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Introduction
Pakistan’s badlands are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA), located along its north western border with Afghanistan
consisting of seven autonomous agencies Bajaur, Khyber, Kurram,
Mohmand, Orakzai, South Waziristan, North Waziristan, and the tribal
areas adjoining the Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan
Districts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). These agencies
are predominantly populated by Pashtun tribes, with the Durand Line of
1893, the 2500 kilometre border line drawn by the British colonial
rulers between today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan, dividing tribes on
the two sides. Ever since the United State’s invasion of Afghanistan,
Pakistan’s badlands have been increasingly disturbed. Today there is a
new but local version of the Taliban controlling it. How has this come
about?
The Talibanisation of the Badlands
During the Afghanistan jihad, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)
organised the Taliban, mainly students of Pashtun refugees from
Afghanistan, equipped, trained and helped them to capture almost the
whole of the country. Hundreds of ISI officials were deployed with the
Taliban in different parts of Afghanistan. When the Al Qaeda team
attacked the twin trade towers in New York on 11 September 2001,
President Musharraf was given the option of being with the Taliban and
Al Qaeda or with the United States. General Musharraf chose to side
with the United States. At least that is what he told them. But it is
clear now that General Musharraf played a very clever double game. In
return for generous aid that bailed out Pakistan from a serious
foreign exchange crisis, General Musharraf handed over at least two
tactical air bases in Baluchistan for use by the United States for
operations into Afghanistan. He also deployed troops in the FATA areas
for the first time. Within Afghanistan a major operation was carried
out to pull out more than a hundred ISI officials who were
coordinating operations of the Taliban forces against the armies of
Abdul Rashid Dostum and the Panjsher leader Ahmed Shah Masood. He also
had hundreds of Taliban evacuated to the FATA areas, where they found
a sanctuary. General Musharraf allowed the CIA to open stations in
Pakistan. While a number of low level Al Qaeda cadres were caught by
the ISI or Pakistan Police, all the major catches like Ramzi bin al
Shib or Khalid Sheikh were caught in combined operations with the CIA,
only after the CIA field officers literally forced the Pakistan
officials to act. In the FATA areas, the Pakistan Army launched anti
terrorism operations in North and South Waziristan. The Army claimed
that they had killed scores of Al Qaeda cadres and local militants
harbouring them. The Taliban along with some of the foreign militants
who had taken refuge in the area, were also killed. The Taliban and
other militants in turn killed 600 military and paramilitary personnel
as well as many government officials.1
Pakistan imposed press restrictions in the tribal badlands. Some
journalists who took the risk and went in clandestinely despite the
restrictions of covering the tribal badlands have even disappeared. It
can however be safely concluded that the campaign to eradicate
terrorists and deny them sanctuaries was not being successful.2 On the
contrary, infiltration into Afghanistan has increased, since the
military having suffered major losses opted for a policy of
appeasement of the FATA based militants, signing peace accords, first
in South Waziristan in April 2004 and then in North Waziristan in
September 2006.3 The use of force, economic blockades and negotiations
in the Waziristan Agencies have had little success in forcing the
local militants to end their support for the Taliban and its allies
including Al Qaeda sympathisers. Ill planned and poorly implemented
military operations have only helped the Taliban cause.
There has been a flurry of comments by senior policy level officials
on the subject of Pakistan’s role in the rise of the Taliban in
Afghanistan. It started with a statement by Chris Alexander, the
former Canadian ambassador to Pakistan, and now the Deputy Director of
the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan that Pakistan was not doing
its part to comply with a UN resolution that designates Taliban
leaders to be terrorists. Alexander was referring to the fact that
most of the 142 Taliban leaders listed as such by the United Nations
in 1999 were still operating with impunity in Afghanistan and some of
these militants had enjoyed safe haven in Pakistan in 2006.4 The UN
concern relates to the fact that violence rose sharply in Afghanistan
in 2006, with militants killing about 4000 people.
