to tackle the Taliban insurgency and the underlying poverty of the tribal societies it preys upon.

If the Malakand peace deal is the carrot, it is important that the Taliban are reminded of the stick.

WHAT WILL THIS ‘PEACE’ COST?
By Mustafa Qadri

US military strikes blunt Pakistan honour

Mustafa Qadri September 17, 2008

Early on the morning of Wednesday, 3 September, just before people were waking for the first of their daily prayers, a squad of US and Afghan commandos attacked the small village of Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

‘I saw 15 bodies inside and outside two homes,’ Habib Khan Wazir told Associated Press. ‘They had been shot in the head.’ Most of those killed were women and children.

The attack may not have been the first ground attack by US forces in Pakistan — it has maintained a military presence since soon after September 11, 2001 — but it is the first to be publicly confirmed. Pakistan has also been conducting attacks against militants in Waziristan, but this and other US attacks have not been cleared by Islamabad.

The Angoor Adda attack was followed, the next day, by a missile strike that killed five ‘foreign militants’. On Friday, another missile attack reportedly killed five more civilians.

All three attacks occurred less than a week into a ceasefire brokered between the Pakistan Government and militants in honour of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Further strikes this week have claimed more lives, most of them civilians.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd endorsed the Angor Adda attack, saying that the US is acting ‘appropriately’ in this and other unilateral strikes.

It is true that hardcore Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters cannot be negotiated with. But military strikes are a blunt instrument, particularly in the rugged tribal frontier of northern Pakistan. Such strikes end up killing more civilians than militants and offer no solutions to the underlying social and economic conditions that generate conflict.

That reality has yet to dawn on the US, although NATO now claims it will no longer undertake unilateral strikes within Pakistan.

Analysts note that US strikes have increased since Pervez Musharraf, Washington’s staunchest ally in the War on Terrorism, resigned as President of Pakistan. Freed from the fear that its unilateral strikes would create resentment towards Musharraf, they have now decided that it is open slather on Pakistan’s Taliban, Al Qaeda and affiliated militants. With the increase in attacks comes an increase in civilian casualties.

The presumption underlying this strategy is that the risk of civilian casualties is outweighed by the capture or elimination of high value targets. In this respect the US strategy has not changed since September 11. There is a belief in the Pentagon that the removal of individual leaders will win the battle against Muslim extremists and reduce the likelihood of attacks in the West.

Yet no major Al Qaeda or Taliban leader was captured or killed during the Angoor Adda raid. And even if other strikes manage to eliminate key figures, the political capital lost from the civilian casualties largely outweighs the tactical gains. They may also constitute war crimes, although the prospect is unlikely to tax lawyers in Brussels and Washington.

The population of Angoor Adda and throughout Waziristan is predominantly Pashtun. They are ethnically identical to the people who live across the border in neighbouring Afghanistan. A civilian casualty in either community is seen as a crime against fellow Pashtuns. The Taliban cashes in on the subsequent resentment these deaths incur by claiming that foreign forces are seeking to subjugate them. Only the Taliban, the movement argues, can keep them safe and guard their honour.

Already the US has killed many civilians in Afghanistan since its October 2001 invasion. It stands accused by the UN of killing up to 90 civilians during an operation in Nawababad last month.

People in these parts are suspicious of foreigners, and with good reason. Much of that sentiment has to do with centuries of interference by external powers, most recently the British Raj and the Pakistan Government, that has left the region politically marginalised and economically undeveloped.

The casual nature with which Western forces excuse civilian casualties as an inevitable cost of bringing the battle to the militants suggests an abject ignorance of this history. Nor does it factor in the ‘Pakhtunwali’ honour-code of these tribal lands.

‘Even people who do not like the Taliban will support [their] attacks against foreigners out of revenge for those slain,’ notes Mansur Mahsud, an analyst with the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies and himself a member of a major tribal family from Waziristan.

The Taliban movement is not a homogenous entity. Some of its members are ideologically driven. Known as the hardcore Taliban, they share Al Qaeda’s vision of a strict theocracy along the lines of their narrow interpretation of the Deobandi school of Islamic thought. Others are motivated by local tribal politics. Others still are criminals or mercenaries who have affiliated themselves with the Taliban as a matter of expediency.

In December 2007, British officials held secret talks with a senior Taliban commander in Helmand, Afghanistan, in an attempt to make him change sides. The gesture was quickly withdrawn, however, after news of the negotiations was leaked to the press. Britain faced extreme criticism from Washington, and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai expelled the British diplomats involved in the negotiations. This strategy has subsequently been out of the question.

Yet at some point military operations will have to be tempered with non-military strategies such as this. If a diverse approach is not adopted, Western forces may find that they are opposed even after the last Taliban and Al Qaeda leader has been eliminated by predator drones or commandoes.

Mustafa Qadri is a Sydney journalist based in Pakistan. He was formerly a lawyer specialising in public international law, who worked at the Australian Attorney-General’s Department representing the Government in native title claims and international crime treaty negotiations, and at the Pilbara Native Title Service.