Outline of the republic

• Last Updated: October 23. 2009 12:02AM UAE / October 22. 2009 8:02PM GMT

As the Pakistani army fights to reclaim Waziristan, Basharat Peer uncovers lessons from last spring’s Swat valley campaign. Both regions’ fates, he writes, hinge on the state’s willingness to include the people on its margins.

On the morning of May 27, Tariq Ali, a 42-year-old clerk at Rescue 15, a police helpline centre in Lahore, reported to work after a weekend visit to his family a few hours outside the city. He shared an office with two other clerks and a police officer. The building faced a shopping complex with a Toyota dealership and an immigration consultancy. Next door to Rescue 15 was an unmarked residence, known to locals as the Lahore office of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s dreaded spy agency. Half an hour after Ali arrived, shots rang out over the noise of passing traffic. Police sirens sounded, and Ali rose from his desk. Some of his colleagues ran to fetch weapons. Ali was still unsure what to do when an enormous blast threw him onto the floor. A suicide bomber had exploded a car inside the office compound.
“I saw a black wind filled with shards of glass tear into my office. Then the ceiling and the walls came crashing on us,” Ali told me, a week later, lying on his bed in the intensive care ward of Gangaram Hospital, surrounded by fellow policemen, his brother and his teenage son. Ali’s face was burnt, and the glass had cut most of his back, his lips, and both his eyes, one of which the doctors had sewed up – the other one was bandaged. The attack killed 23 people, including the officer who shared Ali’s office, and injured 150.

When I ventured to the scene of the bombing, I couldn’t find the Rescue 15 building; the blast had razed it. Fragments of blasted cars were scattered about. A green Toyota stood parked in the car dealership, its body shredded by shrapnel. In the immigration consultancy on the second floor, pieces of computer screens and keyboards were strewn among burnt files. The ceiling and the windows had been torn apart. In a corner the frozen hands of a white clock still on the wall recorded the moment of mayhem: 10:25

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Two weeks earlier, with the encouragement and backing of the United States, Pakistan’s army had launched Operation Right Path, a massive campaign to seize control of the Swat Valley, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, from forces allied to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or the Pakistani Taliban Movement, then led by the South Waziristan-based Baitullah Mehsud. The suicide attack on May 27 that injured Ali was an act of revenge for the ongoing military operation, and it was believed that Mehsud’s men carried it out with local support from Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a Punjabi terrorist group that knows the lay of the land.

Fighter planes were bombing Taliban positions in Swat, and the military had sent more than 30,000 soldiers into the valley, which was pounded by relentless artillery fire. The human costs of the offensive were enormous: by the end of June, more than 3.5 million refugees had been driven from their homes; massive camps were set up in the frontier towns of Mardan, Swabi and Jalozai, but around 85 per cent of the displaced were living with relatives, acquaintances, strangers, in school buildings and in rented rooms across the country. Meanwhile the besieged Taliban exacted their revenge through attacks against luxury hotels, government offices and police and security establishments in Pakistan’s big cities.

The military blocked all press from the war zone, and it has not released any tally of the civilian casualties. The campaign for Swat was a brutal one, but it has been acclaimed – by the Pakistan army and US officials – as a rare victory against the Taliban by an army designed to fight India rather than local insurgents. Some of the millions of refugees returned gingerly to their homes in the late summer, but a vast deployment of soldiers remains in place to secure the valley, and “victory” is far from assured: Taliban commanders remain at large and local militants continue to attack civilians and security forces.

This month, after intense pressure from the United States to launch a Swat-like offensive into the Taliban stronghold of Waziristan – a major base for al Qa’eda forces and other foreign militants planning attacks inside Pakistan and against Nato forces in Afghanistan – the Pakistan army began blocking supply routes to South Waziristan and jets commenced bombing the area to “soften” it in advance of the coming military campaign. But the Taliban – now under the leadership of Hakimullah Mehsud after Baitullah was assassinated by a drone strike in August – responded with a series of bombings and attacks much like the one in Lahore that sent Tariq Ali to hospital. With the support of Punjabi jihadist groups once nurtured by the state they are now attacking, Taliban militants killed more than 175 people in two weeks in a series of attacks throughout the NWFP, in Lahore and Islamabad, and, most dramatically, in an audacious commando raid on the headquarters of the Pakistan army in Rawalpindi.

Now the army has moved its ground troops into South Waziristan, sending some 28,000 soldiers, according to news reports, to attack the TTP and its al Qa’eda allies, believed to number about 10,000 fighters. Intense fighting is already underway. Though the press is again barred from the area of conflict, early reports suggest that both sides have deployed heavy weapons; the army claimed to have killed 60 Taliban fighters and lost 11 soldiers on the second day of the operation. At a recent press conference, Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, had a boastful message for the Taliban: “We will do to you in Waziristan what we did to you in Swat.”

