Long Journey Back to Heaven

November 02, 2009

By Mustafa Qadri

In July 2007, emboldened by the state’s inaction, Fazlullah launched a surprise offensive against police and security forces throughout Malakand, setting up a parallel administration that taxed non-Muslims, closed down music shops and forbade women from attending schools and colleges. It took the Pakistan Army until October to finally send troops into what became a bloody town-to-town battle during which military operations and a string of audacious suicide bombings claimed hundreds of lives. Although the Army regained several key areas, the overall stalemate and public hostility towards the operations compelled top generals to sue for peace with Fazlullah’s Taliban.

But the peace proved short lived as the Taliban insurgency, now spreading to the neighbouring Bajaur tribal area, a key transit point bordering Afghanistan, continued to expand across the Swat valley. Under a mix of international and domestic pressure, the Army commenced a second, much larger operation in July 2008. Backed by jets, helicopter gunships and counterinsurgency training, primarily from the United States, the Army managed to retake many of the largest towns.

But the war was taking an increasingly devastating toll on civilians. Desperate for an end to hostilities, many called for a detailed peace agreement in the hope that the Taliban and its TSNM allies would cease hostilities if their key demand, the application of Sharia Law, was accepted across Malakand. With the Army engaged in an unpopular war, the government—facing immense political pressure due to rising inflation and nationwide energy shortfalls—finally caved.

Although the Swat valley is often described as a settled part of Pakistan, it has more in common with the tribal areas that abut the border with Afghanistan than the urban centres of Punjab and Sindh. Most Swatis are Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group of Pakistan’s tribal areas. Although the laws of Pakistan are meant to apply in Swat (unlike in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that include South Waziristan, headquarters of the Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud), the judiciary and civil administration was considered corrupt and inefficient.

That history is a living, breathing legacy that connects past disenfranchisement with today’s poverty, ignorance and desperation, ills that gave the Taliban and TSNM a casus belli for confronting the state. They promised stability in exchange for their version of Islam.

For many locals, the peace deal’s announcement was hugely welcome. In the streets of the Malakand region, villagers distributed sweets, a common expression of joy usually reserved for celebrations at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. As a sign that the peace deal represented a victory for the Islamists, Sufi Mohammad led members of the TSNM on a march through Mingora, the largest city in the Swat valley. Most of those marching—an estimated 15,000—wore black turbans, the signature dress item of the Taliban.

But dark clouds of repression quickly formed over Swat. ‘We’ve lost the battle against the militants. We’ve seen day by day how the government and army have [been] weakened, how they have finally been reduced to talk and to deal…’

one local woman told Shuja Nawaz from the Atlantic Council. ‘Someone said to me the other day, “Don’t complain, because the one you complain to will be your enemy,”’ she added.

‘[The government of] Pakistan has betrayed us,’ says a middle ranking commander of the Swat Taliban with the nom de guerre Mullah Noor Alam. We are speaking at a secret meeting conducted at a remote Swat village in the dead of the night. ‘Ultimately, we want Sharia over all of Pakistan. But, first of all, here in Swat,’ he says determinedly. ‘Once Islam has been established in Pakistan, you will see there will no longer be any strife.’

But strife has become synonymous with the Taliban. As the Army stepped into Swat again in late April under intense pressure to remove the Taliban, the mutilated corpses of captured soldiers and others like dancers and music shop owners considered apostate littered the streets of Mingora. ‘In all of our Pashtun history, we never saw such barbarism,’ says Abdur Raheem Mundokhel from the Pakhtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party. ‘We have a history [of] people being killed in blood feuds, but still they would give honour even to their enemies.’