”In the name of Allah, lend me your ears!” Anwar Kamal, a political veteran of Pakistan’s tribal areas, stood in a field before his constituents — 300 angry men from the Marwat tribe brandishing assault rifles, shotguns and, in a few cases, red roses pinned behind their ears.
In the sweltering heat an assistant fanned Kamal, a parliamentarian and former minister, as tribesmen squatted at his feet. The Taliban had gone too far, he said. In recent months 11 people had been kidnapped from Marwat territory, and the tribe’s honour had been impugned. Something had to be done.
Kamal slowly raised his voice. If the hostages were not released in a week, he said, jabbing the air, then the Marwatis would raise a fighting force, invade the Taliban territory and ”teach them a lesson”. The tribesmen roared in approval. ”Now is the time for action!” he cried.
Tense times call for tough talk in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, where a firestorm of ideologically driven violence and intimidation — described as ”Talibanisation” — is blazing across the province. Citing justification from the Qur’an extremists have torched CD and DVD shops, attacked barbers who shave beards, and forced the closure of at least four girls’ schools.
Suicide bombings, once unheard of in Pakistan, have become commonplace. Suspected ”collaborators” are punished — they can be abducted, beheaded and dumped on the roadside with a note attached saying ”American spy”.
The trouble stems from Waziristan, a mountainous tribal area along the Afghan border. There, armed Islamists have marginalised the central government to impose their harsh brand of Islamic rule. Sharia courts sentence criminals to be stoned to death; fighters slip across the Afghan border to attack Nato troops.
Waziristan is also home to about 2 000 foreign al-Qaeda fighters, mostly Uzbeks but also Arabs, and Chechens who fled Afghanistan in 2001.
Some of them, the US fears, are using this giant base to plot terrorist attacks around the world. The government has sent 80 000 soldiers to the tribal belt to quell the violence. But, according to Art Keller, a retired CIA official who visited Waziristan last year, most are simply ”hunkering in their bases”.
Now the Taliban’s ideas are spilling over the tribal area’s borders and across the North-West Frontier Province. In Tank, a town in the ”settled area” just outside Waziristan, the Taliban raided the home of a senior government official this month killing 13 of his relatives.
Further north, in Lakki Marwat, Talibanisation has brought kidnappings. Last month a cellphone company paid $79 000 to free five employees; last week two government doctors were abducted on accusations of working for a British aid agency. ”They are starting to play hell with us,” said Kamal at last week’s grand jirga, just 16km from the border with Waziristan.
The most worrying aspect is how deeply Talibanisation has penetrated into previously serene parts. Charsadda, about 20km north of Peshawar, is the home town of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Pashtun nationalist nicknamed the ”Frontier Gandhi” in the 1930s for his peaceful opposition to British rule.
But this year the Charsadda’s DVD shop owners found notes outside their doors, signed by the Taliban and ordering them to shut down. When they refused, bombs blasted through three shops, sending the movies up in flames. Then on April 28 a suicide bomber struck a political rally where the Interior Minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, who hails from the town, was speaking. About 28 people were killed.
”Who are these Taliban? We just don’t know,” said Farman Khan, manager of one of the largest DVD stores. ”This has always been a tolerant city. We had no religious tensions before.”
Analysts said a Taliban takeover, such as happened in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, is unlikely in the province. The extremists are supported by a small minority of the province’s ethnic Pashtun residents, and blame has fallen on the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) — a coalition of hardline religious parties that has ruled the province since 2002 and which openly supports Islamist militancy — for allowing Talibanisation to take root.
”The demagoguery of these religious elements has gone too far. The common man is not safe,” said Memood Shah, former security head for the tribal areas.
The permissive environment has given radical hotheads a foothold. In the picturesque Swat Valley, north-east of Peshawar, Maulvi Fazlullah, a firebrand young cleric who rides a white horse, uses his private FM radio station to preach against polio vaccinations and girls’ schooling. ”A woman has been asked to remain behind the four walls of the house. Men have been given preference by God,” he said in one interview.
But the province’s beleaguered moderates are kicking back. Girls’ enrolment at school has increased 77% since 2002, according to official figures. The MMA government, perceived to be incompetent and corrupt, has haemorrhaged support and is expected to receive a drubbing at the next election.
In Charsadda the DVD shops are open again, lending Jackie Chan, Schwarzenegger and Bollywood movies. ”It’s a good business. Only God knows when it is my time to die,” shrugged Khan.
But the strife here is earning little attention in Islamabad, where President General Pervez Musharraf is engaged in a fight for his political survival over the chief justice crisis, and where his government appears lamentably incapable of tackling Talibanisation even on its own doorstep.
Burka-clad militants from Lal Masjid, a radical mosque just a few streets from Musharraf’s office, have kidnapped prostitutes, attacked police and issued fatwas against journalists in recent months. But the local police seem unable, or unwilling, to stop them.
Lal Masjid also has links to the wider pattern of destabilisation. Its chief cleric recently boasted of having 10 000 suicide bombers at his disposal. One of the main suspects in the recent Charsadda suicide attack, Hafiz Said ur Rehman, is a former student of Lal Masjid. ”He spent four years there. It was free of cost and he absolutely enjoyed it,” said his father, speaking in the courtyard of a mosque.
Critics accuse Musharraf of playing a double game, citing his electoral alliance with the MMA in the province of Baluchistan. ”He tells us that he is fighting the terrorist but he is sleeping in the same bed as the clerics in Quetta. Why are you people turning a blind eye to those things?” said Asfandyar Wali Khan, of the liberal Awami National party.
But in remote, barely governed places such as Lakki Marwat, the strict Pashtun code of conduct — known as Pashtunwali and focused on honour and revenge — is paramount. Here, opportunistic bandits had joined forces with the Taliban, said Kamal. ”Due to poverty we have always had criminals; now they are in the garb of Taliban,” he said, citing rumours of gunmen donning fake beards to increase the fear factor.
Kamal summoned two Taliban representatives to last week’s jirga and met them afterwards in a hot, cramped room. The militants, young men with black turbans and Chinese pistols, looked uncomfortable.
”We fight for Islam, not for money,” said Shafiullah, who boasted of fighting ”jihad” against foreign soldiers in Afghanistan.
Kamal warned them to release the remaining hostages or face dire consequences. The threat carried considerable weight; in 2004 the former provincial minister led a tribal army that sacked a neighbouring village and killed 70 people. Then, as now, the issue was kidnapping.
Faced with the Taliban, gun law was better than no law, he said: ”If the government refuses to act, then it’s high time we secured ourselves.” – Guardian Unlimited Â