For the first time a senior US official directly named Pakistan as the
centre of the Al Qaeda network. In his testimony before the Senate
Intelligence Community on 11 January 2007, the outgoing Director of
National Intelligence John Negroponte warned of the continuing threat
posed by the AL Qaeda and the Taliban operating from Pakistan. He
added that US led counter terrorism efforts continued to disrupt the
Al Qaeda’s operations, but the organisation’s core elements still plot
and make preparations for terrorist strikes against the homeland and
other targets from bases in the Afghanistan Pakistan border area.5 The
new US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates visited Afghanistan on 15
January 2007. At a joint press conference with the Afghan President,
he said that Pakistan was a strong ally; but clearly the border issue
is to be pursued with the Pakistan Government. Gates said that
terrorists were hiding on the other side of the border.6
A day after the visit of Robert Gates to Afghanistan, the Afghan
Intelligence Service released a video of a captured Taliban spokesman,
Abul Haq Haqiq and Dr. Mohammad Hanif stating that the Taliban supreme
leader Mullah Mohammad Omar is hiding in Pakistan under the protection
of the ISI. Haqiq also confirmed that the regular suicide bombings
carried out in Afghanistan are carried out by the Taliban, financed
and equipped by the ISI. He stated in the video that suicide bombers
were being trained in madrassas in the Bajaur district of FATA. Haqiq
further claimed that the former ISI Chief General Hamid Gul is
financing all madrassas in Bajaur.7 Haqiq’s confession confirmed
apprehensions expressed earlier by John Negroponte that Pakistan was
at the centre of a web of extremism that had tentacles throughout the
world. In a testimony before the House of Representatives Intelligence
Community on 18 January 2007, Negroponte said that the Bush
Administration had discussed the problem of alleged Taliban
sanctuaries in Pakistan with great regularity with Islamabad. He also
said that the North Waziristan agreement between Pakistan and Tribal
areas was also discussed. Western diplomats in Afghanistan and
Pakistan as well as Pakistani opposition figures say that the ISI and
the Military Intelligence have been supporting Taliban resurgence,
motivated not only by Islamist beliefs but also by a long held view
that Taliban dominance in Afghanistan would provide Pakistan with
greater strategic depth on its western frontiers. For more than two
weeks, the New York Times, reported from the region on the Pakistan
Afghanistan border. These reports were based on interviews of dozens
of residents on each side of the porous border. Based on these reports
the US daily observed that there was little doubt that Quetta,
Pakistan’s troubled Baluchistan province is an important base for the
Taliban. The New York Times report also found many signs that
Pakistani authorities were encouraging Taliban insurgents, if not
sponsoring them.
It is in this connection that the attack on Ms Carlotta Gall, the New
York Times correspondent is of interest. She was attacked in her hotel
room in Quetta allegedly by Pakistani agents, who punched her, knocked
her to the ground and seized her computer. In her reports from Quetta,
she had written that the most explosive question is whether Pakistan
Intelligence agencies have been promoting the Islamic insurgency? She
says that what is certain is that the Taliban in conjunction with
elements of the Al Qaeda are entrenching themselves in the mountainous
tribal areas of Pakistan. From there they are recruiting and training
a new generation of Taliban fighters and suicide bombers to attack
western and Afghan military and government targets across the border.8
To get to the bottom of this tangle one has to go back to the
tumultuous days of the Afghan jihad. The Taliban have never been any
one’s puppets and their strings were certainly not pulled in
Islamabad. Yet their links to Pakistan are all encompassing, forged
through two decades of war, devastation and life as refugees. The fact
that the Taliban leadership is entirely indigenous to Afghanistan and
fiercely independent does not detract from their social, economic and
political links to Pakistan’s own tribal milieu on the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The shared Pashtun culture of this border
has never been better reflected than in the phenomenon of the Taliban.
