Afghanistan (40 page)

Pakistan’s civil society, as a whole, remains weak. Institutions and practices that could enable civil society have been largely ignored by elites and underfunded throughout the history of Pakistan, resulting in state schools that do not function and taxes that are not collected. With the state school system plagued by absent unpaid teachers, Pakistanis have turned largely to religious-based education. The madrassa system increased from 900 schools in 1971 to, by 1988, 8,000 official and 25,000 unregistered madrassas, an estimated two-thirds of them connected to the Deobandi movement.
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Only an estimated one percent of the entire population pays income tax.
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Yet continued support for democracy still endures, despite widespread disillusionment with the current elected civilian government. A desire for the revival of civil society has been demonstrated in protests led by lawyers and young people in recent years.
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The Baluchistan Insurgency

The current fighting in Baluchistan has been essentially ongoing since 1973–77, and no resolution is in sight.
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It pre-existed and is distinct from the insurgency and terrorism that have emerged elsewhere in Pakistan since the defeat of the Afghan Taliban in 2001.
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Pakistan has long ascribed the Baluch insurgency as well as secular Pushtun and Sindhi nationalism to Indian-led actions. Indeed, the Pakistan military sees these problems primarily in terms of Indian aggression, rather than a symptom of problems at home.
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Conversely, it is widely believed in both Pakistan and Afghanistan that the Pakistani military has been responsible for the increased presence of the Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani allies in Baluchistan. They believe that the Pakistani military is aiming to use insurgents that it believes it could control as a counterweight to the nationalist Baluch insurgents. This sentiment led to Pakistani escalation of the Baluchistan conflict starting in 2005, while at the same time they were concluding truces with the Pushtun insurgents in the FATA that were to become the Pakistani Taliban.
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In 2006, the Pakistani military used tactical aircraft and attack helicopters against Baluchi villages, incurring international and domestic condemnation. The ISI targeted Baluchi leadership in airstrikes that killed Nawab Akbar Shabaz Khan Bugti in August 2006. He was a
distinguished elder statesman, a former governor and chief minister of Baluchistan province. His death was seen by many Baluch as a declaration of war against them by the Pakistani government, with whom there had not been peace since the 1970s. In response, the Baluch insurgents have looked to the Gulf for financial support and to Afghanistan and elsewhere in Pakistan for weapons to put together a more militant nationalist movement, though the Baluch insurgents, with their roots in a secular nationalism and their own strong tribal system, have not used their shared Sunni Islam to make common cause across ethnolinguistic lines with either the Afghan or Pakistani Pushtun insurgents, motivated largely by Islamic radicalism.

The Baluchistan insurgency has an impact far beyond that remote province and is important for the future of Pakistan. It is important because it shows what forces Pakistan, especially the military, considers an internal threat and what it believes it can control or use to its advantage, either in the security competition with India that dominates its national security concerns or in internal politics. Former US Ambassador Teresita Shaefer said at a talk in Washington: “Baluchistan is important for its internal insurgency and its impact on Afghanistan. It has a different dynamic from the NWFP: Islamabad sees Baluchi nationalism as anti-Pakistan, while the threat in the FATA is seen as simply misdirected Pushtuns who want to kill infidels.”
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The distinctions between the insurgency in Baluchistan and that being waged elsewhere in the country was clear to a retired Pakistani officer who had served with ISI: “Baluchistan was an anti-national insurgency with outside support, while what we are seeing in the FATA is the US insisting Pakistan do militarily, regardless of the cost to its national security, what the US itself cannot do, defeat the Afghan Taliban.”

These two opinions highlight a major divergence in the Pakistani military worldview. Insurgents who threaten the national integrity of Pakistan, in Baluchistan since the 1970s or in Swat since mid-2009, are opposed with military force, while other terrorist and insurgent groups—Afghan and Pakistani alike—are tolerated, some to a high degree. Only in late spring 2009, as the Pakistani insurgents showed every sign of expanding their holdings after their success in Swat, did the Pakistan
military decide that at least some of the Pushtun insurgents and their allies from elsewhere in Pakistan had shifted to the first category as threats against national integrity. In 2007, the army had also shown its willingness to consider some Islamic radicals in this category as well, with the storming of their Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) stronghold in Islamabad. This represented a shift in policy from the years immediately following the expulsion of the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, when “foreign” terrorists were the priority target.

