Insurgent Pakistan
| Date | 01 April 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.2041-9066.2010.00015.x |
| Author | Muhammad Idrees Ahmad |
| Published date | 01 April 2010 |
| Subject Matter | From the Front Line |
ghan Taliban is a diffuse, indigenous, rural
insurgency resisting the US occupation. The
Pakistani Taliban’s concerns on the other
hand are local to the country’s north-west
frontier. Al-Qaeda is a transnational jihadist
movement, a nominal umbrella that both
groups tolerate only to the extent that their
goals converge. It is a marriage of conven-
ience – and it has not prevented Taliban
leaders from blaming al-Qaeda for inviting
the US attack on their respective homelands.
Defeating the Taliban would not necessarily
eliminate al-Qaeda, and the Taliban could
return to power without bringing back for-
eign jihadis. They have every reason not
to. The last thing a restored Taliban would
want is to present the US with an excuse to
reoccupy its country.
In Pakistan, the naming of the Tehreek-
e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is indicative of a
movement that sees itself as a local insur-
gency rather than a transnational jihadist
movement. Founded on 14 December 2007
as an umbrella organisation of Pashtun Is-
lamists, the TTP presented a set of demands,
all of which refl ected local concerns. More-
over, the TTP has factions whose interests
do not always accord with its broader goals.
The movement is no doubt broadly sympa-
thetic to the efforts of the Afghan Taliban
and it resents Pakistani participation in the
US war on terror; however, it possesses nei-
ther the intent nor the capacity to attack the
US on its own soil.
The year 2009 was pivotal in the evo-
lution of the insurgency in Pakistan: in it
the last peace agreement between the TTP
and the Pakistani government collapsed
under US pressure. The military has since
launched two major offensives against
the insurgents in Malakand and the semi-
autonomous Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA). The rebel leader Baitullah
Mehsud was assassinated in a US drone
strike. The violence has been relentless
since: thousands killed, millions displaced.
In response, a merciless terrorist campaign
has hit Pakistan’s major cities.
Towards the end of 2009, I returned to
Peshawar. The same night I arrived in the
From the Front Line
Insurgent Pakistan
No nation has ever made a frank avowal of its
real imperial motives. It always claims to be
primarily concerned with the peace and pros-
perity of the people whom it subjugates.
(Reinhold Niebuhr).
The ironies of US President Barack
Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in
Oslo were widely noted. Not since
Theodore Roosevelt had a Nobel laureate
used the acceptance ceremony to make a
case for war. Both men appealed to St Au-
gustine’s authority to support the justness
of their wars. However, when Roosevelt
spoke he had already concluded the peace
for which he was honoured; Obama’s lies
distant, inchoate in the purgatory of ‘hope’.
In the present he remains at war – as Henry
Kissinger was, when he picked up his prize
– having recently ordered the second major
escalation of his brief presidency. Kissing-
er’s war simmered on for two more years;
Obama’s will likely last longer.
Afghanistan may well become Obama’s
Vietnam, but his diversion is not Cambo-
dia, or Laos, it is nuclear-armed Pakistan.
History sometimes repeats itself both as
tragedy and farce.
Weeks before Obama described al-Qaeda
as a threat on a par with Nazi Germany,
national security adviser, General James
Jones, told CNN that the organisation had
fewer than a hundred men in Afghanistan.
Driven by institutional inertia and vulner-
able to the charge of weakness, Obama
appears unable to disengage. Instead he
has borrowed Bush’s rhetoric of good and
evil and joined the fear factory. He has
subsumed al-Qaeda and the Taliban into a
singular threat of global proportions whose
defeat he pronounced ‘fundamental to the
defense of our people’. Afghanistan, he ar-
gued, will not be pacifi ed until the Taliban’s
allies in Pakistan are vanquished. Precipi-
tated withdrawal will restore the Taliban to
power, and create a safe haven for al-Qaeda
to plan more terrorist attacks on the west.
Like ‘al-Qaeda’, the very label ‘Taliban
Movement’ suggests an organisational co-
herence that in fact does not exist. The Af-
Pakistan’s frontier insurgency and porous borders are blamed for the floundering military mission in Afghanistan.
However, as Muhammad Idrees Ahmad reports, the militant backlash in Pakistan is primarily a consequence
of the US–Nato presence.
city, the quiet suburb where I grew up was
hit by nine rockets. In the months since,
Peshawar has sustained near-daily bomb
and mortar attacks, including suicide bomb-
ings. In another ominous development, the
Taliban, hitherto an exclusively Pashtun
phenomenon, has now been joined by a
new force: the Punjabi Taliban. The militant
attacks have grown increasingly audacious,
even reaching the heart of Pakistan’s mili-
tary establishment.
Although Pakistan’s US-mandated mili-
tary policy has had no discernible impact
on the situation in Afghanistan, its own
security has progressively deteriorated.
The insurgents have developed into a more
potent threat with each new military in-
cursion, their attacks becoming increasingly
indiscriminate.
This spiral into chaos began in 2002 when,
following their rout, many Afghan militants
crossed the porous border to regroup in
Pakistan’s tribal areas. Veteran anti-Soviet
commander Jalaluddin Haqqani’s network
was headquartered in North Waziristan,
and Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami
in Bajaur. Further south, most of the former
Taliban leadership took sanctuary in Balu-
chistan where Afghanistan’s one-time ruler
Mullah Omer retains overall command of
the Afghan insurgency. Like most of the
people along Pakistan’s western border,
these groups are all ethnic Pashtuns, with
long-standing ties to Pakistan’s military.
Both the Peshawar Shura (actually based
in North Waziristan) and the Quetta Shura
(based in Baluchistan) are careful not to
carry out any operations inside Pakistan. In
turn Pakistan sees these groups as bulwarks
against the growing Indian infl uence in Af-
ghanistan. They are also the only effective
political-military organisation representing
the majority Pashtuns in Afghanistan.
As US pressure mounted, the Pakistan
army marched in to apprehend ‘foreign
fi ghters’ in the tribal areas, mainly Uzbeks,
Chechens and Arabs. When the tribes re-
fused to surrender their ‘guests’, they were
subjected to collective punishment, unit-
ing them against the government. Local
36 Political Insight
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