The Taliban phenomenon was a reaction to the state of anarchy in
Afghanistan. It was never the ideology that the Taliban propounded,
nor the religious fervour of the people that accounted for their
subsequent success. Rather it was the war weariness of the populace
which stood ready to welcome any force that promised the disarming of
the local brigands, the restoration of peace, and the semblance of
honest administration, no matter how rough and ready its system of
justice
.
Many of today’s Taliban warriors were too young to fight against the
Russian occupation. During this period they were growing up in Afghan
refugee camps in Baluchistan and the NWFP. Several Taliban leaders,
such as Mohammad Omar fought in the later stages of the war. But after
Kabul fell to the Mujahideen, these warriors, expecting the war to be
over, returned to their families living in refugee camps in
Baluchistan or to the southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar and
Uruzgan. In this Pakistan tribal milieu, there were several influences
on the Taliban. The primary religious and ideological influence was
the Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI), even though during the previous
decade of jihad, the JUI had played no role. In the 1980’s Pakistan’s
Afghan policy was conducted with the help of the Jammat-e-Islami (JEI),
the main rival of the JUI in Pakistan and the Afghan Hizb-e-Islami (HEI)
led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. For a decade the ISI’s connection with the
JEI and the HEI were the Government’s main instruments of policy,
which for instance ensured that armaments from the United States and
the Arab countries went largely to the Ghilzai Pashtun warlords of
Central and North-eastern Afghanistan. In comparison, the Durrani
Pashtuns, who dominated the south and Kandahar, were largely ignored
by the ISI. After 1992, Pakistan continued to back Hekmatyar, but by
1994, it was evident that Hekmatyar had failed to capture Kabul and
unite the Afghan people. Throughout the war in the 1980’s the JUI had
quietly built up a support base among the Durrani Pashtuns living in
Baluchistan and the NWFP. During the greater part of the Afghan jihad,
the JUI was politically isolated in Pakistan politics, but in 1993,
they allied with the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) that came to power.
JUI’s newfound access to the corridors of power allowed it to
establish close links with the Army, the ISI and the Interior Ministry
under the retired General Nasrullah Babar. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the
head of the JUI was made the Chairman of the National Assembly’s
Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs. After 1994, Maulana Fazlur
Rehman visited the United States and lobbied for the Taliban. He also
visited Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries and got financial support
for the Taliban.9
When the Taliban captured Kandahar, the ISI were initially more
skeptical than the Government about their chances of further success.
While General Babar and the JUI pushed for support to the Taliban, the
ISI did not give the Taliban any military backing. Meanwhile General
Babar created an Afghan trade development cell in the Interior
Ministry, which had the task of coordinating different Ministries in
developing a trade route to Central Asia. The principal spin-off was
considerable logistical infrastructure support for the Taliban. The
Paramilitary Frontier corps was used to help the Taliban set up an
internal wireless network for their commanders in the field. The
Pakistan Air Force sent in technicians to repair Kandahar airport and
the MIG fighter jets and helicopters the Taliban had captured. During
1995 the ISI continued to debate the issue of greater support for the
Taliban. The debate centered around those largely Pashtun officers
involved in covert operations on the ground, who wanted greater
support for the Taliban and other officers who were involved in longer
term intelligence gathering and strategic planning, who wished to keep
Pakistan’s support to the minimum so as not to worsen tensions with
Central Asia and Iran. The Pashtun grid in the Army High Command
eventually played a major role in determining the military and ISI’s
decision to give greater support to the Taliban. Both the Army Chief,
General Abdul Waheed and the head of Military Intelligence were
Pashtuns as were all ISI field officers involved with the Taliban. The
military appears to have decided by the summer of 1995 that the
Taliban were the only alternative for Pakistan’s own strategic
interests in Afghanistan, especially as President Rabbani was getting
closer to Pakistan’s rivals-Russia, Iran and India. Another major
factor was the ISI’s reluctance to trust Rabbani’s military commander
Ahmed Shah Masood, who had a running battle with the ISI since the
1980’s.10
When the Taliban launched their second attack on Herat, the ISI
weighed in with a limited amount of military support. This included
ammunition for large caliber machine guns and artillery shells,
extending their military wireless net work and helping the fledgling
Taliban Air Force. The ISI also played a leading role in helping the
Taliban’s capture of Kabul and Jalalabad. Pakistani diplomats and ISI
officials arrived in Kabul promising all out support for the
Taliban.11
Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence in the Resurgence of the
Taliban.
