Taliban in Swat

[jimmy olsen]

I believe the key difference is that the Taliban are able to take advantage of an almost feudal society in some parts of Pakistan.  I'll try and find the article.

They've also been infiltrating urban areas though.

http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/09/30/1469342.aspx

The 'Talibanization' of Pakistan's biggest city
Posted: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 12:28 PM

Filed Under: Islamabad, Pakistan
By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent

KARACHI, Pakistan – In the back of a jeep driving through Karachi, a sign on the wall of the city's famous "Village Restaurant" caught my eye. It was just a little piece of frayed white paper plastered next to the restaurant's much bigger logo, tempting customers to "Experience the Exotic of Traditional Dining."

But the printed sign expressed an increasingly urgent plea in this teeming port city, once Pakistan's capital: "Save your city from Talibanization," it said in English.

But could the Taliban really be taking over Karachi? Karachi is Pakistan's biggest city, far from the lawless tribal hinterland along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Out there, Taliban and al-Qaida militants have carved out an independent state. In the mountains, militants have their own courts and even issue licenses to local business. Last week in the tribal area, the Taliban publicly executed a group accused of murders. In another village square, they flogged several butchers for allegedly selling the meat of sick animals. That is Taliban justice.

U.S. military and intelligence officials consider that border area to be the world's biggest, most dangerous safe haven for Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and nearly all of their deputies have been based, and may still be based, in this often impassible mountain terrain.

But I was in Karachi, a giant city on the Indian Ocean. If Karachi is being 'Talibanized,' Pakistan is in real trouble, and so is everyone else.

Growing radicalism
Karachi has a history of Islamic radicalism. Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in front of the Village Restaurant in 2002. Pearl had been meeting contacts here. They were supposed to help him investigate Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris in December 2001.

But Pearl's meeting was a set up. The "contacts" turned out to be fanatic militants who kidnapped and beheaded him. I was about to discover the radicals' presence in this city appears to have grown since then.

Traveling in Karachi is both overwhelming and exhausting. It is a colorful, chaotic and undeniably dirty city. Flocks of vultures circle the sky all day. Trash lines many of the streets.  As we drove from the Village Restaurant, our jeep darted around swarms of motorcycles, pickup trucks, rickshaws and even a sad looking camel pulling a cart stacked with barrels.

We were headed to a neighborhood in west Karachi where I had been told al-Qaida and Taliban militants had established a safe haven. Many Pakistanis make little distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban.  Both want to destabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan, establish an even bigger base of operations and spread their aggressive, intolerant vision of Islamic law.

The majority of people in Karachi want no part of it. Karachi is Pakistan's cultural capital, the center of the nation's fashion, high-tech and media industries. But that Karachi is under siege.

After about 30 minutes in traffic, our jeep arrived at the office of a local contact in a slum in west Karachi. Fearing for his safety, he didn't want to be identified. I'll call him Malik. He would take us deep into the alleys on the outskirts of Karachi, a neighborhood filled with brick homes built around cliffs and marble quarries. It would be unwise, Malik said, to venture in alone.

"It is too dangerous," he said. "The Talibans have their checkpoints, bunkers and snipers. At night, they patrol, sometimes on horses. They are always coming out with their weapons and RPGs intimidating people."

Malik said radicals have been flooding into Karachi since this spring, moving in from the border region. The border region is now a warzone, under attack by the Pakistani military and, controversially here, by U.S. drones and Special Operations Forces (SOF) that carry out raids from bases in neighboring Afghanistan.

The Pakistani and U.S. military offensives have killed hundreds of militants, but scattered many more. Increasingly, they are settling in Karachi. Estimates of Karachi's population range from 12 to 18 million. The lack of accountability makes the city a great place to hide, unless you look like I did as I descended from the jeep dressed in khakis and a blue shirt.

Malik and I were standing in front of one of west Karachi's madrassas, a traditional Islamic school for boys.

"Are there any students inside," I asked a guard. He stared back at me blankly.  In less than a minute there were about 15 people around us. Several appeared to be madrassa students who had come out to see what a foreigner could possibly want from them.

"Are you all students at the madrassa?" I asked. A few said they were.

'God willing, we will fight them' 
Many Pakistanis attend madrassas because they offer free education, supplementing the government's lacking public school system.  For centuries madrassas were the only form of education in the Islamic world.  From Morocco to Indonesia, most madrassas have a similar layout, with a mosque at the center and classrooms upstairs.  The vast majority of madrassas are moderate charities that teach religious values, the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed.

