Lt Gen (retired) Jan Mohammad Orakzai, the governor of the NWFP who recently got his marching orders, is the fourth in a row of provincial governors who have failed to devise an effective anti-Taliban policy. The “peace deal” signed by him in 2005 with Mr Baitullah Mehsud, which was doggedly billed by President Pervez Musharraf as a “tactical necessity”, has turned out to be a strategic disaster, as predicted earlier by independent experts and analysts on the subject, including this paper.
Mr Mehsud has just been nominated head of a 40-member Islamic Taliban Movement of Pakistan. He has cunningly exploited the two year lull to boast an army of 35000 Taliban, including hundreds of suicide bombers. South Waziristan has become the core base of the Taliban. Now Swat and large areas of the settled districts of the NWFP are threatened by Talibanisation. Indeed, fierce battles have been raging for control of territory a mere 20 miles from Peshawar in the vicinity of Dara Adam Khel and further along the way to Kohat etc.
More significantly, Mr Mehsud has enabled elements of Al-Qaeda to get a strong foothold in South Waziristan. In a TV interview Mr Mehsud admitted meeting Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda leader who died in Iraq fighting the Americans. But it is known that Mr Mehsud has received direct funding from Al Qaeda and indirect revenue from Afghan and Pakistani businessmen in the UAE. He has been successfully raiding convoys carrying war material from Pakistan to Afghanistan for the use of the 42,000 strong NATO forces. Around 40 percent of the military supplies to NATO forces go through Pakistan, and if these continue to be threatened then it is only a matter of time before the US military decides to get into the act to protect its supply routes.
The former interior minister, Mr Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, has now admitted that Talibanisation poses a real threat to Pakistan. He says the only way to confront it is through “swift and decisive action”. But he worries that “the police are scared; they don’t want to get involved” and the paramilitary Frontier Corps is “too stressed” to meet the challenge. He is dismayed by the fact that the Pakistan Army was reluctant in the past to take on the Taliban despite all the accumulating evidence of the threat they posed. Mr Sherpao’s most frightening admission is that the Taliban are supported by elements determined to derail the electoral process in the country. He fears “total Talibanisation” and has warned that unless political parties, civil society, and religious leaders unite to act against it, it is bound to overwhelm Pakistan. His views were echoed by the Afghanistan President, Mr Hamid Karzai, who claims that his country along with Pakistan faces “gloom and doom” from Taliban insurgents, and he has called for the world to “join hands” to defeat the “Islamist” rebels.
The latest response of the Musharraf regime to the threat of Talibanisation has been two fold. On the one hand, military force is being applied to clear out the areas captured by the Taliban. This is a defensive policy. It merely acts as a post-facto stop gap measure because it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. On the other hand, the government is reported to be planning a politico-religious initiative to win hearts and minds in the Talibanised areas. One such “Shariatisation” move is aimed at enforcing a special judiciary of Qazis in the provincially controlled areas of Swat, Dir and Chitral. But the extremist verdicts to be handed down by such courts in the interests of “swift justice” are more likely to promote Talibanisation instead of combating it. In this context, the reaction of Mr Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), is noteworthy. He says that Islam has not laid down any edict in favour of “Qazi courts”. So this would clearly amount to a parallel system that the Taliban would support. Indeed, the area has already been primed for a parallel extremist system by the Taliban’s illegal FM radio stations and in the federally administered Khyber Agency punishments like stoning to death are already being doled out.
The US has offered to widen its role in the Tribal Areas. But President Musharraf has spurned this offer because of its potential for backlash. That brings us full circle to the core issue of a lack of political consensus in the country under President Musharraf on how to deal with religious extremism in general and Talibanisation in particular. The dispossessed politicians are not ready to back the army on the difficult job of fighting an internal insurgency. Even some of our retired generals are concentrating their minds on the political aspects of the state and not on the survival of the state when they imply that the army should not take on the Taliban. That is why the only way forward is to hold free and fair elections which bring the peoples representatives back to political power so that they can strengthen and stabilize civilian democracy and support military action against the anarchists and extremists who want to make Pakistan a failed state.