Tentative Steps Toward Opposition, Maybe

One of the things that has puzzled me about the Taliban’s advance through the the Northwest of Pakistan has been the general lack of alarm in mainstream Pakistani society. Starting perhaps most obviously with Pervez Musharraf’s decision to treat marching lawyers, rather than rampaging militants, as the more serious threat to the state, very few in Pakistan have expressed much concern or urgency about the gathering problem. I’ve tried to view this through an historical lens, hoping perhaps that maybe this all seems very alarming because we’re just not used to it happening, while it does indeed have a very long history there. But it still makes little sense for why the state itself seems so tepid in responding to threats. Now Mohammed Hanif, a reporter whose work for the BBC I have followed eagerly, has one explanation:

There is little sense of an impending crisis, just the blithe belief that the Taliban are not as bad as they seem, and that in any case, Pakistan’s fractious government and security services are no match for these men with beards and guns. I hear vague comparisons with the days before the Iranian revolution; the only problem is that we don’t seem to have a Khomeini, at least not yet. And we do have nuclear bombs.

In my hometown in Punjab, a businessman friend was inspired by the news from Swat. “If two hundred Taliban take over our town, then we can all start making our own decisions. Who needs this corrupt system anyway?” My friend is a typical middle-class conservative Pakistani, and people in cities across the country share his excitement. I tried to reason with him: “You drop your daughters off at school every morning, you always have music on in your car. That would be unthinkable if they take over.” He hesitated and then rolled out the explanation that most urban Pakistanis offer.

“What they are doing in Swat is their Pashtun culture,” he said, speaking of the ethnic group that dominates western Pakistan. “Islam says education is compulsory for every man and woman. And we Punjabis don’t have their culture.”

I think most people will take this to say that the “average man” in Pakistan is confused about what the Taliban are and what they represent. But I rather see it as something far more worrying: recently, far too much of Pakistani government decisions seem to be filtered through the Musharraf lens. Friends who are far more knowledgeable of Pakistan than I am have told me, again and again, that everyone there is sick of the corrupt “system.” No matter who is in charge, whether military or one of the wealthy corrupt landowning families (Sharif, Bhutto, etc.), there is always corruption. What people seem to crave when there is a change in the government is firmness and the appearance of incorruptability.

The recent push to overtake Buner makes sense in this context. Indeed, as Jane Perlez noted yesterday (and as we have been saying for well over a year), it was remarkable that the government never reinforced the police and Frontier Corps units that had been systematically attacked by Taliban elements. The behavior of government officials, which was tepid and often included a rush to concede territory, seemed to encourage the Taliban’s advance.

But is that on the verge of changing? The architect of the Swat Peace Deal, and one of the officials locals seem to think primarily responsible for the Taliban’s advance in the area, has been fired. The military has launched yet another “offensive” into Swat.

Probably not. These things happen all the time, and as the crest of the Taliban’s true threat to the state rears its head, it seems that the majority of Pakistan’s people seem content on navel-gazing about the abuses of the Musharraf regime rather than choosing one lesser evil (the PPP) over a horrendous evil (the Taliban).

Update: Steve LeVine kindly links here and notes that I’m showing more concern than I used to. The thing is, he’s right: I’ve been expressing this really poorly of late. Partially, this has been a reaction against what I view as petty alarmism over what still amounts to a tiny band of lightly armed rebels. But partially, it’s also born of a genuine belief that, should the Pakistani military and ISI choose to do so, they could remove the Taliban in fairly short order. For the reasons LeVine notes in his piece, they have chosen not to do so, which is both puzzling and strange. But I have not intended to downplay the seriousness of the challenge posed by the Taliban: they need to be stopped.

However, in thinking this through, especially in the light of Steve’s comments on my posts, I’ve come to a realization. The more shocking/depressing/whatever aspect to this whole thing is, I think, that the Pakistani government has declined to protect Pashtuns, and now seems concerned only when Sindhis and Punjabis are at risk. Mohammed Hanif hinted at that in his op-ed, but it matches with the events on the ground very precisely: only when they attack non-Pashtuns are the militants a concern. That is shockingly racist, even for a country with an unfortunate history of violent racism.

Update 2: Interestingly (or perhaps not), Peter Bergen seems to share my “this is not the end of Pakistan” philosophy.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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