But some madrassas in Pakistan have churned out suicide bombers indoctrinated in jihad and a paranoid but widespread philosophy that they must attack innocent civilians to defend their faith from the United States, Israel and other modern-day "crusaders." 

Former President Pervez Musharraf promised to reform and regulate Pakistan's hard-line madrassas.  It never happened.  According to Karachi's former mayor Farooq Sattar, there are now more than 2,000 illegal madrassas in Karachi alone. This was one of them.

"What do you think of the Taliban and their influence here?" I asked the students.

More blank stares.

"What do you think about the U.S. incursions?"

That got a reaction.

"God willing, we will fight them," said one teenager with a purple scar on his chin. "They are the enemy," he said and launched into a long explanation of America's goal to occupy Muslim lands and undermine Islam. I've heard the same speech from Cairo to Lebanon, Baghdad to Riyadh. God bless the Internet.

A few minutes later my driver/fixer, a very tough guy from a very tough part of Pakistan, tapped me on the shoulder.

"I think you have been here long enough," he said. It was time to go.

But I still hadn't seen any Taliban. 

Malik suggested we go deeper into the slum, to the neighborhood right under the cliffs and quarries.  He was nervous about taking a foreigner, but had an idea. There was a graveyard in the area.

"We can pretend to be offering prayers for the dead," Malik suggested.  "I'll pray over one of the graves and you can see the neighborhood for yourself."

Malik said praying at a gravesite would give us an excuse to be in the area and raise less suspicion.

'You should not be here'
It didn't exactly work. As soon as I stepped out of the jeep by the gravestones, I was again surrounded by a group of people. They didn't have weapons or appear threatening, but didn't attempt to hide their sympathies for the Taliban. One man proudly told me several suicide bombers had prayed in a nearby mosque.

But others were scared of the Taliban. A man who spoke English told me the Taliban were in control of the area.

"Do the Pakistani police or soldiers ever come here?" I asked him.  "No, they can't come here."

"How do people feel here?"

"We are all frightened. The Taliban has taken over."

More men, athletically built in their 20s and 30s, started to arrive.

"Who are these people?" I asked the English speaker.

"They are Taliban."

"Do they understand what we are saying?  Do they understand English?"

"No, but you shouldn't stay here. It is not comfortable here. You should not be here."

"Who runs this neighborhood?"

"They do."

The new arrivals didn't want to be interviewed.

"Stop asking them questions," the English speaker advised.

We left a few minutes later.

"We couldn't come here at night," Malik said as we were driving out of the neighborhood.  "Now we had an excuse to come to the graveyard.  But at night, there would be no reason to be here."

'It's sad'
Driving back to the hotel, I kept thinking how a neighborhood in Karachi could be so tense and apparently out of control. In less than two hours, and without any prior arrangements, we'd managed to get to an area full of Taliban supporters and where many locals were clearly terrified.

As I walked back to my hotel room, I passed an old man in the hallway.

"I didn't know you people were still coming here," he said.  By "you people" I assumed he meant foreigners.

"Yes, a few. Not many of us," I admitted.

"I didn't think anyone would be coming anymore," he added, saying he was upset by the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, one of the centers of social life for Pakistan's shrinking expatriate community.

"It's sad," he said. "It's sad it's come to this."

"Yes, it's sad," I agreed.

[Sheilbh]

Ah here it is.  As the Spectator put it, the most worrying article you'll read all day:

Taliban Exploit Class Rifts in Pakistan


Around 3,000 people gathered for a rally in the Swat Valley of Pakistan on April 10 in support of the bill paving way for the implementation of Islamic law there.
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
Published: April 16, 2009

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according to government officials and analysts here.


Rashid Iqbal/European Pressphoto Agency
Supporters of Islamic law on Thursday in the Swat Valley, a Pakistani region where the Taliban exploited class rifts to gain control.

The strategy cleared a path to power for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, where the government allowed Islamic law to be imposed this week, and it carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants' main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province.

In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power.

To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that became their shock troops, the residents, government officials and analysts said.

The approach allowed the Taliban to offer economic spoils to people frustrated with lax and corrupt government even as the militants imposed a strict form of Islam through terror and intimidation.

"This was a bloody revolution in Swat," said a senior Pakistani official who oversees Swat, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Taliban. "I wouldn't be surprised if it sweeps the established order of Pakistan."

