The battle for Peshawar

The militants, while playing ball with the military over the last two years, have kidnapped foreigners and held influential locals and Pakistani diplomats to ransom; they have carried out suicide bombings inside Pakistan and are accused of masterminding Benazir Bhutto8217;s assassination; they have held paramilitary personnel hostage, blown up strategic installations, run propaganda radio stations, shut down and blown up girls8217; schools, colleges and music shops, enforced purdah, banned the shaving of beards and dispensed tribal justice, even meting out capital punishment to those who did not obey their orders. They have demanded the withdrawal of paramilitary forces from the areas 8220;under their control8221; and threatened to enforce Islamic law across the land. So far they have been undisturbed up in the rocky mountains, confiscating and raiding supplies meant for the Afghan transit trade, and smuggling the loot across the border to fund their war on the 8220;war on terror8221; and the writ of the Pakistani state.

The erstwhile secular and leftist Awami National Party ANP provincial government, led by the grandson of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, has even gone as far as risking its own popularity by acting against the electoral mandate given it in the February election when it offered the militants peace deals for keeping calm inside Pakistan, ostensibly leaving them free to attack Afghan and NATO forces across the border. The rationale: the ANP wants to avoid a Pakhtoon bloodbath because Pakistani paramilitary forces stationed in the region comprise local Pakhtoons. A faulty premise indeed given that those the Taliban are left free to attack in Afghanistan are also largely Pakhtoon.

The situation could not be messier; it is made worse by internecine feuds among emerging warlords. The erosion of the state8217;s authority has meant that once the government has been made virtually ineffective, tribal warlords like Baituallah Mehsud, Maulvi Umar, Mullah Fazlullah and Mangal Bagh Afridi will fight it out amongst themselves; a situation that is reminiscent of the tribal feuds that convulsed Afghanistan after Soviet forces withdrew in 1989 from that country.

It is not clear whether the Pakistan government8217;s relinquishing of its control and its handing over the troubled areas to the army8217;s high command will solve the problem. But the government, under pressure from the United States as well as the public, has been forced to finally sit the army chief down and ask him to treat the 8220;war on terror8221; as Pakistan8217;s national war against extremism and militancy. The move comes amid promises of carrying out development work and creating employment opportunities in Taliban-controlled areas, and of punishing those who take the law into their own hands.

The Taliban are not likely to oblige and fall in line so readily. Peace deals and incentives have not worked in the past and are least likely to work at a time when the government is now finally saying it will not tolerate any more lawlessness. However, the truth is that lawlessness is now a fact of life in the Taliban-controlled areas. Almost daily, vital installations are attacked and people suspected of being sympathetic to the government are ambushed and brutally slaughtered. The blowing up of a luxury hotel and the army8217;s ski resort in Swat valley on Thursday was but the latest such incident.

Military action against the disparate extremists and those who call themselves Taliban but are not united under one command seems the only way to contain the growing menace. In the meeting presided over by Prime Minister Gilani and held earlier in the week with the army chief, the Frontier governor and the chief minister were seen to be fully on board, which is a tacit admission on the part of the ANP that the peace deals it advocated with the militants were not the answer to that beleaguered province8217;s woes.

The writer is an editor with 8216;Dawn8217;, based in Karachi murtazarazvihotmail.com