Taliban resurgence in Pakistan
DESPITE President Bush's description of Pakistan as a "strong ally and vibrant democracy" during the recent visit to Washington by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, a suspected US missile attack inside Pakistan that reportedly killed a top Taliban biological and chemical weapons expert underscores US suspicion that Pakistan is not doing enough in the fight against extremists and terrorists and Afghan President Karzai's accusation that Pakistan military intelligence is not doing its best to prevent cross-border militancy by Afghan Talibans from their sanctuary in some areas of the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA).
Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was more forceful in demanding that the US confront Islamabad on the question of funding of Islamist extremists. According to Obama: "It is not just in the interest of Afghan security or the US's security, it is in the interest of Pakistani security that we shut down those (terrorist) bases."
While one cannot dispute the urgent necessity of confronting and defeating terrorism in any form one has to consider whether the Pakistan government has the capacity to wipe out Islamic extremism in areas that for centuries defied central control, that during the regime of General Ziaul Huq the Talibans were given both financial and material assistance by the US and the then Pakistan government to fight Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, and no less that the US invasion of Iraq as an implementation of President Bush's doctrine of preemption is largely perceived in Pakistan and in many Islamic countries as a war against Islam and, as a result, is bound to put any government in Pakistan in a difficult position to be on the same page with the US war on terror.
Added is the number of terrorist groups operating in and from Pakistan territory that, according to Ashley Tellis of Carnegie Foundation and Rohan Gunaratna of International Center of Political Violence and Terrorism, can be classified as sectarian, anti-Indian, Afghan Taliban, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and no less importantly the Pakistani Talibans, who have become an effective fighting machine engaging both the Pakistani military and the Nato forces in Afghanistan.
The emergence and consolidation of Pakistani Talibans in the FATA happened when the Pakistani forces were fighting the "foreign" Taliban elements and, in the process, ignored the transition of the indigenous elements from Taliban sympathisers to a force fully subscribing to the Taliban ideology. Hasan Abbas, a fellow of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government wrote in an article that "during this process (of Pakistani forces fighting foreign terrorists) the Pakistani Taliban effectively established themselves as an alternative leadership to the traditional tribal elders. By the time the Pakistani government realised the changing dynamics and tried to resurrect the tribal jirga institution, it was too late. The Taliban had killed approximately two hundred of the tribal elders under charges of being Pakistani or American spies."
The disparate Taliban elements banded together in December last year under the banner of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). TTP has announced a program of defensive jihad against the Pakistan army, enforcement of Sharia laws, and to unitedly fight against Nato forces in Afghanistan. These elements appear to be more extremist as the traditional intermediaries between the Taliban and the establishment have been replaced by "a younger generation of more violent radical leaders who are in a hurry and have no patience for compromise."
Maulana Fazlur Rahman, chief of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), a pro-Taliban political party of Pakistan was quoted by the New York Times as saying that "when the jihad in Afghanistan started, the maliks (tribal leaders) and the old tribal system in Afghanistan ended; a new leadership arose. Similar is the case in tribal areas." South Asian expert Stephen Cohen writes in his book, The idea of Pakistan, that the Taliban grew out of a generation of leaders who had received their education in Pakistan's religious schools in NWFP and Baluchistan, and sought to gain power in Afghanistan and then purify it of contaminating elements. Their success was due in part to support received from Pakistani intelligence and various Pakistani military groups, and especially JUI.
Unfortunately for Pakistan, the Taliban began to see Pakistan itself as a ripe fruit to be plucked. The defeat of the Taliban at the hands of the Western powers had a blow-back effect on Pakistan in the form of sectarian violence, appearance of drug culture, easy availability of guns, and general social breakdown that came at a big cost to the socio-political structure of the country. Neo-conservative Robert Kagan (The return of history and the end of dreams) dismisses the possibility of a cataclysmic effect of "the struggle between modernisation and Islamic radicalism" on international affairs because "Islamic resistance to westernisation is not a new phenomenon" and "in the struggle between traditionalism and modernity, tradition cannot win."
In Pakistan, the fight to recover full control of the Swat valley is still continuing between the government forces and the Pakistani Taliban at a time when Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has just concluded his visit to the US, during which President Bush and Vice-President Cheney reportedly strongly urged the Pakistan government to take more seriously its responsibility in the war on terror despite Pakistan's claim of loss of lives in its forces and civilian casualties in its continuing fight against the Taliban. Many Pakistanis believe that the Westerners' heavy-handed handling of the frontier regions is doing more harm than good because of their ignorance of the tribal customs and unfamiliarity with the terrain in the frontier region. Besides, President Bush is not particularly popular in Pakistan and, consequently, the Pakistan government's war on terror is also hugely unpopular in the country.
One wonders whether the Americans are aware of the paradox being faced by the Pakistani leaders, the paradox of waging an unpopular war that also must be waged at all cost. But then again, as the al-Qaeda and the Taliban cannot be allowed to turn Pakistan into a failed state and cause instability in one of the most volatile regions in the world, one hopes that the four countries -- Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Bangladesh -- assailed by Islamic extremism in varying degrees would cooperate both within the ambit of Saarc and bilaterally in order to defeat this scourge in this region and the world.
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