[Reader-list] Radio Taliban: Pakistan

[Paul Miller]

A different web  2.0

Paul

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/world/asia/25swat.html?_r=1&hp

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Every night around 8 o’clock, the terrified  
residents of Swat, a lush and picturesque valley a hundred miles from  
three of Pakistan’s most important cities, crowd around their radios.  
They know that failure to listen and learn might lead to a lashing —  
or a beheading.

Hundreds gathered Jan. 11 in Swat to watch drug dealers punished. The  
Taliban also have made it a crime to shave a beard.

Using a portable radio transmitter, a local Taliban leader, Shah  
Doran, on most nights outlines newly proscribed “un-Islamic”  
activities in Swat, like selling DVDs, watching cable television,  
singing and dancing, criticizing the Taliban, shaving beards and  
allowing girls to attend school. He also reveals names of people the  
Taliban have killed for violating their decrees — and those they plan  
to kill.

“They control everything through the radio,” said one Swat resident,  
who declined to give his name for fear the Taliban might kill him.  
“Everyone waits for the broadcast.”

International attention remains fixed on the Taliban’s hold on  
Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, from where they launch attacks  
on American forces in Afghanistan. But for Pakistan, the loss of the  
Swat Valley could prove just as devastating.

Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, a Delaware-size chunk of  
territory with 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is  
part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and  
Islamabad, the capital.

After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under  
Taliban control, marking the militants’ farthest advance eastward into  
Pakistan’s so-called settled areas, residents and government officials  
from the region say.

With the increasing consolidation of their power, the Taliban have  
taken a sizable bite out of the nation. And they are enforcing a  
strict interpretation of Islam with cruelty, bringing public  
beheadings, assassinations, social and cultural repression and  
persecution of women to what was once an independent, relatively  
secular region, dotted with ski resorts and fruit orchards and known  
for its dancing girls.

Last year, 70 police officers were beheaded, shot or otherwise slain  
in Swat, and 150 wounded, said Malik Naveed Khan, the police inspector  
general for the North-West Frontier Province.

The police have become so afraid that many officers have put  
advertisements in newspapers renouncing their jobs so the Taliban will  
not kill them.

One who stayed on the job was Farooq Khan, a midlevel officer in  
Mingora, the valley’s largest city, where decapitated bodies of  
policemen and other victims routinely surface. Last month, he was  
shopping there when two men on a motorcycle sprayed him with gunfire,  
killing him in broad daylight.

“He always said, ‘I have to stay here and defend our home,’ ” recalled  
his brother, Wajid Ali Khan, a Swat native and the province’s minister  
for environment, as he passed around a cellphone with Farooq’s picture.

In the view of analysts, the growing nightmare in Swat is a capsule of  
the country’s problems: an ineffectual and unresponsive civilian  
government, coupled with military and security forces that, in the  
view of furious residents, have willingly allowed the militants to  
spread terror deep into Pakistan.

The crisis has become a critical test for the government of the  
civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari, and for a security apparatus  
whose loyalties, many Pakistanis say, remain in question.

Seeking to deflect blame, Mr. Zardari’s government recently criticized  
“earlier halfhearted attempts at rooting out extremists from the area”  
and vowed to fight militants “who are ruthlessly murdering and maiming  
our citizens.”

But as pressure grows, he has also said in recent days that the  
government would be willing to talk with militants who accept its  
authority. Such negotiations would carry serious risks: security  
officials say a brief peace deal in Swat last spring was a spectacular  
failure that allowed militants to tighten their hold and take revenge  
on people who had supported the military.

Without more forceful and concerted action by the government, some  
warn, the Taliban threat in Pakistan is bound to spread.

“The crux of the problem is the government appears divided about what  
to do,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier who  
until 2006 was in charge of security in the western tribal areas.  
“This disconnect among the political leadership has emboldened the  
militants.”
 From 2,000 to 4,000 Taliban fighters now roam the Swat Valley,  
according to interviews with a half-dozen senior Pakistani government,  
military and political officials involved in the fight. By contrast,  
the Pakistani military has four brigades with 12,000 to 15,000 men in  
Swat, officials say.

The Taliban are thought to be responsible for the killing of a popular  
Swat Valley dancing girl, Shabana, whose body, above, was found Jan. 2  
in Mingora. The Taliban have made gains in the strategic region, in  
part by meting out harsh punishments.


But the soldiers largely stay inside their camps, unwilling to patrol  
or exert any large presence that might provoke — or discourage — the  
militants, Swat residents and political leaders say. The military also  
has not raided a small village that locals say is widely known as the  
Taliban’s headquarters in Swat.