In this background is it difficult to believe that the ISI and the
Pakistan Army are continuing to support the Taliban? What is difficult
to understand is the contradictory role of the United States, in on
the one hand praising Pakistan for its anti terror operation and on
the other for its role in supporting the Taliban in its badlands.
There are a number of reports by international correspondents on the
links between the ISI and the Taliban. There is a connection between
the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI and the ISI’s long standing control over
the Taliban. Drugs are a part of their operation. Opium cultivation
and heroin production in Pakistan’s northern tribal belt and adjoining
Afghanistan was a vital offshoot of the ISI-CIA cooperation.12 Between
three to five ISI officers gave military advice to the Taliban in late
September 2001.13 Large convoys of rifles, ammunition and rocket
propelled grenade launchers for Taliban fighters crossed the border
from Pakistan into Afghanistan just after the US bombing of
Afghanistan began. The Pakistan ISI gave safe passage to these
convoys.14
Traditionally Waziristan has been sympathetic to the Taliban/ Al Qaeda.
Many Waziris fought alongside the Mujahideen against the Soviet troops
during the 1980s and later alongside the Taliban in the 1990s. When
the US led troops launched Operation Anaconda in 2002, many Taliban/Al
Qaeda fighters took shelter in Waziristan, regrouped and launched
attacks against the US troops in Afghanistan. Pakistani forces
commenced military operations against the militants in January 2003.
There was a major battle between the Pakistani and the Al Qaeda/Taliban/
tribal forces in South Waziristan in October that year. Two months
later there was an attempt on General Musharraf’s life. The conspiracy
was believed to have been hatched in Waziristan. In April 2004, the
Government and the militants reached an understanding in Shakai, but
Nek Mohammad, who was one of the parties to the agreement, resumed
fighting. He was eliminated in a rocket attack, but the fighting
continued… By November 2004 the Security forces claimed that South
Waziristan was cleared of militants and reached an understanding with
the Ahmedzai Wazirs. Ever since the theatre of operations shifted to
North Waziristan.15
It is clear that the Taliban has regrouped and refurbished. It could
not have done this on its own. Pakistan’s ISI has obviously been the
architect of this revival. The Pakistan-Taliban strategy is clearly to
deny access and disrupt the operation of coalition and government
forces and officials, undermining the administrative and relief
efforts even in secure areas to bring both Kabul and the international
coalition to its knees- as has been the case of the British forces in
Musa Qala, a key forward base in the Helmand province, who were forced
into a humiliating agreement with tribal elders, who approached the
Afghan government to negotiate a ceasefire between British forces and
the Taliban in the area. The Pakistan strategy and involvement is even
visible in major Taliban reverses such as the bloody confrontation
with NATO forces in the Panjwai district between 4 to 17 September
2006. NATO’s operation Medusa ended with nearly 1,100 of a 1500 strong
Taliban force which crossed over from Quetta, waved on by Pakistan
Border Guards, killed, with 160 in NATO custody. Interrogation of the
captured Taliban cadres has confirmed in significant detail, the
complicity and support of Pakistan’s ISI Further confirmation of such
support came from the sheer firepower that the Taliban forces brought
to the battle. According to the NATO post battle assessment, the
Taliban fired an estimated 400,000 rounds of ammunition, 2,000 rocket
propelled grenades and 1000 mortar shells. Further ammunition dumps
unearthed after the battle exposed an additional stock of one million
rounds. An unnamed senior NATO officer cited by Ahmed Rashid, an
expert on the Taliban noted that the Taliban could not have done this
on their own. Rashid notes further that the NATO is now mapping the
entire Taliban support structure from ISI run training camps near
Quetta, to huge ammunition dumps, arrival points for Taliban’s new
weapons and meeting places of the Shura or leadership council in
Quetta, headed by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the group’s leader since its
creation a dozen years ago.16
Conclusion
A new generation of militants is emerging in Pakistan. Although they
are generally referred to as Taliban, they are a recent phenomenon.
