Category: Violence

‘I’m here to understand what you mean by Taliban’

Celebrated Indian author and social activist Arundhati Roy addresses a gathering at the Karachi Press Club on Friday.-Photo WhiteStar/Fahim Siddiqui

Salman Siddiqui on Arundhati Roy’s address at the Karachi Press Club. (It looks like a bad transcript.)

Is there a threat of Talibanisation engulfing the entire region?

I think it has already engulfed our region. I think there’s a need for a very clear thinking (on this issue of Talibanisation). In India, there are two kinds of terrorism: one is Islamic terrorism and the other Maoist terrorism. But this term terrorism, we must ask, what do they mean by it.

In Pakistan, I’m here to understand what they mean by this term. When we say we must fight the Taliban or must defeat them, what does it mean? I’m here to understand what you mean when you say Taliban. Do you mean a militant? Do you mean an ideology? Exactly what is it that is being fought? That needs to be clarified.

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The biggest human flood since 1947

Refugee camp near Mardan
Children line up to receive food in a refugee camp near Mardan. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP

The United States has doubled military aid to Pakistan. Kamal Hyder of Al Jazeera reports that a ‘big catastrophe is unfolding in the Northwest Frontier Province – I have never seen anything on this scale…This is a huge humanitarian crisis; the largest number of internally displaced people in the world, and in the smallest possible time…Anger is growing that the government did not give the citizens adequate warning to escape…Many people are saying their government has abandoned them … what is unfolding here is the tip of the iceberg, the worst is yet to come.’

According to Al Jazeera:

Bodies were reported to be lying in roads, homes reduced to ruins and people left cowering with no means of escape after the military imposed curfews across the region amid the fighting…Hyder reported that those who have fled the fighting are in refugee camps and receiving little government help.

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A Catastrophe Foretold

Pakistani refugees fleeing fighting in Swat, Buner and Lower Dir queue for rations in a relief camp at Mardan yesterday (DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES)

There is an exodus of Pakistani civilians as battle against Taleban rages, Zahid Hussain reports. They may yet succeed, but it appears no one seems to have told the Pakistani government the first rule of counterinsurgency: it is not the driving out of opposition that constitutes success, it is the ability to hold on the gains. The militants could have been neutralized through the use of sparing and targeted force in conjunction with a political settlement. This one is guaranteed to backfire.

With jet fighters screeching overhead, tens of thousands of people fled Pakistan’s once-idyllic Swat Valley yesterday, increasing a humanitarian crisis that threatens to undermine public support for the military campaign against the Taleban.

The UN says that more than 200,000 people have left Swat in the past few days, and another 300,000 are on the move or trying to leave after the collapse of a three-month-old peace deal between the Government and the Islamists this week. They will join the estimated 555,000 who have fled other conflict zones in northwestern Pakistan since August, taking the total number of displaced people in the region to more than one million.

As government forces claimed to have killed 143 militants since Thursday, The Times spoke to dozens of refugees arriving — bedraggled, exhausted and crammed into buses, vans and trucks — at a makeshift camp in Jalala, just outside Swat.

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Taliban v. Taliban

India in Afghanistan. Graham Usher writes that ‘peace in Afghanistan rests on peace between India and Pakistan. The road out of Kabul goes through Kashmir.’

Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India.

In the Bajaur tribal area, for example, the army is fighting an insurgency led by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of one of Pakistan’s three Taliban factions, but it’s not because he is a friend of al-Qaida. What makes him a threat, in the eyes of Pakistan’s army, is that he is believed to be responsible for scores of suicide attacks inside Pakistan (including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto). He is also thought to have recruited hundreds of Afghan fighters, among them ‘agents’ from the Afghan and Indian intelligence services – ‘Pakistan’s enemies’, in the words of a senior officer.

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US seeks to expand covert war in Pakistan

The United States has been heavily criticised for the high number of civilians being killed by drone missile strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

That controversy was high on the agenda during a visit by the head of the CIA to Pakistan.

The US, meanwhile, is considering expanding the fighting to Balochistan province, as Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reports.

BBC rejects play on Israel’s history for impartiality reasons

The Guardian reports today that the BBC declined to broadcast a play examining Israeli history and attitudes to war despite believing that it is a ‘brilliant piece’.  This follows some criticism of the play in the right wing press.

The BBC has declined to broadcast a radio version of Caryl Churchill’s controversial new stage play about Israeli history, claiming it needed to remain impartial ‑ the same reason given for declining to air the Gaza emergency appeal.

In a move likely to resurrect the row over the BBC’s refusal in January to broadcast the appeal to help the people of Gaza, Radio 4 rejected an unsolicited manuscript of the play, Seven Jewish Children, which recently finished a short run at the Royal Court theatre. BBC sources suggest that a significant factor in the decision was awareness of the controversy stirred by Seven Jewish Children during its theatre run and the fact that the BBC has only recently survived the onslaught of criticism for its refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal. In an email seen by the Guardian, Radio 4’s drama commissioning editor Jeremy Howe said that he and Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer thought Churchill’s play was a “brilliant piece”.

