Afghanistan (41 page)

The Insurgency Spreads, 2004—07

The Pakistani military did not move against the Pakistani insurgents in their formative stages. Rather, the Pakistani Army saw them, much like they had seen the Afghan Taliban, as a controllable strategic asset. The Pakistani military hoped that these groups would join the Afghan Taliban fighting in Afghanistan and not threaten Pakistan. Even after large numbers of maliks had been murdered, the army hesitated to act. They were focused on the primacy of the military threat from India, especially in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament that raised tensions.

It was not until March 2004 that the Pakistan Army, at US urging, moved into South Waziristan to help quell the growing insurgency. Yet
by the time the army arrived in South Waziristan for this “coercive deployment,” it was evident that the initial Pakistani government response was inadequate. While fighting in Waziristan, the Pakistani army, trained and equipped for conventional conflict with India, demonstrated a profound lack of capacity for counter-insurgency warfare. Counter-insurgency was not taught at Pakistani staff colleges. The army leadership, predominantly Punjabi, lacked an understanding of the culture and politics of South Waziristan. The land was remote and foreign even to most of the ethnic Pushtun officers in the army, who may have known the language but not the area’s complexities (the British Indian Army would not recruit Wazir Pushtuns back in the days of the Empire because they were too independent, and to this day the tribe lacks the traditions of government service that have been important to Pushtuns elsewhere, but not there). In 2004, Musharraf introduced local representative assemblies to the FATA, which had already been set up in the rest of the country four years earlier, but with more restricted powers and fewer seats reserved for women as concessions to the conservatism of the Pushtun population. Rather than acting as a stabilizing force, these assemblies were seen as an attempt to further undercut the preexisting system of governance and impose institutions alien to local customs and traditions. The attitude of many Pakistan Army officers was that the campaign in Waziristan was taking Musharraf’s promise to cooperate with the US “Global War on Terrorism” too far.
³⁸⁴

The March 2004 Pakistani military offensive in South Waziristan did not succeed in reestablishing governmental control. All the elements of the old control system—the maliks, political agents, khassadars, tribal levies, the Frontier Corps—had been uprooted. Many Pushtuns had become radicalized and sympathized with the insurgents.
³⁸⁵
Pakistani religious parties urged negotiations, especially the JUI, with links to both the insurgents and the national and NWFP and Baluchistan provincial governments through their participation in the MMA political coalition.
³⁸⁶
The continued military setbacks led to a truce and subsequent peace agreement between the insurgents in Waziristan and Pakistani authorities in April 2004. Nek Mohammed said “I did not surrender, they came to me.” His view was widely accepted in Pakistan: it was the army that had given in.

The April 2004 South Waziristan peace agreement was the first in the cycle of localized cease-fires and attempts to co-opt insurgents which really has only allowed them to run even more rampant. The truces with the army provided the insurgents with a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the people. If the army would negotiate with them, they were obviously not outlaws and could be accepted as part of Pakistani society. Most Afghans were convinced the Waziristan deal would not work from the start and would only cause them more grief. Rather, they saw this agreement as an attempt to secure peace in Pakistan by focusing the insurgents on fighting in Afghanistan. In the words of Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, it was perceived that “The Army is willing to pull back, surrender sovereignty to the Pakistani Taliban. The agreements say, do not fight us, fight the US in Afghanistan, and fight NATO.”
³⁸⁷
That was something the insurgents proceeded to do. Infiltration of guerrillas into Afghanistan reportedly increased 300 percent after the first South Waziristan agreement.
³⁸⁸

