On Oct 16, Pakistani news sources reported that Qari Hussain, the second-in-command of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), had been killed in a drone strike on Oct 2. Since reports of his death have been circulated several times before, the news of the killing was under some scrutiny.

Indeed, within a few hours of the news release, sources in the Pakistani media began to report otherwise. A national daily reported that the drone attack in question had, in fact, merely injured Qari Hussain while two of his bodyguards and eight Germans had been killed.

The story of Qari Hussain and his many deaths are characteristic of the TTP and its seeming invincibility. If news headlines of the past two years are even cursorily perused, one can see the regularity with which senior Taliban leaders are reportedly killed in Pakistan.

According to TheLongWarJournal, a website that keeps track of the number of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders killed, a total of 1,549 people have been killed by US drone strikes and other operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan since 2006.

In 2010 so far, a total of 605 Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have reportedly been killed in a total of 87 reported drone attacks. Major leaders reported as killed this year include Sheikh Fateh Al-Masri, Al Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Qari Mohammad Zafar, an Al Qaeda leader said to have attacked the US consulate in Karachi, Mustafa Abu Yazid, a top Al Qaeda finance official and other Al Qaeda and TTP office-bearers.

The list is exhaustive and given the regularity with which Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are apparently being killed, it would be expected that their leadership cadres would have been more or less decimated. If 605 ‘leaders’ of any organisation are killed, that organisation’s capacity to operate ought to be significantly impacted.

The death of Baitullah Mehsud last year was, for instance, celebrated as a major blow to the organisation. This would suggest, then, that the reported injuries suffered by Qari Hussain should be considered as crippling the entire leadership cadre of the organisation. Add to this the deaths of sundry thirds- and fourths-in-command that are regularly reported in North Waziristan and it becomes baffling how the Taliban are able to conduct any operation at all, let alone stand up to not one but two much larger and better-equipped armies.

And yet, like zombies in a horror movie, the Taliban persist, their leaders continually rising from the dead to be killed again and again. It seems that both groups, Al Qaeda and the TTP, have access to some sort of magic elixir that allows them to produce new leaders with the speed and efficiency of Swiss watchmakers. No sooner is one leader ‘killed’, a new one seems to be waiting and ready to take over at the helm, organise the ranks and continue the terror without missing a beat.

If each of these reports of the killing of ‘senior’ leaders is to be believed, it would seem that both Al Qaeda and the TTP are exceptionally egalitarian organisations where, as in kindergarten classrooms, everyone is special and everyone is a leader.

Since 2004, when Predator aircraft began surveying the tribal areas, the cycle of drone attacks followed by victorious reports of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders’ deaths has become a well-rehearsed pantomime. The tableau appears so effortless now that it is considered futile to question its efficacy or utility. On both sides are the self-serving economies of supply and demand.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda appear to have an endless supply of leaders while the US and Nato forces have a correspondingly insatiable desire to kill them. The Pakistani state, with a new aid economy built on the delivery of terrorists and terror suspects, participates happily in a new form of exchange where it can capitalise on a scourge that is otherwise a bloodthirsty nuisance. The dearth of data aids the process, allowing every casualty of drone attacks to be summarily labelled as a ‘senior’, ‘high-level’ or ‘second-in-command’ leader.

The losers in the equation are unsurprisingly the Pakistani people, especially those unfortunate enough to be inhabitants of North and South Waziristan. As a recent report produced by CIVIC, an NGO that collects data on civilians in conflict areas, argues, the low civilian casualty figures provided by the United States are likely to be inaccurate. The report cites civilian casualties from drone attacks in 2009-2010 to be somewhere between 788 and 1,344 — far greater than the 20 reported in congressional hearings on drone strikes held this past April.

Meanwhile, the strikes are far from accurate, often killing those that are committed to fighting the Taliban and bringing peace to the region. The very first drone strike ordered by President Obama, for instance, in January last year, targeted not a militant stronghold but the house of Malik Gulistan Khan, a tribal elder who was a member of a local pro-government peace committee. His father, brother and various members of his family were killed. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no investigation was carried out and no compensation provided.

Given the information in the CIVIC report, one must wonder about the truth behind every headline that proclaims the death of yet another Al Qaeda or Taliban leader. With a complete absence of on-the-ground investigations following drone attacks, it is virtually impossible to contest the contentions that proudly and mechanically announce the death of this or that leader. And so Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are targeted and killed and then resurrected in an endless cycle before a baffled world tired of counting heads.