The Taliban's ability to exploit class divisions adds a new dimension to the insurgency and is raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal.

Unlike India after independence in 1947, Pakistan maintained a narrow landed upper class that kept its vast holdings while its workers remained subservient, the officials and analysts said. Successive Pakistani governments have since failed to provide land reform and even the most basic forms of education and health care. Avenues to advancement for the vast majority of rural poor do not exist.

Analysts and other government officials warn that the strategy executed in Swat is easily transferable to Punjab, saying that the province, where militant groups are already showing strength, is ripe for the same social upheavals that have convulsed Swat and the tribal areas.

Mahboob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American lawyer and former classmate of President Obama's, said, "The people of Pakistan are psychologically ready for a revolution."

Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan, he said. "The militants, for their part, are promising more than just proscriptions on music and schooling," he said. "They are also promising Islamic justice, effective government and economic redistribution."

The Taliban strategy in Swat, an area of 1.3 million people with fertile orchards, vast plots of timber and valuable emerald mines, unfolded in stages over five years, analysts said.

The momentum of the insurgency built in the past two years, when the Taliban, reinforced by seasoned fighters from the tribal areas with links to Al Qaeda, fought the Pakistani Army to a standstill, said a Pakistani intelligence agent who works in the Swat region.

The insurgents struck at any competing point of power: landlords and elected leaders — who were usually the same people — and an underpaid and unmotivated police force, said Khadim Hussain, a linguistics and communications professor at Bahria University in Islamabad, the capital.

At the same time, the Taliban exploited the resentments of the landless tenants, particularly the fact that they had many unresolved cases against their bosses in a slow-moving and corrupt justice system, Mr. Hussain and residents who fled the area said.

Their grievances were stoked by a young militant, Maulana Fazlullah, who set up an FM radio station in 2004 to appeal to the disenfranchised. The broadcasts featured easy-to-understand examples using goats, cows, milk and grass. By 2006, Mr. Fazlullah had formed a ragtag force of landless peasants armed by the Taliban, said Mr. Hussain and former residents of Swat.

At first, the pressure on the landlords was subtle. One landowner was pressed to take his son out of an English-speaking school offensive to the Taliban. Others were forced to make donations to the Taliban.

Then, in late 2007, Shujaat Ali Khan, the richest of the landowners, his brothers and his son, Jamal Nasir, the mayor of Swat, became targets.

After Shujaat Ali Khan, a senior politician in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, narrowly missed being killed by a roadside bomb, he fled to London. A brother, Fateh Ali Mohammed, a former senator, left, too, and now lives in Islamabad. Mr. Nasir also fled.

Later, the Taliban published a "most wanted" list of 43 prominent names, said Muhammad Sher Khan, a landlord who is a politician with the Pakistan Peoples Party, and whose name was on the list. All those named were ordered to present themselves to the Taliban courts or risk being killed, he said. "When you know that they will hang and kill you, how will you dare go back there?" Mr. Khan, hiding in Punjab, said in a telephone interview. "Being on the list meant 'Don't come back to Swat.' "

One of the main enforcers of the new order was Ibn-e-Amin, a Taliban commander from the same area as the landowners, called Matta. The fact that Mr. Amin came from Matta, and knew who was who there, put even more pressure on the landowners, Mr. Hussain said.

According to Pakistani news reports, Mr. Amin was arrested in August 2004 on suspicion of having links to Al Qaeda and was released in November 2006. Another Pakistani intelligence agent said Mr. Amin often visited a madrasa in North Waziristan, the stronghold of Al Qaeda in the tribal areas, where he apparently received guidance.

Each time the landlords fled, their tenants were rewarded. They were encouraged to cut down the orchard trees and sell the wood for their own profit, the former residents said. Or they were told to pay the rent to the Taliban instead of their now absentee bosses.

Two dormant emerald mines have reopened under Taliban control. The militants have announced that they will receive one-third of the revenues.

Since the Taliban fought the military to a truce in Swat in February, the militants have deepened their approach and made clear who is in charge.

When provincial bureaucrats visit Mingora, Swat's capital, they must now follow the Taliban's orders and sit on the floor, surrounded by Taliban bearing weapons, and in some cases wearing suicide bomber vests, the senior provincial official said.

In many areas of Swat the Taliban have demanded that each family give up one son for training as a Taliban fighter, said Mohammad Amad, executive director of a nongovernmental group, the Initiative for Development and Empowerment Axis.