But as the army gears up for a sequel to the Swat offensive, several questions emerge. Is the country prepared for an endless and messy war, with substantial civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of refugees? Already more than 100,000 people have fled Waziristan, and officials expect another 150,000 to follow. The campaign in Mehsud tribal territory is sure to be a long one, echoing what has come before: militants regrouping and relocating after every setback; civilians killed by drone attacks and artillery fire, creating more militants; and official celebrations of Army victories – followed by more suicide attacks and bombings in Pakistan’s cities.

For the pacification of Waziristan – if such a thing is even possible – like the retaking of Swat, is only one of several fronts in Pakistan’s newly zealous US-backed “war on terror”; a separatist insurgency continues in resource-rich but marginalised Balochistan, to the south of Waziristan, while militant groups in Punjab, bolstered by the past and perhaps present support of the state in its battle with India, continue to thrive and, recently, to collaborate with Taliban groups in attacks against Pakistan. Many Pakistani intellectuals see the military campaigns as inevitable but have moral qualms about the indiscriminate use of aerial bombing and heavy artillery. The campaign in Swat had the backing of the majority of Pakistanis at its outset, but it remains to be seen whether the present war in Waziristan – almost certain to be longer, more intense, and more brutal – will enjoy the same support as the collateral damage mounts.

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The valley of Swat is carpeted by lush grassy meadows, cradled by pine-forested hills and ice-cold rivers and streams. Traditionally, Pakistan’s middle class and elite sought refuge there during the summer, when temperatures rose unbearably in the plains. Hotels, cafes and small crafts shops did brisk business, transforming the valley – only 100 miles from Islamabad – into a relatively prosperous tourist destination. But Taliban-allied clerics from Swat sent thousands to fight the Americans after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and, in the following years, promised swift justice through sharia law and exploited grievances with the existing legal system to shore up support.

By 2007, a local Taliban movement had emerged, led by Maulana Fazlullah, who earned himself the nickname “FM Mullah” for his extensive and successful use of illegal radio broadcasts to rail against American operations in the tribal areas and the failings of the Pakistani state and its judiciary, and to call for the imposition of sharia. Fazlullah banned television, music and girls’ education in Swat; his men beheaded local policemen and hung their bodies in town squares. By early 2009, Fazlullah’s Taliban controlled most of the valley and had negotiated a ceasefire with the government under which sharia was imposed in Swat. When the Taliban broke the unpopular truce and moved into the neighbouring Buner region – prompting the somewhat exaggerated scare that the Taliban, now “60 miles from Islamabad”, could simply overrun the capital – the army began its offensive.

Empowered by public disgust with Taliban excesses in Swat, the army sent around 25,000 soldiers into the NWFP, where they bombarded suspected Taliban targets with maximum force. Within a month, most of the valley had been cleared, but at tremendous cost: more than 3 million people fled the area and scattered throughout towns and villages in the NWFP and Punjab. The government’s response to the massive refugee crisis – the largest movement of people within Pakistan since Partition – was marred by delays in providing transportation, shelter, food, medicine and financial support.

In June I visited a small, decrepit school in Javed Negar, an hour outside Lahore. Some 20 refugee families had found shelter in the ramshackle building, which had a mud floor and a tarpaulin sheet for a roof. A television crew was trying to persuade some women huddled together in a classroom to speak about their journeys. After a while, a woman in a floral green chador faced the camera in one of the classrooms. A social worker from Swat translated her forceful Pashto into English. She came from a village in Buner, she said, and was cooking lunch when the army arrived and announced that people should leave. Grabbing some clothes, she rushed out and, with her two daughters, followed the hundreds of villagers in flight. They crossed a river, continued walking till night fell, then got a lift on a tractor that dropped them the next morning in Rawalpindi, adjacent to Islamabad. Strangers gave them food and shelter for the night. They joined a group of women and arrived in Lahore after two days.

“I am speaking to the television because my husband might watch it and find out where we are.” Her husband, a day-labourer, had been away working at a factory in the vicinity of Peshawar. He couldn’t afford a mobile phone, and the number of a friend that he had given her no longer worked. “I have no idea where he is, and he knows nothing about us,” she said. She shuffled a bit, adjusting her chador around her face, and looked straight into the television camera. “I miss him.”