The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.

Why attack the shrines?
A spate of terrorist attacks by puritan extremists on a number of famous Sufi shrines in Pakistan has brought into focus the shrine-going culture and its opponents. This is an important development, especially considering the negligible knowledge today’s young, educated urbanites have of this popular culture even though shrines continue to play an important spiritual and economic role in the lives of a majority of Pakistanis.

The shrine culture of devotional, recreational and professional activity around the shrines of Muslim saints has been present in the subcontinent for over a thousand years. It is largely associated with activity around the shrines of Sufi saints who started arriving from Iraq, Iran and Central Asia with various waves of Muslim imperialists from 8th century onwards.

These men (and some women) allowed for fusing Muslim esotericism, as it had developed in their home countries over the years, with the cultural rituals of Indian non-Muslim communities — all were welcome to the presence of the Muslim divine. More than the ulema, it was the Sufi saints whose all-inclusive approach helped spread Islam in this region.

Over time, a permissive culture of devotional music, indigenous rituals and assorted intoxicants (said to be used to induce trance-like state) started taking shape around the shrines. The shrine culture was patronised by various Muslim dynasties that ruled the subcontinent, and by the 19th century, it had become a vital part of the belief and ritual system of a vast majority of Muslims.

This system has remained intact despite the many puritan movements that attempted to expunge what they alleged were innovations that Muslims of India had adopted from Hinduism. However, around late 1960s urban middle-class Pakistan had left this culture to the largely uneducated and the superstitious lot or the feudal lords who presided over them.

But just like middle-class hippies in the West in the 1960s, who had chosen various esoteric eastern spiritual beliefs to demonstrate their disapproval of the ‘soullessness’ of the western culture, many young, middle-class Pakistanis in the 1970s, began looking to the shrine culture as a way to make a social and political connect with the dispossessed masses. Thus urban middle-class youth came into contact with rural peasants, petty traders and the urban working classes who thronged the shrines.

Middle-class Pakistani youth began to frequent shrines, especially on Thursday nights when a number of shrines hold nights dedicated to the traditional Sufi devotional music. The popular genre of qawali has been sung in the region for over seven hundred years. Now it has become a commercially lucrative art form, but at its pristine best it remains an impassionate fixture at shrines on Thursday nights.

The shrine culture is strongly owned by the Barelvi, mainstream Sunnis. They celebrate the ritual and social outcome of Sufism’s historical engagement with other faiths. This acceptance inherent in the popular belief system historically worked well to harmonise relations between Muslims and the Hindu majority of India. Pakistan’s military as well as civilian ruling elites did not meddle with the shrine culture. In fact, the Z.A. Bhutto regime (1972-77) actually patronised (and utilised) it as an expression of populism.

According to a report published in 1979, more Pakistanis visited shrines than they did mosques. Though some scorn at this, there are many who would say that the level of violence, crime and corruption in society was much lower than what it climbed up to from 1980s onwards. The Ziaul Haq dictatorship (1977-88) was inspired by the more puritan strains of the faith, and found it hard to introduce certain harsh Islamic laws in a social scene that was steeped in centuries-old traditions of tolerant shrine-going Muslim creed.

This popular religious culture was not attuned to a puritan interpretation of jihad, which constituted a problem for the Zia regime. He had to propagate the importance of ‘jihad against the infidels’ in the wake of Pakistan’s frontline status in the CIA-backed guerrilla war against Soviet occupation forces present in Afghanistan. The dictatorship went about building a number of puritan mosques and madressahs, mostly funded by donations from the Gulf states. Zia also began partronising certain spiritual leaders (pirs) around some shrines.

This was also done because many shrines (especially in Sindh) had become the centre of activity of various anti-Zia political forces. The tactic of hijacking the shrines by the Zia regime was successful in diminishing the participation of the middle-class in the shrine culture, but the culture’s core participants (the masses) remained intact. The status quo in this regard remained unchanged, and many shrines faced neglect and growth of crime around them.

The state’s interest in reinvigorating the all-encompassing shrine culture was revived after the tragic 9/11 episode. Governments under Musharraf (and the current PPP-led coalition) put in efforts to upgrade various shrines in an attempt to arrest the growth of extremism which has also found an appeal among the urban middle-class. This is why puritan terror outfits like the Taliban have begun targeting the shrines