A landlord who fled with his family last year said he received a chilling message last week. His tenants called him in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, to tell him his huge house was being demolished, he said in an interview here.

The most crushing news was about his finances. He had sold his fruit crop in advance, though at a quarter of last year's price. But even that smaller yield would not be his, his tenants said, relaying the Taliban message. The buyer had been ordered to give the money to the Taliban instead.

The ending's a bit of a damp squib but they whole thing's worrying enough.

[KRonn]

Very worrying, indeed. 

[Neil]

Karachi's where India's got a bunch of atom bombs aimed, so fuck it.  They'll all be rad-waste anyways.

[Josquius]

I wonder; what was the status of Pakistan, the tribal areas and the Talbian pre-Afghan invasion?

[Queequeg]

I wonder; what was the status of Pakistan, the tribal areas and the Talbian pre-Afghan invasion?

As mentioned a bunch of times, Swat was a vacation area, especially sine Kashmir has been a warzone for a lot longer.

That said, this is the traditonal route of invasion from the Steppe, has been since the Vedic tribes, history of danger.

[jimmy olsen]

Is the situation in Pakistan a mortal threat? America speaks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q79sFakmv4&feature=player_embedded

[citizen k]

Taliban cornered in NW Pakistan by angry locals
By MUNIR AHMAD, Associated Press

ISLAMABAD – A group of Taliban fighters under siege by hundreds of angry tribesmen tried to sneak to another village in northwest Pakistan, only to find themselves cornered there too, an official said Tuesday.

A citizens' militia that sprang up over the weekend to avenge a deadly suicide bombing at a mosque in Upper Dir district appeared unwilling to stop pursuing the Islamist fighters, underscoring the rising anti-Taliban sentiment in Pakistan.

The growing pressure on militants who have held sway in parts of Pakistan's northwest comes as the army bears down on their one-time stronghold in the Swat Valley region. Talk has also turned to the possibility of another operation against al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in the nearby tribal belt along the country's border with Afghanistan, something U.S. officials privately say they would like to see.

Some 1,500 tribesmen laid siege to several villages known as Taliban strongholds in Upper Dir over the weekend, eventually cornering militants in Shatkas and Ghazi Gay villages. By Tuesday, some of the Taliban tried to get away to Malik Bai village, which the tribesmen also encircled, police official Fazal Rabi said."About 200 Taliban have been surrounded by the militia" in the villages, Rabi said.

Officials have said the Taliban carried out Friday's mosque bombing that killed 33 in the town of Haya Gai because they were angry that local tribesmen had resisted their moving into the area, where minor clashes between the two sides occurred for months. Rabi said the tribesmen had sworn on the Quran that they would not let the militants go unpunished.

At least 13 insurgents have died in the fighting since Saturday.

The citizens' militia, or lashkar, was using its own weapons and had no police backup, Rabi said.

The army's chief spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, on Monday urged civilians to consider the kind of rule the Taliban was trying to impose — they stand accused of whippings and beheadings in the name of Islamic law in Swat — and join the fight against them."Citizens should ponder upon the way of life they are introducing, if that is acceptable to us," Abbas told the News1 television network. "If not, they have to raise a voice against them, they have to rise against them."

Washington strongly backs the Swat offensive, and officials have said privately they would like Pakistan to follow up by launching an operation in nearby South Waziristan tribal region, the main base for Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.

The government has announced no plans to attack the area, where al-Qaida fighters also are believed to be operating.

[KRonn]

Pretty significant change in attitudes towards the Taliban by some Pakistanis. In the past six months or so I've read that there were some uprisings, militias forming, that some Pakistani village/tribal leaders were looking at what the Sunnis did in Iraq to oust AQ and were trying the same. So we'll see how this goes, see if enough people oppose the Taliban or see if the Taliban have enough support to hold their own. Either way I'd think this has changed the dynamics of things and that at least a sizable number of Pakistanis in the affected regions are fed up enough to rise up.

[Sheilbh]

Either way I'd think this has changed the dynamics of things and that at least a sizable number of Pakistanis in the affected regions are fed up enough to rise up.

And I think that the Taliban seizing Islamabad's favourite holiday spot made the government and army take the threat a bit more seriously.

Though I believe the overwhelming majority of US military aid to Pakistan is still spent on that essential front of the war on terror, the Indian border

[Valmy]

The best way to get rid of the Taliban is to put them in charge for awhile.