The Rise of the Pakistani Insurgents, 2001—04

The Pushtun society in the FATA, Baluchistan, and North West Frontier Provinces had been strongly influenced by the “Taliban culture” that had appeared in Pakistan since the 1970s. Indeed, the Taliban culture has had an impact beyond the Pushtun borderlands. Taliban principles have meshed with the long-standing desire of Pakistani governments, civilian and military alike, to ally themselves with elements of Islamic practice that allow them to demonstrate piety without imperiling their control. It was the secular president Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who banned alcohol in the 1970s. The secular General Nasrullah Babur, Benazir Bhutto’s interior minister in 1994, helped create the Afghan Taliban, providing funding and weapons and coordinating their support with Pakistan’s Pushtun transport mafia to open up the roads to central Asia for trade from Karachi, and convinced the Pakistani leadership that “our boys,” the Afghan Taliban, could be controlled by Pakistan and its military.
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The cosmopolitan and primarily ethnically Punjabi city of Lahore followed the widely publicized actions of the Afghan Taliban and also banned kite-flying.
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The current Pakistani incarnation of the Taliban and other Pushtun insurgent movements emerged in the Vortex as a result of the intermingling of radicalized Pakistani Pushtuns with the original Afghan Taliban. Once the main “circuit cable” of international Islamic terrorism was plugged in to the FATA, enough money could be brought in to change power in the region. The Pakistani insurgents are also heavily influenced by Al Qaeda and their foreign allies, possibly even more so than their Afghan counterparts. Uzbeks, Uighurs, and Chechens brought
their own brand of desperation and ruthlessness after being expelled from Afghanistan. The Uzbeks alone are estimated at 1–2,000 strong, many of them veterans of fighting with the Afghan Taliban in that country’s civil wars. Arabs in the region both manage and use the network of “safe houses” that extend throughout Pakistan, houses that provide hiding places, weapons caches, and secure planning and organizing. Kashmiri groups have trained in the border area for decades, and their members also joined forces with the different Pakistani insurgent groups. Large numbers of Punjabis and Sindhis were carrying Kalashnikovs in this new conflict. Many of these Pakistani insurgents had fought in Afghanistan or in Kashmir against India, and they had contacts with the Pakistani security services, were well-versed in guerrilla warfare, and had worked with a broad range of criminal groups. They had access to the networks established by the ISI and other Pakistani security services, as well as links to Pakistani religious groups. Many Pakistani insurgent groups have benefited from the support of Punjabi groups, such as the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba, who have been fighting in Afghanistan alongside the original Afghan Taliban since the 1990s, where together they had committed numerous atrocities against Hazaras and other Afghan Shias. Other recruits to the insurgency came from the ranks of groups that had been concentrating on the insurgency in Kashmir, which continued until the Musharraf government initiated talks with India and agreed to stop invasive violence and other offensive action by 2003.

Pakistan helped enable the US and coalition intervention in Afghanistan. Musharraf broke relations with the Afghan Taliban government and withdrew its ISI officers and other Pakistani supporters that had been taking part in supporting their war against Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance. Pakistan provided the coalition with bases and permitted overflights and shared some intelligence. It moved additional forces to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to backstop fleeing Taliban and Al Qaeda members, although those of Afghan or Pakistani nationality were not usually taken into custody.
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The years following the US intervention in Afghanistan saw the rise of insurgent leader Nek Mohammed, a Pakistani Wazir who had fought in Afghanistan with the Afghan Taliban and had close contact with Al
Qaeda leaders in Waziristan. When Al Qaeda fled over the border in 2001–02, Nek Mohammed welcomed them into Waziristan. The links with the Afghan Taliban and the foreigners provided Nek Mohammed with the ability to start consolidating political power in Waziristan. He was soon joined by other insurgent leaders among South Waziristan’s Wazir and Mehsud tribesmen. Among these was Abdullah Mehsud, a one-legged veteran of Afghanistan’s civil wars who had been held prisoner by the US. He rose to command a large force of insurgents before killing himself during a Pakistani police raid in July 2007. Another figure to emerge was Behtullah Mehsud, who had good contacts with Al Qaeda while fighting in Afghanistan and made a fortune running a mule taxi service over the mountains for fugitive terrorists.

