Talibanisation of Pakistan

WHEN I wrote these lines a police training school in Lahore was under attack by armed men. Mayhem had broken out, people were killed, while many had to be taken to hospital to be treated for injuries.

On the same day, there were press reports of a militant ban on women going shopping in parts of Swat and of warnings to close down CD shops. A few days earlier, a huge explosion in a Jamrud mosque killed and injured more than 200 people. There is panic in the air, even though we have become inured to gory sights.

After the peace arrangement, Swat does not really appear as part of the Pakistani state. It has passed into the hands of the Taliban. It is, to all intents and purposes, a Taliban state and this hard reality should sink into the minds of our ruling elite.

First, the Nizam-i-Adl Ordinance (not yet promulgated) is meant to operate in Swat and not the rest of the country. The way Sharia will be interpreted will depend entirely on the power of the interpreter. The interpreters will be the Taliban and their supporters. This means that a part of Pakistan has been virtually detached from the rest of the country and handed over to those responsible for terrorising this area in the past.

Secondly, as pointed out by former caretaker interior minister Lt Gen Hamid Nawaz, the creation of a legal system different from that in the rest of the country will encourage hard-line elements in Hazara Division and the Seraiki region to demand such a parallel system. If this turns out to be the case, then we are headed for balkanisation or the Talibanisation of Pakistan.

Thirdly, the qazi courts, as they are seen to be functioning at present, will not introduce the Islamic system of justice as it existed before colonialism. There were several local systems of jurisprudence in different Islamic countries much before. The system which is presently envisaged threatens to render hundreds of lawyers jobless and it is not clear how the laws will be interpreted. The fear is that the rough-and-ready justice administered by these courts will not be justice at all. The reality in Swat is that everyone is afraid of the Taliban. There is peace but at the cost of accepting the militants’ domination. This is more of a defeat than a truce — and it is the state of Pakistan which has been defeated.

The cost of this defeat is heavy. According to a letter sent by several peace groups, including the Pashtun Peace Forum, to UN chief Ban Ki-moon about 700,000 people have been internally displaced and are leading miserable lives. Moreover, if one talks to these people they express their resentment against both the Taliban and the army. They complain that the army did not save them from the militants even when it was possible to do so. The army denies this charge but the public perception is that the army either played it safe or was not capable of combating the militants.

Some people, and not just American officials, point to the army’s romance with the jihadis since the time Pakistan fought America’s proxy war against the Soviet Union. Although Gen Musharraf withdrew support for the Taliban in Afghanistan soon after 9/11, journalists like Ahmed Rashid kept pointing out that there were Taliban camps in Quetta. The argument is that old policies are either carried out by individuals in their private capacity, or, at least at some level, are not reversed.

I have no inside information about this but it is clear that there is much confusion when groups that claim to operate in the name of the sacred are attacked by our soldiers. Surely years of state radio, television, school textbooks and public speeches using the name of Islam have caused people to see the Islamic idiom as something quite normal — and, of course, the Taliban use this idiom. It is altogether a separate matter that the Taliban’s usage of it is different from how ordinary people perceive it.

Ordinary people are not at all clear about what the implementation of the Sharia would entail. They think it would bring them the justice they have always sought but never obtained. They think they will finally find the food they have always craved but never eaten. They think there will be electricity in their homes, water in their taps, schools for their children, and no bribery or humiliation in their daily lives. In short, ordinary folk desire justice, good governance and peace. They want to live without having to face the danger of being blown to smithereens by a suicide bomber.

What the militants will give them is a dictatorship of the most barbaric kind. Excesses are always committed by ideological rulers such as the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iran. But they will be more than matched by the cruel and mindless barbarity of the Taliban. We saw this in Afghanistan when it was under their rule. We are gullible and the militants take advantage of our gullibility. Slowly, they are nibbling at parts of our country. This is a situation of our own making. And we have our own unwise, narrow policies to blame. This being the case, we are the ones who should be finding a solution. A durable solution can only be found when we acknowledge our past mistakes, clean up the Augean stables inherited by the state, take our citizens on board and call the war on militancy ‘our war’ and then fight it single-mindedly, all the while helping the internally displaced.

The events which we are witnessing are reminiscent of the break-up of the Mughal empire. A number of states emerged then until the British created a centralised Indian empire. A number of states are emerging now. But the British gave us education, science, a legal system, canals, roads, railways and the postal service. What the Taliban will give us is anyone’s guess!