SHARIA IN TALIBANISTAN…..
Commentary
Talibanistan
Nicholas Schmidle, 10.17.09, 4:26 PM ET
When the Pakistani Taliban declared, on a widely distributed propaganda DVD in early 2006, the establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan, the video featured a public hanging of five alleged bandits from North Waziristan.
Months later, one resident of South Waziristan told me the Taliban were now seen as modern-day Robin Hoods. When bandits stole his family’s car and kidnapped their driver, the family asked the authorities for help, only to have them reply that there wasn’t all that much they could do: “So then we called the local Talib commander. Within a few days, the Talibs raided a safe house, got the car and freed the driver.”
Since late 2001, when top Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders fled Afghanistan for sanctuary in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), such tales created a fawning folklore. And so long as the Talibs stayed in the rugged hills of Waziristan or the pine forests of Swat, Pakistanis in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad were happy to cling to their fantasy of the Taliban as a loose-knit group of pious, well-meaning Muslims, rough-hewn, to be sure, but wanting nothing more than to live according to sharia law. With this rationale in place, the “Talibanization” of northwestern Pakistan continued apace.
During the two years I lived in Pakistan, on a writing fellowship, I watched this process unfold. In the spring of 2006, I browsed the hashish and gun markets in Dara Adam Khel, a frontier town in the FATA, which fell to the Taliban a short time later. When I visited the Swat Valley with my wife in June of 2007, the government was as in control as it ever was; when I returned alone four months later, the Taliban had established checkpoints throughout the valley and scared off the police through a campaign of ambushes and suicide attacks.
As the Talibs fought their way into bazaars up and down the border, I overheard the variety of justifications and methods they employed. They promised to cleanse society of vice–and then bombed DVD shops suspected of selling pornographic titles, and kidnapped (and sometimes killed) brothel owners and dancing girls. They sermonized about a redistribution of wealth–and then assassinated the tribal chiefs who, aside from owning land, also possessed political power, which was the Taliban’s ultimate prize.
Residents of northwestern Pakistan grew increasingly ambivalent, if not outright hostile, toward the Taliban, although the religious militants retained dignity in the eyes of many other Pakistanis who supported their bid to implement sharia in the Swat Valley. A poll conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow in early 2008 showed that more than 40% of Pakistanis wanted to see “strict sharia law” implemented throughout Pakistan. And another survey by the group, done six months later, showed that 58% of Pakistanis supported negotiating with the Pakistani Taliban rather than fighting it.
The Swat Taliban were led by a short, squat man with dark tresses that fell past his shoulders and large spaces between his teeth, named Maulana Fazlullah. Fazlullah drummed up support for sharia and Taliban rule on a network of illegal FM radio stations. (These sermons earned Fazlullah the nickname “Maulana Radio.”) Weighing in on a broad range of topics, he lambasted a polio vaccination drive in Swat as a plot by the West to sterilize–and eventually eradicate–Muslims. In the summer of 2007, after his partner-in-arms, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, was killed during the Red Mosque siege, he used the radio station to incite jihad against the government.
By late summer 2007, the Swat Valley had spiraled into violence as Fazlullah’s supporters launched frequent ambushes and suicide attacks on the police and paramilitary units in the area. Soon enough, outmanned and outgunned, the police retreated to their barracks, and government officials fled for the security of Islamabad. Chaos gave local criminals brief reign and carjackers and kidnappers flourished. Then, in signature fashion, the Talibs stepped in and proclaimed themselves the law. It was just about that time when I rode a bus into Mingora, the main city in Swat. Within an hour of being there, I passed through a checkpoint manned by a couple of hundred militants with long hair, floppy caps and rocket launchers cradled on their shoulders. They were inspecting vehicles for uncovered women, CD players and spies. (Our host, a top Talib in the area, called ahead and instructed the militants to let us through.) “Since we were getting blamed for all the violence,” one Talib told me later, “we decided to patrol the roads ourselves. Guess what? Since then the violence has gone down.”
But the violence didn’t go down for everyone. Hundreds of policemen and soldiers were killed. Sometimes their headless bodies were left in open view to remind locals who it was that enjoyed the monopoly on violence. Later, truckloads of Talibs conquered the neighboring district of Shangla by swiftly overrunning a police station, then lowering the green and white Pakistani flag and raising their own, a black flag with two crossed swords and the kalma, or profession of faith, written underneath.
Security forces weren’t the only ones targeted. Hundreds of “dancing girls” fled the valley for safety after the Taliban threatened them with death. One who didn’t leave, a woman named Shabana, was killed, her body left in the center of Mingora. As she was being dragged from her home, she reportedly begged to be shot, rather than have her throat slit. The Talibs complied.
Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (Henry Holt, 2009). This is an excerpt from a longer essay published in the Fall 2009 issue of World Affairs Journal, a Heldref publication.
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