The army’s triumph over the Taliban in the valley risks turning sour

APTHE mayor of Swat, a pretty valley in north-west Pakistan that the army has just wrested back from the Taliban, has now returned to work. But instead of overseeing the rebuilding of the schools and roads, he has gathered his own lashkar, or traditional tribal militia, 2,500-men strong, to defend his village and nearby areas.

In late September Jamal Nasir, who used to feature near the top of a Taliban hit-list, returned to the Matta area of Swat two years after militants burned his house. He says that repairing infrastructure and damaged buildings can wait. Organising anti-Taliban forces comes first. “You have to involve the people in their own defence,” he says. “The army won’t stay here forever.”

Armed lashkars, or “village-defence committees” to employ the less aggressive term now in vogue, are being set up across Swat as unpaid private armies to guard individual districts. Swat was a relatively developed area, so the lashkar tradition is having to be relearnt. Such militias did not exist when the Taliban staged a near-complete takeover of the huge valley with ease in the autumn of 2007.

Militia members bring their own firearms. The better-off have Kalashnikovs; others have old shotguns or rusty pistols. Some white-bearded old men turn up with an axe or just a stick. At the airport outside Swat’s main town, Mingora, a lashkar about 10,000-strong rallied on September 24th (see picture), and was addressed by an army brigadier. This was a sign of the sanction the lashkars enjoy from the army and the government. Some see this as a dangerous abdication of authority that could spell trouble in the longer run.

More worrying for the time being is another development outside the law: extra-judicial killings. An estimated 300 to 400 corpses of suspected Taliban have turned up in Swat, dumped on street corners, bridges or outside homes. Last month Pakistani newspapers gave a figure of 251 bodies. Most show signs of severe torture. Some were killed with a single shot to the head, hands tied behind their backs. Often the dead were last seen alive being taken away by soldiers. The army claims they were killed in combat or by lashkars or others taking revenge on former tormentors.

Most of those who joined the Swat chapter of Pakistan’s fearsome Taliban movement were locals, from a Pushtun society that sets great store by vengeance. Swatis believe that most of the dead were genuinely involved in the Taliban, and so deserved their punishment. “Speaking not as a lawyer but as a citizen, I’d say that human rights are for human beings,” says Farid Ullah, a lawyer in Mingora. The Taliban he says, were not human. “Their acts were barbaric. They used to slit peoples’ throats with a knife.”

In early August the army dragged Ayub Khan away from his home in Mingora. Nine days later his body turned up on a nearby bridge. The 42-year-old newspaper hawker and father of five had been shot in the side of his head. He appeared to have been beaten all over including on the soles of his feet, with something like a belt. Several locals say that he had been a minor informer for the Taliban, spying on government offices on his paper rounds.

No official general investigation into the killings has been ordered and locals are terrified to speak about them. If the army is responsible, the purpose seems to be to show the people of Swat that the dreaded Taliban really have been eliminated. After several half-hearted operations in the past, Swatis were highly sceptical. This time however, the operation has been serious and remarkably successful. Some 2m people displaced in May were back in their homes by August, the Taliban routed.

Even locals tolerant of the torture and extra-judicial execution of Taliban members, however, are uneasy that some innocents have perished horribly. Akhtar Ali, for example, was picked up from the street at around 4pm on September 1st at a checkpoint in Mingora. Many passers-by saw the 28-year-old, who ran a popular electrical repair store, being taken away. His family were assured later that day that he would be released. But at 6am on September 5th his corpse was dumped on the doorstep of the family home, where many in the neighbourhood saw it. Every inch of his body showed signs of abuse, including burns made with an iron and the marks of merciless beatings. He was not shot, but tortured to death. It seems that he may have been a case of mistaken identity.

Asma Jahangir, chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent organisation, argues that even if the killings are being carried out by the militias, “these lashkars have been formed by the government.” The military spokesman in Swat, Colonel Akhtar Abbas, insists that there have been no killings in custody by the army, which is a “disciplined organisation”. However, in the one case of Akhtar Ali, an internal probe is under way, headed by a brigadier, the results of which may or may not be made public.

The HRCP says there is evidence of at least two mass graves in Swat. The army claims that retreating militants killed their own injured co-fighters, to prevent them passing any information to the authorities. Pakistan’s Western allies, though glad at the evidence of new vigour in Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban, are privately concerned about the killings, which risk sullying the army’s recent gains.