Swat: America Keep Out

[frozen]

wat: America Keep Out
4 JUNE, by Graham Usher
The Pakistan government’s announcement that only 10% of the Swat Valley now remains outside state control is a major military victory. In four weeks the Pakistan army has routed a local Taliban force that had held the valley in thrall for nearly a year. The speed of the Islamists’ collapse has surprised everyone, including the army.

So has the cost. Towns and villages have been reduced to shells. A thousand people have been confirmed killed, with a final toll probably much higher. And 2.4 million have fled their homes, the largest internal refugee displacement since Rwanda.

Most remarkably of all, most Pakistanis have backed their army. Appalled by atrocities that went by the name of the Taliban’s “Islamic” rule in Swat, political parties, the media, even the clergy, came together with the cry that Swat is “Pakistan’s war”, not America’s. Even today many displaced are terrified to go home until the Taliban leaders have been killed or captured.

Washington has stayed in the shadows, wisely. Having originally denounced the peace deal that brought the Taliban indirectly to power in Swat as an “abdication”, the United States is now “impressed” by the army’s counterinsurgency, and no longer so concerned about the safety of the country’s nuclear arsenal. Barack Obama believes Swat may even signal a “shift” in Pakistani perceptions of the enemy away from nuclear India to the east to an insurgent Taliban in the north and west.

And his special envoy Richard Holbrooke hopes (quietly) that the army will now take the war to the tribal areas on the Afghan border: “sanctuaries” for Taliban and al-Qaida militants and source for the flow of guerrillas fighting America in Afghanistan.

Nothing is more likely to drain the Swat operation of its support.

Anti-Americanism is at a zenith in Pakistan, stoked by US drone attacks in the tribal areas that in the last three years have killed 14 al-Qaida commanders and 700 Pakistanis. Islamabad is also bracing for the fall-out later this summer of Obama’s “surge” of 21,000 new troops into Afghanistan: the fear is so far from turning the tide in America’s losing war in Afghanistan it will turn a tide of Afghan Taliban into the tribal areas.

History is always close-by in Pakistan-US relations. The flight of al-Qaida and other Islamic militants into the tribal areas after the fall of Afghan Taliban regime in 2001 created the nucleus of the “sanctuaries”. And, in 2003, it was US-pressured army operations against them that radicalised the tribes and created the Pakistan Taliban, the native Pashtun-Islamist movement that went on to conquer Swat.

Its spread has almost been co-dependent on America. Nek Mohammed was the first Pakistan Taliban leader, with 5,000 tribal militants under arms. In 2004 the first ever US drone attack killed him. Today there are a dozen like warlords, each commanding 5,000 men. Baitullah Mehsud – self-proclaimed leader of the Pakistan Taliban – may have up to 30,000, with cadre stretching from Khyber to Karachi via Lahore.

Nothing – in other words – has fanned spread of Talibanisation in Pakistan faster than American driven moves to curb it. And nothing has helped the Pakistan government build a national consensus for the army’s current operation in Swat than the fact that “the US is not seen to be calling the shots in any pronounced way,” says Maleeha Lodhi, the former Pakistan ambassador in Washington.

On 3 June, in Islamabad, Holbrooke was asked whether he thought US policy was in any way responsible for the situation in Swat. “Not anyone except al-Qaida is responsible for the whole mess,” he said.

There’s only some truth in this. Ordinary Pakistanis are alienated by a Taliban Wahabism that crashes against a popular faith that remains, at heart, tolerant, eclectic, folkloric and Sufi. But the Taliban acquired legitimacy, especially among the young and poor, by opposing American actions not only in Afghanistan but also, increasingly, in Pakistan.

Swat has demonstrated that the Pakistan army can regain state power against the militants. If Washington really wants to help it to take on the rest of the Pakistan Taliban, it should end the drones, call off the surge and lay down a timetable for a withdrawal from Afghanistan.