Pakistan’s offensive, involving severe fighting and heavy casualties, which has reportedly cleared the Swat Valley, Buner and Lower Dir and other tribal areas of Taliban fighters, has been regarded as an indication of Islamabad’s determination to wipe out fundamentalist Islamist terrorism from its soil. Is that so? What does it mean for India?
The trouble is that the Pakistani Army’s claims of success lack adequate independent corroboration. A report by Dexter Filkin in the New York Times of May 8, stated that there was no way of verifying the claims by the Pakistani military’s chief spokesman, Maj Gen Athar Abbas, as newspersons and most outsiders had been blocked from the areas. It further quoted a woman in a refugee camp in Mardan as stating, “The Army and the Taliban are not killing each other — they are friends. They are only killing civilians. When civilians are killed, the Government claims they have killed a bunch of terrorists.”
A report by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, published in the New York Times of May 19, about urban guerrilla warfare confronting Pakistani Army as it closed in on Mingora, quotes a statement by the military as claiming that it had started clearing houses in Kanju, a village in the outskirts of Mingora, and residents who had left Kanju described a mounting civilian death toll. It then added, “The Pakistani Army has closed Swat to outsiders and essentially ordered residents to leave. The authorities have also mostly barred journalists from entering the area, making it difficult to verify what is happening.”
Unverified claims by the military are difficult to accept at face value given the latter’s — and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate’s — close ties with the Taliban. As it has been known for a long time, and as Pakistan’s President, Mr Asif Ali Zardari admitted recently, the ISI and the CIA jointly created the Taliban in 1994. According to a report by Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times of April 1, Ms Michelle A Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, acknowledged before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, the US Administration’s concern about a wing of the ISI, which American intelligence officers said was providing money and military assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Under sharp questioning by Sen John McCain, she said that she thought the ISI or at least parts of the latter — were “certainly a problem to be dealt with”.
One has doubtless seen television news clips of the Pakistani Army directing artillery fire and rockets. But at whom? A report by Carlotta Gall and Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times of April 28, stated, “After strong criticism here and abroad over its inaction, the Pakistani military deployed fighter jets and helicopter gunships to flush out hundreds of Taliban militants who overran the strategic district of Buner last week.” The Taliban, however, had started retreating from Buner on April 24 under orders from its leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah.
According to television channels, the order followed a meeting between Taliban leaders Qari Muhammad Khan and Muslim Khan and the Commissioner of the Malakand division, Syed Muhammad Javed, in the presence of Maulvi Sufi Mohammad, the founder of Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Sharia-e Mohammadi (Movement for the Establishment of Islamic Law) who acted as an intermediary. Further, television channels showed dozens of militants, masked and heavily-armed, driving away in pick-up trucks and minibuses. Muslim Khan, the Taliban spokesman, said on April 25 that all militants who had come from Swat had withdrawn and that only local Taliban fighters from Buner remained in the area. He, however, did not mention how many had left and how many remained. Yet heavy fighting was reported from Buner district on May 6. Surely, “local Taliban” alone could not have held out for so long!
Clearly, there is more in the whole thing than meets the eye. Pakistani leaders, of course, have been talking stridently. Asked to clarify Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s statement that the objective of the north-western operations was “to eliminate the militants and terrorists”, Mr Zardari told a television channel during his state visit to the US in early May, “This means clearing out the area of the miscreants and bringing life to normalcy.” Asked if “eliminate” meant “killing them all”, he replied, “That’s what it means.” But then not all of Mr Zardari’s and Mr Gilani’s statements can be taken at face value. Besides, the Army can overrule both. After the terrorist attack on Mumbai on November 26 last year, they promised to send the ISI’s Director-General, Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to Delhi to help in the investigations. Mr Zardari finally admitted in an interview with NBC news on May 10 what had been known from very beginning — that the Army did not let him send Lt Gen Pasha!
Clearly, it is too early to say how successful the Pakistani Army’s offensive has been and how far the Army will go in dealing with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda. It is one thing to clear Swat, Buner, Lower Dir and Shangli districts of militants, and quite another to wipe out the Taliban headed by Mullah Omar and the Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden. With both untouched, Taliban militants retreating in the face of the Pakistani Army’s offensive will be sheltered in their strongholds in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas just as the Taliban and Al Qaeda elements fleeing from Afghanistan in the face of the US and the Northern Alliance’s offensive in November 2001 had been sheltered by organisations like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, courtesy the ISI.
They will return when the going is good again. For it is one thing to drive the Taliban out and another to hold the territory thus cleared. Has Pakistan the political will to do that? Finally, the offensive does not mean that Pakistan would also act against the LeT and the JeM which it has created to stage terrorist strikes against India. Indeed, the release of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, head of the LeT and mastermind of the attack on Mumbai on the ground of there being “insufficient” evidence against him, clearly indicates that Pakistan’s sptonsorship of cross-border terrorism against this country will continue.
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