A few days later, I drove to the Swabi district in the NWFP, where a local landlord named Liaqat Khan Taraqai had set up camps for thousands of refugees from Swat and Buner. Hundreds of white tents were spread out in long, grim rows amid the fields of Taraqai’s village. Sunburned children wandered aimlessly between the rows of tents; the women stayed inside. Small groups of men with listless faces squatted between the camps, drawing on the dry soil with twigs and smoking cigarettes. I wandered around till I met Moomin Khan, who had arrived in Swabi a week earlier from the village of Kabal in Swat – Maulana Fazlullah’s primary base. A short, stocky 44-year-old, he insisted with a grin that I walk with him to his battered blue Suzuki Mehran. “See how I got my family here,” Moomin laughed, pointing out a dozen bullet holes in the body and roof of the car. The Taliban and the army were firing at each other when he left Kabal. “We survived, but I lost almost everything,” he said.

He had prospered as the owner of Kabal’s largest music store, where he sold mostly cassettes of Pashto dramas and songs. A pirated audio cassette sold for less than a dollar, and his inventory ran into the thousands. Business was brisk, and Moomin’s worth was impressive by the standards of a remote, small town: he was a Pakistani-rupee millionaire. (1 million rupees are equivalent to $12,278, Dh45,000.) Last year, he received a letter from the local Taliban. “They said my business was against Islamic law, and I had 10 days to close it down or face consequences.” He grinned, ran his fingers through his hair, and chuckled. “What could I do? Four days before the deadline, I packed all my cassettes and decided to take them to Peshawar.” After packing up his wares, Moomin heard rumours of an imminent Taliban attack on the local police station. He still had three days and hoped they might still forget him. A loud blast woke him up at 2:30am. “There goes the police station,” Moomin said to his wife. In the morning after a light breakfast, he went to check out the scene at the bombed police station. “The police station was exactly as it was,” Moomin recalled, with another laugh. “It was my shop that had been blown up.”

In Islamabad I met refugees from Swat’s biggest town, Mingora, who were now staying at the Melody Theater, a massive caramel-coloured concrete building that had been home to a cinema until Islamist vigilantes set it on fire in 2006. Inside scores of mattresses were laid out from one end of the bare whitewashed hall to the other. Hasan Khan, a tall, wiry 40-year-old with a high aquiline nose, described the brutal fighting in Mingora, which the army finally recaptured in June. High mountains full of emerald mines circle the town. The medieval Silk Road and its modern equivalent, the Karakoram Highway to China, are a few hours away.

On May 5, the soldiers arrived and the assault began. The Taliban were believed to be hiding in factories, in government offices, in residential areas and in the emerald mine in the mountain towering over Khan’s neighbourhood, Shahdara. Khan huddled with his five children, his wife, and his parents in the room in his house with the thickest walls. Outside, the loud blasts of mortars fired by the army buffeted the town. Mingora’s electricity failed. Soon after sunset, Khan got a phone call: a kilometre from his house, three of his friends had been killed by an army mortar attack. “They were no Taliban!” Khan cried, “Sher Mohammad ran a music and movie CD shop, Mohammad Ayub sold mobile phones, and Ayub Khan sold vegetables. Like me, they had families, they had children.”

Gunfire and shelling continued for hours after the death of Khan’s friends; at 4:30am his house was shaken by a mortar that landed just outside the door. Similar scenes, he said, played out all across the town: people fled their houses in panic; some stepped on landmines laid by the Taliban; others were hit by the bullets and mortars fired by the Pakistan Army. By late afternoon, Shahdara had collected and buried its dead: 17, including five children. “Can you imagine how many civilians would have been killed in all of Swat, if my small neighbourhood lost 17?”

Three days later, during a break in the curfew, Khan, his family, and neighbours joined a grieving caravan of thousands streaming out of Mingora. Along the way, Khan saw the debris of wrecked cars, smouldering school buildings and houses, and the sick and the dying being carried on charpoys. Some residents, like Khan’s friend Mehdi Hasan, a short, rotund man who made his living selling television sets and refrigerators, decided to stay behind to guard their houses. Gunfire and shelling kept him awake throughout the night; he caught some sleep in his basement during the day. Outside the army had orders to shoot on sight. A week later, when he ventured out to a cousin’s home to get food, he saw around 20 bodies rotting by the road. “I ran,” he told me in Islamabad, “but a little ahead of me I saw dogs eating a dead boy. I couldn’t stay there any longer.”

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The Pakistan Army resolved to keep its “boots on the ground” in Swat after the initial offensive, and it now guards the traumatised residents who have gone home to rebuild their lives in the wake of the war. Mehdi Hasan is among those who have returned; when I called him in September at about 10:30pm Pakistan time, shortly before that night’s curfew went into effect, he said the army was fully in control of Mingora. “I am still at my shop. People are out in the markets. It is almost like the old days. We aren’t scared of the Taliban anymore,” he said.