The original Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan briefly during the
nineties were Afghan fighters. They were created and moulded by the
Pakistan army and ISI. Many Taliban leaders were educated at Haqqania
madrassa by Maulana Samiul Haq. The new generation of militants is all
Pakistani. They emerged after the US invasion of Afghanistan and
represent a revolt against the government’s support for the US. They
are led by young mullahs, who unlike the original Taliban are
technology and media savvy and are also influenced by various tribal
nationalisms, honouring the tribal codes that govern social life in
Pakistan’s tribal areas. Their jihad is aimed at not just the infidels
occupying Afghanistan, but also the infidels who are ruling and
running Pakistan and maintaining the secular values of Pakistani
society. They aim at nothing less than to cleanse Pakistan and turn it
into a pure Islamic state. The Pakistani Taliban now dominates the
northern province of Waziristan, adjacent to Afghanistan. They are
defacto rulers of the province. Waziristan is a tribal area that has
historically been ruled by the tribals themselves. Pakistan has
followed the policy of the British in the region. The British allowed
tribal leaders, known as maliks semi-autonomous powers in exchange for
loyalty to the crown. Pakistan gave them the same powers, but demanded
loyalty to the federal government. They have been sidelined by the
Taliban. Pro-government maliks, who resisted the onslaught of the
Taliban, have been brutally killed. The Taliban have declared
Waziristan as an Islamic emirate.17
In three weeks of battle there between local Taliban and mostly Uzbek
Islamists, more than 259 foreigners were reportedly killed. The Army
which had failed to clear the foreigners from South Waziristan in four
years of trying, announced on 9 April 2007 that the Talibs had done
so. Yet, why this fight began, whether it has ended, and what it means
for Pakistan and the broader war on terror is not clear. Amid a lot of
distressing news, the Government is trying to present the fighting in
South Waziristan as local tribes recoiling against Al Qaeda type
militants. But it is hard to celebrate a war that appears to have
cemented the authority of a Taliban militia modelled on Mullah Omar’s
Afghan original over a swathe of the strategic border region, from
which its fighters launch attacks on US and NATO troops in
Afghanistan. The Army had deployed 80,000 troops in the tribal areas,
of whom 700 were killed. Seen locally as an invading army, this has
inspired fanatical resistance, undermined the civil administration and
helped spread the Taliban rule outside the tribal areas and into the
NWFP.18
Postscript
At the time of going to the press a series of grave incidents have
taken place in Islamabad with its sequel in the NWFP and the FATA. The
developments in the badlands of Pakistan are indeed very serious and
substantiate the theme of this paper that the Pakistan ISI and the
Army have built up the Taliban in this area and they are now
inexorably slipping out of control.
