Back to the beginning

Seven years after the valley of Swat was liberated from the tyrannical rule of the Taliban – hundreds of schools were bombed and people were terrorised across the area as militants acted under the command of Mullah Fazlullah – it appears the victory in the valley is still not so secure after all.

There have been reports that a militant commander close to Fazlullah has been calling eminent members of the business community in Mingora, demanding extortion money to fund militant activities and threatening to kill all those who refuse to pay. The Taliban, as we have seen before, are of course perfectly capable of carrying out their threat.

A force of around 4,000 soldiers remains posted in Swat today and there is talk of setting up a permanent garrison in the strategic valley. However, despite this, people in the area report that there is ominous evidence that the Taliban are on the move again.

Many activists in the region, including women, are stated to have been making door-to-door approaches to houses to raise money to help people. They point out that there has been little improvement in the lives of people since Swat was brought under state control once again in August 2009. They also state that in some ways things have worsened as inflation hit families.

This is an outcome of the failure of the government to move in behind the military and initiate the kind of reforms that are needed to permanently rescue people from the hands of the militants. Swat is not the only area to have undergone this failure – many in the tribal agencies based along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are in a similar situation. While Pakistan remains under pressure from the US to act against militants, there have been questions regarding whether it is truly determined to do so and, most importantly, how it intends to secure areas that it has been able to liberate. Maintaining control over emancipated regions is more difficult than driving out the Taliban.

The same problem has been experienced in parts of South Waziristan which was freed of militants under Operation Zarb-e-Azb. It is also true that a multitude of militant groups continue to operate across the country – with some based in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and some in southern Punjab – setting up massive new madressahs where they will presumably indoctrinate more young recruits. The process is made easy by the desperation of people to get their children educated and to gain access to food and shelter that seminaries provide. The state-run education sector has of course failed in this respect.

By now, there has been a fairly detailed documentation of some of the acts of extremism in the country. The simple act of clapping along to music as young men from another tribe danced to at a wedding reception brought death to four women, one minor girl and three men in the remote area of Kohistan. The low quality images of these women and men captured on a mobile phone led to a jirga decision against them. A brother of the men who were dancing brought the matter to public attention but it seems the state offered him no assistance. No security was provided nor was the matter investigated. This case took place in 2012 when the video first surfaced. There have been many such similar incidents.

Despite new laws, ‘honour’ killings continue and the Council for Islamic Ideology, which was given a constitutional status under field marshal Ayub Khan, continues sending out its obscurantist vision of national events. Recently, it declared that it was ‘perturbed’ by the renaming of the physics centre at the Quaid-e-Azam University after Nobel Laureate Dr Abdus Salam. An announcement to this effect was made by the prime minister earlier this month.

Such pronouncements of course add to ideological confusion in the country. So do the ludicrous protests launched by religious groups in Sindh against a new law passed by the Sindh Assembly which bars minors from changing their religion. The intention behind the new rule was to prevent the forcible conversion of Hindu girls. But instead of taking the obvious, humane view of this and acting to prevent the abduction of children, religious groups insist this law violates basic Islamic principles.

The mindset which exists is just as dangerous, indeed more so, than the practices of militant forces. In Swat, leaders of the trading community who have refused to help collect extortion money are now followed by armed private and police guards, to prevent them being from targeted by bullets or bombs. There can be no certainty that this will be enough to save their lives. In parts of Balochistan, meetings of Taliban factions are known to be held quite openly. It is uncertain why there is no action to prevent this.

The real question we need to ask is how determined we are in real terms to knock down extremism. There is no proof that we are willing to do so. Too many exceptions have been made in the actions taken against these forces and as a result specific groups continue to operate with a degree of impunity. They are of course able to draw new recruits quite easily given that the rate of joblessness in the country is high – forcing many people to take up any kind of occupation, adopt any kind of belief if it offers them some degree of power and places a gun in their hands.

We have also failed in another aspect. There has been no effective attempt to rehabilitate the militants who over the years have been active in all areas where military operations were conducted. As a result, young men who are familiar only with the use of guns have been allowed to re-enter communities with no skills that can make it possible for them to earn a livelihood. It is then inevitable that they will finally turn back to weapons that provided them with their basic purpose in life.

The limited attempt in Swat to rehabilitate young members of the Taliban brought some success. But such efforts have to be sustained over a longer period of time. We also need to set up more organised schemes to retrain former militants across the country. Examples from countries such as Sri Lanka where rehabilitation for the Tamil Tigers was made a priority after their defeat in 2009 should offer a model for us to follow.

We certainly need to think about why militant forces continue to reappear on our landscape and draw from it yet more blood. Until we consider these matters more carefully and come up with a plan to prevent these activities, there will almost certainly be further mayhem of the kind we have been experiencing since before 2001.

Right now, there is a danger of losing all that we have gained. We need to assess how many of these gains were real and how many were a mere mirage conjured up by our own hope of finding a way out from the crisis that entrapped us.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com