But Pakistan’s campaign against the Taliban is not merely a military conflict, and it cannot be won simply by taking and holding territory in the NWFP or other rural areas. Extremism remains widespread throughout the country, and for decades the state has fostered the growth of Islamist militant groups to promote its foreign-policy objectives in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Whether or not some elements in Pakistan’s military or intelligence services continue to regard these groups as strategic assets, the jihadists themselves, now allied with the TTP, have increasingly turned their sights on the state and its institutions.

Several of these outfits are based not in outlying tribal areas but in the very heart of the country. Punjab is home to four prominent militant groups: the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Lashkar-i-Taiba. The first three are affiliated with al Qa’eda and involved in recruiting and training fighters who battle US and Nato forces in Afghanistan. These so-called “Punjabi Taliban”, trained in commando tactics and familiar with Pakistan’s big cities, have the capacity to target major population centres: the devastating attack on army headquarters two weeks ago was led by a commander of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, which has been providing logistical support to al Qa’eda and the TTP. The southern parts of Punjab are traditional centres of Sufi Islam, but radical groups have seized on the region’s debilitating poverty and underdevelopment to recruit an army of young jihadists.

The Pakistani defence analyst Ayesha Siddiqa, writing in Karachi’s Newsline magazine, estimated the number of men from South Punjab fighting in Waziristan and Afghanistan at “about 5,000 to 9,000”. The Pakistani establishment, she wrote, is not focusing on the threat, because they fear “it might draw excessive US attention to South Punjab – an area epitomising mainstream Pakistan”.

One mid-June afternoon, while walking in the heart of mainstream Pakistan, on the Mall Road in Lahore, I stopped briefly at a row of tables collecting relief for the Swat refugees. One of the largest was run by an organisation called Falah-i-Insaniyat – Benefit of Humanity. A young man was at the table; stacks of clothes, pulses, rice bags and utensils were piled in the tent behind him. He gave me a pamphlet with details of his organisation’s relief work. It proclaimed in Urdu: “Hundreds of thousands displaced by the Operation are waiting for your assistance! Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation is feeding 20,000 displaced people everyday. We have treated 15,000 in our medical camps across the frontier. We have distributed one month’s food to 1,100 families.” It ended with a call for monetary support and gave the number of a bank account in Lahore.

I told the young man I had never heard of Falah-i-Insaniyat.

“The name is a new one,” he replied. “We are the Lashkar-i-Taiba. Have to come up with new names because of the ban by America and our own government.”

Lashkar-i-Taiba has mostly attacked Indian targets, particularly in Kashmir, and India blames it for last year’s assault on Mumbai. A week earlier, the Lahore High Court had released their chief, Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, from house arrest for lack of sufficient evidence. “Hafiz Sahib is free now despite the pressure from India and America,” the man behind the table said with a smile. “Thousands of people are coming to see him at the city office. You should go there.”

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The fate of the Waziristan campaign is likely to determine when and whether Pakistan decides to turn its attention to the Punjab jihadists. For now, it faces immense challenges in a region no army has yet conquered. According to a recent study by Sameer Lalwani of the New America Foundation, a proper counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban would require at least 400,000 troops deployed throughout the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the NWFP. But Pakistan has no intention of shifting those forces from the Indian border. The state is eager to crack down on the Taliban factions attacking within Pakistan, but its military establishment still regards the Afghan Taliban, and groups like Lashkar-i-Taiba, as tools to promote its national interests in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

In the end, military campaigns – no matter how sophisticated – will fail as long as the Pakistani state refuses to see Waziristan, Balochistan, and swathes of South Punjab as the brutally marginalised and chronically underdeveloped areas they are. For 60 years now, Pakistan has avoided the expense of infrastructure development, and controlled the frontier through financial assistance to tribal leaders – whose authority has now been usurped by militants. Among the four million people who live in tribal areas like Waziristan, the literacy rate remains a mere 17 per cent – the figure for women is only three per cent. To regain its legitimacy and authority in these places, Pakistan will have to deploy more than troops. Next door in Afghanistan, the United States is learning the hard way that an occupying army may not be the best tool with which to build a functioning state, and Pakistan may soon confront the same problem.

Before I left Pakistan, I met with Aitizaz Ahsan, the leader of the Lawyers’ Movement, whose mass protests restored Pakistan’s chief justice to his seat and united hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis across regional, political and class barriers in a non-violent, democratic exercise. When I asked Ahsan about Pakistan’s future, he did not mention military victories, in Waziristan or elsewhere. “When the dust of this conflict settles,” he said, “we have to rebuild a new country, move from being a national security state to being a welfare state. We have to rebuild our blighted public schools, we have to make the feudal lords give a little bit of Pakistan back to its poor farmers, we have to integrate the tribal areas as a part of the NWFP and build modern infrastructure and systems of governance there. We have to give people on the margins a stake in Pakistan.”

Basharat Peer is the author of Curfewed Night, a memoir of the Kashmir conflict, and a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York.