These emerging insurgent leaders’ willingness to use violence against secular Pushtun authority in Pakistan started in the FATA’s South Waziristan agency, but spread throughout the FATA and then into Baluchistan and to the NWFP. Throughout Waziristan, tribal
maliks
were murdered in large numbers, especially by Al Qaeda’s Uzbek allies. By targeting the tribal leadership, the insurgents gained support of current tribal leaderships’ internal rivals, the “tribal entrepreneurs” who could offer influence (if mullahs) or money (if traders) and the members of the trading mafias. For all the previous decades of political unrest and undercutting of traditional authority by Pakistan’s policies, the widespread campaign of the murder of Pushtun leaders was previously unheard of since the Khalqis attempted the same thing on the Afghan side of the Durand Line in 1978–79 and provoked large-scale armed resistance. By killing these men, the insurgents expanded the vacuum in authority in the FATA that had already been increasing for decades.

Pakistan’s initial attempts to deal with this terrorism in the FATA relied on lightly armed
khassadar
tribal police and, only after they failed, by the Frontier Corps. On a number of occasions, when the Pakistani authorities tried to form traditional tribal
lashkars
(armed groups) to oppose Pakistani insurgents in the FATA, they deserted while hanging on to their weapons. The political agents that represented the government in the FATA paid subsidies to maliks and other local leaders to try to keep the peace. Outside the FATA, the 2002 local government reforms
have made it hard to act quickly and decisively against any terrorist challenges to state authority. The paramilitary Frontier Constabulary and the Frontier Police, the NWFP’s provincial police, were inadequately armed and poorly trained to confront murderous veterans of Afghanistan’s wars.
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Applying any sort of force against insurgent groups operating in the NWFP required the cooperation of the provincial government, which was usually not forthcoming, especially after the MMA took control of the provincial government in the 2002 election. And so, governmental authority quickly eroded in much of the FATA and NWFP within a few short years after the Afghan Taliban’s retreat into Pakistan.

The Frontier Corps, intended to keep the peace on the frontier, consists of Pushtuns serving outside their home areas led by seconded army officers, often non-Pushtuns. Some 80,000 strong, it is divided into separate forces for the NWFP and Baluchistan. Equipped only with light weapons, they were outgunned by the insurgents, who had access to world markets. The Pakistani insurgents, through their alliance with Al Qaeda, had access to worldwide sources of funding that allowed them to out-buy the government of Pakistan for local allegiances. The Frontier Corps, under the command of the Ministry of the Interior, is a “limited liability” political force, intended for an “economy of force” presence in the FATA.
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The politicization and then the radicalization of the Frontier Corps had started in the 1980s. Involving this force in Pakistan’s strategy toward Afghanistan was beyond its capability and an invitation for a blowback effect of unanticipated results.
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The Frontier Corps had been asked to provide support to the ISI and other Pakistani security services’ Afghan proxies, initially HiH but later the “Afghan Arabs” and the Afghan Taliban. This put them in contact with the Islamic radical support infrastructure in the Vortex. Throughout the course of fighting with Pakistan’s insurgents, the Frontier Corps has often proved more willing to turn over its arms to them than fight pitched battles against them, and has sometimes joined with them to fire on US troops in Afghanistan.
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After 2001, the idea of a Pakistani Taliban became more than a general expression of radicalized Pushtun solidarity. The pre-existing group, called Tehrik-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammed (TNSM), was
inspired by Al Qaeda escapees from Afghanistan, the consolidation of Islamic radical power in South Waziristan, and aimed to achieve similar results in the Bajaur Agency, which was their stronghold, adjacent to Afghanistan’s war-torn Kunar valley.
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The TNSM had been formed in the 1990s as an offshoot of JI and had spent years recruiting Pakistanis to go fight with the Afghan Taliban in the civil war and, later, to fight the Americans. In 2001, the TNSM sent large numbers of madrassa students to defend the Taliban regime in what became known as “The Children’s Crusade.” Few returned alive. The result contributed to the radicalization of Pakistani Pushtun tribes that had provided these new “martyrs.” Other insurgent groups appeared in the NWFP, taking advantage of the weak governmental authority and aimed to spread the radicalization already controlling South Waziristan. Mangal Bagh Afridi organized the Lashkar-e-Islam, a radical insurgent group espousing violent opposition to the Sufic religious practices of many Pushtuns. This group has links to narcotics trafficking and operates throughout the NWFP. Qazi Mahbub-ul Haq organized the Ansar-ul-Islam in the NWFP’s Tirah district. This group set up Sharia courts in the areas it controlled. It soon became a rival of Lashkar-e-Islam, opposing their anti-Sufic violence.
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Plans to overthrow Pakistan’s government were reportedly drafted as early as 2003, with the seizure of Swat intended to provide an interim headquarters on their way to Islamabad.
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