Nor have troops destroyed mobile radio transmitters mounted on  
motorcycles or pickup trucks that Shah Doran and the leader of the  
Taliban in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, have expertly used to terrify  
residents.

Being named in one of the nightly broadcasts often leaves just two  
options: fleeing Swat, or turning up headless and dumped in a village  
square.

When the army does act, its near-total lack of preparedness to fight a  
counterinsurgency reveals itself. Its usual tactic is to lob artillery  
shells into a general area, and the results have seemed to hurt  
civilians more than the militants, residents say.

In some parts of Pakistan, civilian militias have risen to fight the  
Taliban. But in Swat, the Taliban’s gains amid a large army presence  
has convinced many that the military must be conspiring with the  
Taliban.

“It’s very mysterious how they get so much weapons and support,” while  
nearby districts are comparatively calm, said Muzaffar ul-Mulk Khan, a  
member of Parliament from Swat, who said his home near Mingora was  
recently destroyed by the Taliban.

“We are bewildered by the military. They patrol only in Mingora. In  
the rest of Swat they sit in their bases. And the militants can kill  
at will anywhere in Mingora,” he said.

“Nothing is being done by the government," Mr. Khan added.

Accusations that the military lacks the will to fight in Swat are  
“very unfair and unjustified,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the chief  
military spokesman, who said 180 army soldiers and officers had been  
killed in Swat in the past 14 months.

“They do reach out, and they do patrol,” he said.

Military officials also say they are trying to step up activity in Swat.

General Abbas said the military did not have the means to block  
Taliban radio transmissions across such a wide area, but he disputed  
the view that Mingora had fallen to the militants.

“Just because they come out at night and throw down four or five  
bodies in the square does not mean that militants control anything,”  
he said.

Few officials would dispute that one of the Pakistani military’s  
biggest mistakes in Swat was its failure to protect Pir Samiullah, a  
local leader whose 500 followers fought the Taliban in the village of  
Mandal Dag. After the Taliban killed him in a firefight last month,  
the militants demanded that his followers reveal his gravesite — and  
then started beheading people until they got the information, one  
Mandal Dag villager said.

“They dug him up and hung his body in the square,” the villager said,  
and then they took the body to a secret location. The desecration was  
intended to show what would happen to anyone who defied the Taliban’s  
rule, but it also made painfully clear to Swat residents that the  
Pakistani government could not be trusted to defend those who rose up  
against the militants.

“He should have been given more protection,” said one Pakistani  
security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the  
delicacy of the subject. “He should have been made a symbol of  
resistance.”

Gruesome displays like the defilement of Pir Samiullah’s remains are  
an effective tactic for the Taliban, who have shown cruel efficiency  
in following through on their threats.

Recently, Shah Doran broadcast word that the Taliban intended to kill  
a police officer who he said had killed three people.

“We have sent people, and tomorrow you will have good news,” he said  
on his nightly broadcast, according to a resident of Matta, a Taliban  
stronghold. The next day the decapitated body of the policeman was  
found in a nearby village.

Even in Mingora, a town grown hardened to violence, residents were  
shocked early this month to find the bullet-ridden body of one of the  
city’s most famous dancing girls splayed on the main square.

Known as Shabana, the woman was visited at night by a group of men who  
claimed to want to hire her for a party. They shot her to death and  
dragged her body more than a quarter-mile to the central square,  
leaving it as a warning for anyone who would flout Taliban decrees.

The leader of the militants in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, gained  
prominence from making radio broadcasts and running an Islamic school,  
becoming popular among otherwise isolated homemakers and inspiring  
them to sell their jewelry to finance his operation. He also drew  
support from his marriage to the daughter of Sufi Mohammed, a powerful  
religious leader in Swat until 2001 who later disowned his son-in-law.

Even though Swat does not border Afghanistan or any of Pakistan’s  
seven lawless federal tribal areas, Maulana Fazlullah eventually  
allied with Taliban militants who dominate regions along the Afghan  
frontier.

His fighters now roam the valley with sniper rifles, Kalashnikovs,  
rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortar tubes and, according to  
some officials, night-vision goggles and flak vests.

His latest tactic is a ban on girls’ attending school in Swat, which  
will be tested in February when private schools are scheduled to  
reopen after winter recess. The Taliban have already destroyed 169  
girls’ schools in Swat, government officials say, and they expect most  
private schools to stay closed rather than risk retaliation.

“The local population is totally fed up, and if they had the chance  
they would lynch each and every Talib,” said Mr. Naveed Khan, the  
police official. “But the Taliban are so cruel and violent, no one  
will oppose them. If this is not stopped, it will spill into other  
areas of Pakistan.”