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Pakistan finally taking on its real enemy

Talibans tactics are stupid, which means their leaders are pretty stupid too
Last Updated 25 May 2009, 16:15 IST

It’s the mistake they made as­government army-in-residence in Afghanistan, lines of men formed in fatuous attack, ragged troops cut to ribbons by superior weapons and air assaults. When they come out into the open, they lose. And in a Swat Valley cleared of innocent bystanders, they are losing badly.

This tells us three interesting things. One is that Taliban tactics are pretty stupid, which means that their leaders are pretty stupid too. Another is that US alarm about zealot hordes seizing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is equally foolish. But a third element provides positive hope rather than familiar despair.

We deceive and delude ourselves every time we write about the Taliban (or al-Qaeda) as a coherent force under a single command. (The parallel mistake is writing about Afghanistan as though it were a Switzerland in waiting, not a chaotic assemblage of medieval fiefdoms.)

Some of the Taliban in Pakistan are Afghan refugees who left when the Russians invaded and never went home. Some are homegrown Pakistanis gone to the extremist side of the tracks. Some are itinerant warlords who work for money and extort it by any means. A few are foreigners from the ‘stans’ to the north, come to fight Osama bin Laden’s campaign against the infidel West and its Riyadh puppets.

But there’s no coherence, nor are there the roots of a permanent movement. The Taliban remnants in Swat are fading under fire because the ordinary folk who live in the valley offer them no sustenance. When the army sweeps in, most of them get out.

Another human tragedy

It’s another human tragedy, of course. But it also shows the Taliban for what they are: a resented, alien force, without community cover or support. In normal circumstances, a conventional invading army like Pakistan’s, lacking flexible weaponry and forced to send in tanks, would be doomed to house-to-house combat, killing thousands of civilians as they pounded their way to victory. Yet that’s not happening. There are innocent casualties, but most civilians here left — and left the Taliban to their fate.

The religious far right in Pakistan isn’t some mighty tide. It barely exists in the Punjab and Sindh. It has more enemies than friends in the North-West Frontier Province. And Baluchistan, a tangle of tribes and endemic lawlessness, will go to the highest bidder (so long as nobody tells it what to do too officiously). It can be beaten, if the stakes are clear enough.

Pakistan’s problem for three decades has been a profound unclarity, with an army fixated on Indian attack, primed to undermine Delhi’s relations with Kabul and play America both ends against the middle; a feeble government, whether military or civilian, keen to feather nests while its power lasts; a country out of control as birth rates and poverty spiral.

But now look. Terrorists bomb and assassinate almost at will under cover of teeming cities. Yet if they try to take over in the open, they’re put to flight. There is no regime of wild mullahs coming to rule Islamabad. Their own obsessions cut them adrift from the people they’d need to convince. The contrast between Shariat law and welcome order, even in a state created by Muslims for Muslims, is too stark to endure.

Does this mean that Afghanistan, just over a porous border, can be hopeful too? Not really — the differences are profound. Nor can Pakistan’s fractious politicians or uncertain generals be much congratulated yet. They’ve wasted years not confronting the enemy within. But they’re doing it now, to some effect. They are exposing the Taliban threat for what it is — and making their nation no longer part of the problem, but part of a possible solution.

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(Published 25 May 2009, 16:15 IST)

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