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Rachel Corrie through her own eyes

On March 16, 2003, I was a graduate student at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT, USA. That morning I recall hearing on Democracy Now! that an Evergreen State College student was run over by an Israeli bulldozer. The girl’s name was Rachel Corrie.

Corrie was defending property belonging to Samir Nasrallah, a local pharmacist. Eyewitness accounts say the bulldozer ran over Corrie twice. The driver claims he didn’t know Corrie was there… That’s pure rubbish. We all know it was deliberate.

I remember going to my Assessment & Evaluation class that day knowing the news. Yet what I remember most were the reactions of two friends and classmates of mine, both of whom went to Evergreen State College with Rachel. Neither of them came to class that day.

One wrote an impassioned e-mail to all my classmates about Rachel and the wonderful life she lived. The other was in our on-campus coffee shop. I will never forget her not crying but “wailing” upon hearing the news that Corrie was killed. That memory will forever haunt me. 

The following interview was conducted on March 14, 2003… two days before Rachel Corrie was killed. As today marks the sixth memorial of Rachel’s death, I want to play back this YouTube so you can hear Rachel’s words and understand the oppression Palestinians experience on a day-to-day basis. It prides me that there are Americans out there who believe the Israeli occupation is an occupation of violence. We will never forget you Rachel!

Saving Swat

The analysis of the recent ceasefire in Swat has drawn the ire of the desktop Napoleons in Islamabad and Karachi. The Western press has taken an equally blinkered view, liberal and conservative alike. Even otherwise sober analysts such as the Observer’s Jason Burke have joined the chorus. On the other hand, Rahimullah Yusufzai, the most informed and astute analyst of the region’s politics, sees ‘signs that inspire hope‘.

Maulana Sufi Mohammad has once again been tasked to perform a familiar role. He is trying to persuade militants in Swat to drop their guns and go home. His argument is that the government had accepted his demand for enforcement of Shariah, or Islamic law, and there was now no point in continuing the armed struggle that has turned Pakistan’s most beautiful and greenest valley into a battlefield.

The task before him is difficult and the environment in which he is operating is dangerous. But the elderly cleric is made of sterner stuff and even risks to his life won’t turn him away from doing what he believes is the right thing to do. Back in 1994, he did something similar by persuading the armed fighters belonging to his organisation, Tanzim-e-Nifaz Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), to stop fighting the state. A military helicopter flew him to all those places in Swat, Shangla, Dir, Kohistan and other districts where his black-turbaned followers had blockaded roads and set up hilltop positions to fight the troops from the paramilitary Frontier Corps and personnel of the other law-enforcement agencies. Accompanied by Major General Fazal Ghafoor, the-then inspector general of the Frontier Corps, and some other civil and military officials, he would disembark from the chopper, make a rousing speech to his startled fighters and urge them to return to their villages. On occasions, he would even reprimand them for taking up arms against their Muslim brothers in the FC. He would argue that the use of force for achieving the worthy cause of Shariah was wrong.

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Swat and the Doctrine of Necessity

‘The Swat accord is doctrine of necessity in its purest form’, Ayaz Amir argues.

Those armchair warriors — and there’s no shortage of them out here — who are wringing their hands over the Swat accord should ask themselves whether the government had any alternative. Necessity, and iron necessity at that, is the mother of this accord. The authorities were left with no other option because the Swat Taliban under the command of Maulana Fazlullah had fought the army to a standstill.

In Pakistan, as indeed elsewhere, sending in the army is the option of last resort. We had tried this option in Swat and it hadn’t worked. In fact the Taliban, far from being defeated, were in the ascendant, their grip on Swat tighter than before the operation began. The army was there, as it still is, taking distant artillery shots at the Taliban, and occasionally sending in helicopter gunships, but for all that confined largely to its bunkers.

Guerrilla insurgencies are not defeated by such long-range or long-distance tactics. So what was the ANP government in Peshawar to do?

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Non-Violence? Finkelstein and Gandhi

When Western liberals call on the Palestinians to renounce violence and to adopt Gandhian passive resistance instead, I usually become enraged. My first response is, they’ve tried non-violence, and you failed to notice.

For the first two decades after the original ethnic cleansing of 1947 and 48, almost all Palestinian resistance was non-violent. From 1967 until 1987 Palestinians resisted by organising tax strikes, peaceful demonstrations, petitions, sit-down protests on confiscated lands and in houses condemned to demolition. The First Intifada was almost entirely non-violent on the Palestinian side; the new tactic of throwing stones at tanks (which some liberals consider violent) was almost entirely symbolic. In every case, the Palestinians were met with fanatical violence. Midnight arrest, beatings, and torture were the lot of most. Many were shot. Yitzhak Rabin ordered occupation troops to break the bones of the boys with stones. And despite all this sacrifice, Israeli Jews were not moved to recognise the injustice of occupation and dispossession, at least not enough to end it. The first weeks of the Second Intifada were also non-violent on the Palestinian side. Israel responded by murdering tens of unarmed civilians daily, and the US media blamed the victims. Then the Intifada was miltarised.

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