Since its original negotiations with the insurgents in Waziristan, the army has mostly kept their part of their bargains. Pakistan did not block US Predator UAV attacks against the insurgent leadership. When the Pakistani army moved back into South Waziristan in June 2004, it was to target Chechens, Uzbeks, and Arabs operating in the Shakani valley. This was followed by a further peace agreement with the Pakistani insurgents in South Waziristan in November 2004, although this proved short-lived.
³⁸⁹
Following these truces with the army, however, the insurgency in Pakistan acquired a momentum of its own. The insurgents set up a de facto parallel government that ruled South Waziristan, imposing their version of Sharia law, beheading “spies” and imposing strict Taliban-style social controls, requiring beards and banning music and DVDs. This was copied by other insurgents throughout the FATA, starting in 2004 and spreading to Bannu and Tank by 2007, and Sharia courts followed insurgents into Swat in 2008–09. By 2004, the insurgent movement was no longer limited to the FATA, but was targeting parts of NWFP, especially the Swat valley. Despite the lack of a central command, the insurgency in Pakistan was able to use the pre-existing contacts and networks between different tribes and agencies to their advantage, acquiring and moving
money, weapons, and supplies. The TNSM, operating in Bajaur and Swat, was motivated to more openly challenge the Pakistani authorities by the insurgent success in Waziristan.

All these insurgent actions gave an aura of success to the Waziristan insurgency’s new leader, Behtullah Mehsud, then in his transition from mule driver to charismatic commander following the death of Nek Muhammed in a US Predator UAV attack in June 2004, just a week after his ceasefire with the government went into effect. With the vacuum caused by the death of Nek Mohammed and with the erosion of Pakistan’s state control over the FATA, Behtullah Mehsud was able to extend his authority across tribal lines. There was also an increasing tempo of insurgent activity in the FATA, as shown by the kidnapping of Chinese telecommunications engineers by Abdullah Mehsud in October 2004.
³⁹⁰

Behtullah Mehsud led the insurgents in an offensive against established leadership in the FATA, unimpeded by the 2004 truces. His leadership of South Waziristan’s insurgents appeared acknowledged by a further peace agreement with the army in February 2004. In 2005–06 alone, some 200 Pushtun secular leaders were murdered.
³⁹¹
In 2006, Behtullah Mehsud opened an expanded terrorist campaign in Pakistan, using suicide bombers, which an expanded recruitment and training effort allowed him to sustain for years.
³⁹²
In 2007, a jirga of tribal leaders in NWFP were attacked by one of the seemingly limitless number of largely non-Pushtun teenage suicide bombers collected from Pakistan’s madrassas and controlled by Behtullah Mehsud. In other areas, the insurgents were able to offer money and guns to support local allies. The insurgent-established Sharia courts offered a rough frontier justice, mainly targeting common criminals and informers, but also resolving property disputes. Local governance through jirgas was banned, and the Pakistani government was kept out by roadblocks.

The October 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan created much damage and demonstrated the inability of the government to help the victims. Islamic non-governmental organizations, some of them associated with radical groups, provided the most effective relief work. The insurgents were able to take advantage of some of the good will among the population that this created.

All of the insurgent groups shared links to radical parties elsewhere in Pakistan, often providing greater access to communications and media. Behtullah Mehsud’s well-known DVDs of executions helped solidify his control over South Waziristan by adding to his already formidable reputation for ruthlessness. The strength of the Taliban culture in the FATA was demonstrated by Mullah Fazlullah, the TNSM “Radio Mullah,” who made effective use of FM radio broadcasts in 2007 to almost completely halt polio vaccinations in Swat and the Bajaur agency by reporting that vaccines were an impotency serum created by the West intended to wipe out Muslims. The Pakistani insurgents, as with the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani extremist groups, have benefited from new advances in media technology, by using propaganda DVDs, both legal and illegal FM radio stations, and, more recently, satellite television broadcasting.

In 2007, there were reportedly 14 to 16 Taliban groups operating in Pakistan with no cohesive unity or command structure, but they did share common objectives of defeating the foreign coalition presence in Afghanistan and overthrowing the government in Pakistan. One of the major shared objectives of these groups was blocking or extracting funds by not blocking Pakistan-Afghanistan trade routes. Some groups aimed at the main route from Karachi to Kabul, on which the US-led military coalition presence in Afghanistan depends as the only major port available to them. Some 14 of these groups—divided by tribe or region in the FATA and NWFP—were pulled together into the Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan (TTP), the umbrella organization for Pakistan’s Taliban, formed in December 2007.
³⁹³
The TNSM was among these but kept its operational independence. Behtullah Mehsud was acknowledged as the TTP’s leader. Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a Wazir insurgent leader from North Waziristan, was appointed as his deputy. A governing shura was established. The TTP followed this up with battlefield success, storming and capturing Sararogha Fort in South Waziristan in January 2008.
³⁹⁴
The military responded with a renewed offensive into South Waziristan, aiming to target the TTP leadership. Failing to capture them, the military instead destroyed large numbers of villages, creating over 200,000 internal refugees who were then recruited as supporters by the insurgents.
³⁹⁵
But when the offensive ended in May 2008, the army again withdrew from
South Waziristan. The government of Pakistan banned the TTP in August 2008, but this had little effect on its operations.
³⁹⁶

