MARY FITZGERALDin Islamabad talks to Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan who says sharia law in Swat valley could be a model for rest of Pakistan
THE INFLECTIONS in Muslim Khan’s broken English are a legacy of the years he spent doing odd jobs, including painting houses, in Boston. Today Khan, a sprightly man whose full white beard contrasts with straggly grey-flecked hair topped with the black turban that identifies him as Taliban, fields a stream of calls on several mobile phones high up in his mountain redoubt in northwest Pakistan.
“We want the sharia here so we can make this region a model for the rest of Pakistan and other countries. People will see the sharia system working here and they will want it for themselves,” Khan, the Taliban’s main spokesman in the Swat valley, a former tourist destination that once boasted Pakistan’s best skiing, told The Irish Times in a telephone interview yesterday.
After days of speculation, the Pakistani army moved yesterday to clip the wings of the country’s indigenous Taliban which had grown emboldened following a controversial peace deal allowing them impose their own severe version of sharia law, referred to locally as Nizam-e-Adl, in Swat and neighbouring areas that make up what is known as the Malakand Division.
The government hoped the agreement would help pacify the restive region, which comprises one-third of Pakistan’s rugged North West Frontier Province, after more than a year of fighting and a rash of suicide bombings that together left more than 800 people dead and more than 100,000 displaced.
Military officials said “scores” of militants had been killed yesterday in the Lower Dir area of Malakand. In recent weeks, the Taliban had streamed into Buner, a district that nestles just south of Swat and only 65 miles across a mountain range from Pakistan’s increasingly vulnerable capital Islamabad. Tales abounded of the Taliban banning music, ordering all girls over the age of seven to wear a burka, and all men to grow beards.
That followed numerous reports of heavily armed Taliban fighters in black turbans fanning throughout Swat and surrounding areas, whipping suspected thieves, carrying out beheadings, cutting off the ears of tribal elders who stood up to them and bombing buildings including girls’ schools and aid agency offices.
“If the Taliban continue to move at this pace they will soon be knocking at the doors of Islamabad,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of one of Pakistan’s Islamist political parties, warned in parliament last week.
Amid increasingly tough talk from Islamabad and Washington, the Taliban began to withdraw from Buner on Friday. But officials believe some remain in the shadows, bolstered by local sympathisers.
Muslim Khan is defiant when asked about a broader military offensive, arguing that sending troops to Swat would constitute a violation of the recently signed accord. “We will fight like before if they break the agreement,” he says. “The Taliban can move everywhere in the mountains and cities. We can do anything. We can reach anywhere. There are soldiers from more than 30 countries in Afghanistan – can they control the Taliban there? No.” Khan claims that worries the Taliban seek to take power in Islamabad are misplaced.
“Let the government impose sharia and we will watch only. That is all we want.”
But many remain unconvinced that the ambitions of Pakistan’s homegrown Taliban will stay in check. “The threat faced by Pakistan is indeed an extreme one,” warned the News, one of the country’s major English-language dailies, in an editorial yesterday. “There is as yet no sign that the militants are halting their efforts to capture territory.”
The same newspaper recently compared Pakistan to Vietnam: a weak and corrupt state finding itself being “nibbled away” by militants. “The Taliban have the upper hand, and they know it,” it added.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who last week raised hackles within official circles in Pakistan when she accused the government of “basically abdicating” in the face of Taliban aggression and warned that instability in the nuclear-armed country posed a “mortal threat” to international security, toned down her rhetoric yesterday but the message was still the same.
“We cannot . . . let this go on any further,” she told an interviewer. “Which is why we’re pushing so hard for the Pakistanis to come together around a strategy to take their country back.” The Pakistani government has been prickly over criticism that its deal with the Taliban amounted to capitulation and served only to play into the militants’ hands. In recent days, however, its somewhat muted stance on the escalating situation – which Amnesty International last week described as “fiddling while the North West Frontier Province burns” – has turned more muscular.
Army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani issued a statement saying it “will not allow the militants to dictate terms or impose their way of life”.
Yesterday interior minister Rehman Malik blamed the Taliban for the deaths of 12 children killed by a bomb hidden in a football in Lower Dir. “The Taliban have exposed their real face by killing innocent children,” he said.
Maj-Gen Tariq Khan, commander of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps (FC), calls for patience. “There is a very negative perception in the West that maybe we are not doing enough or we could do better. I would tell people to be more patient,” he says, sitting in his office in Balahisar Fort, an historic edifice that rises over the frontier town of Peshawar. The FC, a 60,000-strong paramilitary force established as a border patrol in colonial times, has found itself on the frontlines of the battle against militants including Taliban and al-Qaeda in the tribal badlands that border Afghanistan. It was FC personnel who engaged with militants in Lower Dir yesterday.
Maj-Gen Khan argues that this is a battle that cannot be won by military means alone, stressing the need for more development in Pakistan’s northwestern flank to ensure its wider population does not fall prey to ideologies many insist were imported by foreign militants who fled the bombardment of Afghanistan after 9/11.
But the fact that you don’t even have to leave Islamabad to get a sense of the scale of Pakistan’s challenge in the face of an arc of militancy that now stretches from deepest Punjab and over the border into Afghanistan is telling in itself.
On Friday, thousands of worshippers had gathered for prayers at Lal Masjid, a pro-Taliban mosque situated a short drive away from the national parliament. The mosque has been rebuilt after a bloody standoff in 2007 during which at least 100 people died.
Maulana Abdul Aziz, recently released after almost two years in jail, told followers to remember his brother who had died in the siege, and said he planned to launch soon a campaign for the introduction of sharia across Pakistan.
Some prayer-goers had travelled hundreds of miles for the occasion, including Mirza Beg. “We would welcome the Taliban in all parts of the country because they would bring peace and true Islam,” he said. One man with a freshly shaven face who said he was from Buner prompted a cacophony of criticism when he dared raise objections to what was happening in his home town since the Taliban arrived. Two other young men with wispy beards were exultant. “We want Nizam-e-Adl in the whole of Pakistan and the whole world,” they cried.