Baitullah Mehsud has finally broken his silence and told the BBC personally from his hideout in FATA: “By the grace of Allah Almighty, I am claiming responsibility for the attack on the police training school in Lahore with eagerness, honour and love and will continue similar strikes across the country”. In 2005, Mr Mehsud’s militia killed over 100 policemen and soldiers; in 2007, the toll was nearly 2000. In 2008, he cobbled the Taliban Tehreek of Pakistan (TTP) comprising various warlords. This has since all but captured Swat under the aegis of his deputy Fazlullah.
The police academy at Munawan was a “soft” unguarded target, like the FIA building and the Navy War College in Lahore which were targeted last year. The blasts at the Norwegian embassy and the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad can also be laid at Mr Mehsud’s door. Indeed, the government has already accused him of engineering the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in November 2007. There are thousands of such soft targets across the country. The police is insufficient and ill-equipped to defend them. Mr Mehsud is targeting the police and security agencies because he wants to demoralize them from fighting his forces. Indeed, since the police and khassadars are so thinly stretched across the tribal areas and much of the NWFP and Swat, this is the best way to seize territory and establish alternative state structures in the captured spaces. For example, a mosque in Jamrud in Khybar was attacked last week because many local “khassadars” were praying in it. Only a week earlier a local khassadar force had attacked and scattered a local Taliban warlord allied to the TTP. The suicide bombing was a retaliatory strike by the Taliban, who later went on to capture a dozen khassadars and kill others.
If all this cannot be refuted, why do most Pakistanis have so much difficulty in accepting Mr Mehsud’s culpability? Certainly, he and his followers make no bones about their contempt for democracy, elections and constitutionalism. They say their aim is to seize Afghanistan and all of Pakistan and establish an Islamic Emirate of the Taliban. Their writ runs in much of FATA. It is now sweeping across Swat and beginning to encroach into Dir and Chitral. Many areas of the NWFP are threatened by them because they can kidnap and attack people with impunity. They are much better armed and certainly more mobile than the police of the region. Their network includes the disgruntled elements of the old military-sponsored jihadist network in southern Punjab and Karachi spawned by various hard-line Sunni outfits like the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. The MQM now says that Karachi, which has a significant Pashtun population that has migrated from the NWFP and Afghanistan over the years and is concentrated in certain key sectors of the economy, is threatened by the Taliban.
Naïve Pakistanis say that if the Americans were to leave Afghanistan and the Pakistan government were to abandon its support for them, the Taliban would either melt away or stop warring with the Pakistan state, even though the Taliban’s excesses in Afghanistan are well known and their intention to replicate their experience in Pakistan are routinely broadcast from mobile FM radio stations in FATA. They support “peace deals” with the Taliban even though these peace deals lead to a loss of Pakistani territory to the Taliban and erode the writ of the Pakistani state markedly. They say there is no such thing as Al-Qaeda and there are no foreign fighters in FATA, even though many foreigners have been hunted down and killed in these areas and Al-Qaeda spokesmen appear from time to time on TV channels to make claims of victories and hurl threats of more attacks to come. When the Taliban kill Pakistani policemen, soldiers, or local politicians and tribal elders, they say “Muslims cannot conceivably kill Muslims” and that some “foreign hand” must be involved, even though Muslims have been killing each other in Sudan, Egypt, Iraq and in sectarian conflict across the Muslim world for decades, and evidence of any foreign hand is never presented. The Pakistan media, by and large, supports and propagates this unfortunate view.
The underlying factor is the rampant anti-Americanism sweeping Pakistan. Because the Taliban are fighting the Ugly American, popular sympathy is with them, even when most people oppose any Talibanisation of their own region or locality. The lack of credibility and loss of faith in the Pakistani state and government, which are generally unable to protect or inspire their citizens, is another reason for disowning their cause against the Taliban and succumbing to the psychology of frustration, alienation, anger and fear.
The popular opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, has finally agreed that “the concerns of the West about extremism and terrorism in Pakistan are justified”. This is great news. If the mainstream PPP and PMLN parties can stop fighting each other, they may be able to forge a mutual agenda to ward off this evil. Perhaps then the media will also come on board and the people of Pakistan can be apprised of the facts and galvanized to support their state and government. Until then, however, we must hunker down to survive the Taliban offensive that is gathering storm in Afghanistan and Pakistan.