As the TTP emerged, other Pakistani insurgent groups also became better organized. The “Punjabi Taliban”—a descriptive term for a loose network of Punjabis from radical organization with strong links to TTP rather than a formal organization—has emerged as a separate insurgent force and has been associated with terrorism inside Pakistan.
³⁹⁷
It originally drew its members from insurgent groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed who had fought in Kashmir and pre-2001 Afghanistan. Sipah-e-Sahaba, another building block of the Punjabi Taliban, had its origins in anti-Shia terrorism inside Pakistan, especially against Shia landlords in the southern Punjab. The members of the Punjabi Taliban went from Kashmir and Afghanistan to fighting alongside the predecessors of the TTP and TNSM in the FATA and then brought the struggle back to their home province.
³⁹⁸
Punjabis were an important part of the insurgent forces that fought the Pakistan military in areas such as Swat and Waziristan.

By 2007, the TNSM leadership was in a strong position. Maulavi Fazlullah propaganda radio broadcasts continued without government interference, all while weapons and resources were being sent up from Waziristan by Behtullah Mehsud, helping to consolidate his position of power. He linked insurgent forces coming out of Waziristan with those in Bajaur and Swat, including his father-in-law Sufi Mohammed, who had fought in Afghanistan for the Afghan Taliban in 2001 and Fakir Mohammed, a Bajaur-based member of the Mohmand tribe. The TNSM eventually displaced government authority and held sway over the population through armed gunmen, first in the Bajaur Agency of the FATA and then in the Swat valley, part of the NWFP, in 2007. This provoked an army response, but as the troops advanced, the TNSM insurgents largely sidestepped the blow and withdrew back to Bajaur, threatening any of the local inhabitants that cooperated with the government with retribution when they returned. The army soon withdrew its troops and, without a capability to establish effective civil governance in Swat, the population was soon again threatened by the TNSM. The TNSM also made significant inroads into the Malakand and Dir districts
of the NWFP in 2007, as the MMA-dominated provincial government in Peshawar was reluctant to move against them.

Responding to the Insurgency, 2007—10

By 2007, the Pakistani insurgents and their allies had become a sophisticated political insurgency operation.
³⁹⁹
Linked to the anti-democratic religious forces growing throughout Pakistan, these groups shared what amounted to a sanctuary as well as the support system of paymasters, networks, and material support infrastructure with the Afghan Taliban, Al Qaeda, and its transnational terrorist allies, not to mention narcotics traffickers and criminal enterprises. By 2007, the Pakistani insurgents were affecting all of Pakistan, not just the FATA and NWFP. They had shown signs of entering the political mainstream. Maulavi Omar, the TTP spokesman, was a regular commentator on Pakistan television until his arrest by the government in August 2009.
⁴⁰⁰

But the decisive event in showing that the insurgents were having a nationwide impact was the July 2007 siege of the Lal Masjid (the Red Mosque) in Islamabad.
⁴⁰¹
It had been founded by two veteran Pakistani religious radicals with strong links to Al Qaeda, for which they had been imprisoned in 2004, Maulana Abdul Aziz and his brother Mullah Abdul Rashid Ghazi. The mosque was built in the 1960s but started operating as a challenge to the government in January 2006 with what was at first just a handful of radicals; but within a year, it had been reinforced by radicalized Pushtuns, Punjabis, Kahsmiris, and Al Qaeda supporters. He organized a brigade of female activists that ransacked businesses and kidnapped women accused of immoral behavior.