The storming of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad started with the decision
of the Islamabad Capital Development Authority demolishing the first
of eighty mosques and madrassas illegally built on public land in
Islamabad. The Jamia Hafsa was on this list and its students protested
by seizing a public library situated between the madrassa and the Lal
Masjid. Dressed in their trademark veils and holding sticks, the girls
of Jamia Hafsa madrassa gave a new and dramatically photogenic image
of militant Islam as they sat in the library that they had seized. One
of the girls Amna Adeem a fourth year student said that she and her
fellow students were soldiers of Islam. First the Government has to
withdraw all demolition notices and rebuild the mosques that it has
demolished. Secondly the government should bring in Islamic rule in
Pakistan. Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his brother Abdul Aziz controlled the
Lal Masjid and the Jamia Hafsa madrassa. Located in the Aabpara area
of Islamabad, a few kilometres from the Presidents office, Lal Masjid
was a centre for Deobandis in Pakistan that provided fodder for the
jihad in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets and in
Kashmir. Its links with the Intelligence agencies was public
knowledge. The brothers inherited the mosque from their father who was
shot dead in the compound in 1998 in sectarian (Shia-Sunni)
score-settling. They made no secret of their Taliban, Al Qaeda
sympathies. The Governments accommodation of Lal Masjid’s open show of
religious extremism was never more apparent than when the Sharia court
set by Ghazi passed a fatwa against Niloufer Bhaktiar, the former
Minister for Tourism, because she hugged a parachute instructor. The
turning point in the Lal Masjid incident came when its vigilante shock
troops raided a Chinese massage parlour in an Islamabad neighbourhood
and kidnapped seven Chinese nationals, six of them women. The Chinese
obviously reacted, and days later the Pakistan Rangers surrounded the
mosque. In the early days of the standoff, the Rangers strategy was a
maximum display of their firepower but a minimum use of it. 1200 men
and women walked out of the mosque in two days. The Government
appointed a committee consisting of Choudhury Shujaat Hussain and
others to negotiate with Ghazi to let all members leave the Masjid.
The negotiations broke down at 0345 hours on 10 July 2007. Shortly
after, the shooting began. Ghazi was killed in the shoot out. The
military confirmed fifty deaths.19
For sometime now, the more extremist elements in the radical Islamist
fold have no longer been satisfied with the status of obedient
instrumentalities of the Pakistan Army and its ISI and renegade groups
have repeatedly challenged the limits that the Army and the ISI set
for them. Since January 2007, a more profound shift was sought to be
engineered through the Lal Masjid standoff as the “moderate Islamist
element made a bid to violently renegotiate their worth and influence
within the Pakistan equations of power. That came to a bloody
denouement on 11 July 2007, after the Army stormed and cleared the Lal
Masjid-Jamia Hafisa complex, leaving according to the official count
91 civilians and 11 soldiers dead and 248 injured. This has been
disputed and the Islamists have claimed up to a thousand civilians
killed. In a swift reaction to the Lal Masjid assault militant attacks
on the military in the NWFP and the FATA areas and some other parts pf
the country have surged, leading to the death of 75 persons in the
NWFP, 76 in FATA, 39 in Baluchistan and 17 in Islamabad. Of these 94
were soldiers. There were in all 36 incidents, most of them in lethal
suicide bombings. The backlash was concentrated in the NWFP and FATA.
Dangerously, the current stream of extremist mobilization appears to
have forged a greater unity of perceptions and objectives between the
Al Qaeda- Taliban combine on the one hand and a range of Pakistani and
terrorist elements who have long been thought to be the officially
sponsored jihadi category. Though there has been no claim by the Al
Qaeda, their leader Dr. Ayman Zawahiri called for vengeance in an
internet video posted on 11 July 2007. Such significance is compounded
by the postures of the hitherto officially sponsored jehadi
leadership, the moderate extremists who have been systematically
promoted by Musharraf’s military regime over the past years. Thus
Hafiz Muhammad Saeed the chief of the LET, now rechristened as the
Jamaat-ul-Dawa (JUD) described the Lal Masjid assault as an operation
against every mosque and religious seminary in Pakistan.20
General Musharraf is under siege. However, it must be understood that
his policies were the policies of the ISI and the top military
establishment. Ever since the rule of General Zia ul Haq and even
before, it was the ISI and the Chief of Army Staff who controlled the
government. If General Musharraf proves to be inconvenient, he will be
removed as a scapegoat and a new Army Chief will come on the scene and
the country will continue to be ruled by the Army Chief – ISI combine.
If an understanding is reached with the political establishment, the
Army and the ISI will continue to do the back seat driving. In both
scenarios the Islamists will gain.
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