While President Musharraf labours to manage the fallout of his ‘second coup’, events in the Swat and the adjoining Shangla District of the NWFP, the centre of most of the current violence, are entirely out of Islamabad’s control. In fact, the situation reflects a clear failure of Musharraf’s counter-insurgency strategy and provides a disturbing picture of the magnitude of Pakistan’s slide into anarchy. In more ways than one, the state of play in Swat is a reflection of the crisis that afflicts Pakistan. While the march of radical Islam has been rapid and relatively unopposed, despite claims to the contrary, submissiveness and compliance has marked the character of the Pakistani state’s responses.

On November 29, 2007, military authorities said they had evicted militants from most of the troubled areas in the Swat Valley while all the displaced Government officials returned to their jobs in Shangla District after the retreat of Maulana Fazlullah-led militants of the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) from their positions in the District Headquarters of Alpuri. Major Amjad Iqbal, the military spokesman in Mingora (Swat), told reporters that the majority of militants were either killed or had escaped to the mountains after the SFs targeted them in their hideouts. He said 230 militants had so far been killed in clashes with the SFs in the Swat and Shangla Districts. The military’s declaration of ‘victory’ is far from final – in an insurgency, holding or losing ground is of little significance, and sources indicate that the violence has merely shifted, with the militants tactically dispersed into the hills. Maulana Muhammad Alam, a close aide of Maulana Fazlullah, made a speech from his mobile FM radio in which he denied that the militants had left their positions and claimed that the real battle against the SFs had now begun, and would continue indefinitely. And at around 11:45 pm on November 27, through his FM radio channel, Fazlullah himself directed his armed followers to stop fighting and shift to safer places and wait for his other ‘important messages’ regarding the future line of action.

There has, nevertheless, been some reduction in the militants’ capacities. Reports on November 27 indicated that, after suffering ‘huge losses’, the militants in Swat vacated all the seized Police Stations and other Government buildings and decided to go underground, while the Government closed down all the FM radio channels in the District, including the one run by Fazlullah. The military claimed that they had captured two strategic mountain positions and key routes to Imam Dehri in the Swat Valley. Troops reportedly captured the key positions of Najia Top and Usmani Sar after shelling the Imam Dehri, Koza Banda and Bara Banda areas. On November 25, an unnamed commander of the Khan Khitab alias Baba group, which controlled the Matta sub-division in Swat, was reportedly killed.

With an area of approximately 1,772 square kilometres, the Swat District has a population of 1.5 million (according to the last census in 1998). It is a place of great natural beauty, with "high mountains, green meadows, and clear lakes" and was, till recently, a popular tourist destination. Located just about 160 kilometres from the national capital, Islamabad, five of the Districts' seven Sub-districts had fallen into the control of Islamist extremists.

Unsurprisingly, SF personnel, administrators loyal to Islamabad, pro-Government tribal leaders and journalists, have been the obvious targets of the rising extremist violence. The choice of targets has also expanded to include music and video shops, barber shops, internet centres, NGOs, girls’ schools, and cultural targets such as ancient images of the Buddha. According to the TNSM, all of these are ‘un-Islamic’.

With little evidence of state capacities to control or protect, the common people of Swat have been extraordinarily vulnerable. Indeed, thousands fled their villages in the Kabal sub-division and other areas of Swat after announcements were made by SFs asking them to leave the area, as the Army was set to launch a massive operation against what it called terrorists hiding there. Safdar Sial and Aqeel Yusafzai reported that about 60 per cent of the 1.5 million inhabitants have left the area. Unnamed officials confirmed, on November 19, that at least 500,000 people had fled the region. A majority of them had reportedly shifted to the Malakand Agency, Mardan, Charsadda, Nowshera, Peshawar and Islamabad. A majority of villagers in areas like Sangota, Faza Gat, Hayatabad, Koza and Bara Bandai, Nangolai, Kanju, Shakar Dara, Sher Palam, Behrain, Mianadam, Oshu, Gabral, Shawar and Chakrial have also reportedly abandoned their homes. On their part, the militants are said to have made announcements asking people not to leave their homes as they had arranged for suicide bombers to attack the SFs, if the latter came out of their bases to attack the militants.

The supply of food and daily utilities has reportedly been disrupted to the Swat, Upper Dir, Lower Dir and Chitral Districts and the Malakand Agency because the main approach road, the Mardan-Malakand Road, had been blocked to all kinds of vehicular traffic since November 24. Cellular-phone services have been jammed while the landline telephone network has collapsed in the Shangla, Swat and Battagram Districts. Further, a large number of people who "wanted to move to safer areas from Swat, were reportedly stranded on the roadside, in fields and gas stations and other places on the Mingora-Malakand road. The government has been slow to set up camps for the displaced people at Barikot in Swat and far away in Risalpur in the Nowshera District."

Administrative control in Swat has for long shifted into the hands of the forces of radical Islam led by the TNSM. More importantly, the "tribal system of political administration is being dismantled, both by the presence of the Army and by terrorist violence orchestrated by groups and individuals linked to the Taliban/al Qaeda." Taliban-linked operatives have reportedly opened offices and set up check-posts at various places in the District. On October 9, Fazlullah had announced the formation of a ‘volunteer force’ to "control law and order and traffic problems" in the Matta Sub-division. He said that a Sharia court had already been set up in his native Imam Dehri village. The volunteer force called ‘Shaheen Commandos’, he disclosed, had started patrolling the area and marched through the Matta and Kabal towns.

A demoralised Police force is clearly no longer able to maintain law and order in the District. Demoralisation is now also rampant among the military, and this has been enormously augmented by the suicide attacks and demonstrative brutality of the Islamist militants. Two days after a suicide bomber targeted a vehicle carrying Frontier Constabulary personnel at Nawan Killi on October 25 and killed 18 soldiers and two civilians, the heads of two Frontier Constabulary personnel were paraded through the streets of Matta village near Saidu Sharif, the capital of Swat. Militants also publicly executed two SF personnel and seven civilians in the Swat District on October 26-27, taking the total such killings to 13. Maulana Sirajuddin, spokesman for the pro-Taliban cleric Maulana Fazlullah, confirmed that they had conducted the beheadings. There have been a significant number of surrenders by Army and Paramilitary personnel. On November 2, TNSM militants paraded 48 SF personnel before the media in Swat. The SF personnel had surrendered during a week of fierce clashes. One unnamed soldier is reported to have stated, "The militants told us that we would not be harmed if we surrender. If not, then the entire population from the village below will climb up the hill and may kill you." The soldiers subsequently were given PKR 500 each before being released. One of the soldiers said that they do not want to fight with their Muslim brothers who are fighting for the implementation of Sharia.

Further, out of the 21 suicide attacks in the NWFP in 2007, four have occurred in Swat:

October 25: Eighteen soldiers and two civilians died and 35 others, including nine civilians, were injured in a bomb blast aimed at a vehicle carrying Frontier Constabulary personnel at Nawan Killi.

August 3: A suicide blast targeting the family of a Government official killed two persons and injured six members of the family in the Gora village.

July 15: At least 13 SF personnel and six civilians, including three children, were killed and more than 50 people sustained injuries at Matta, when two suicide bombers rammed two cars packed with explosives into an Army convoy early in the morning.

July 12: A suicide bomber killed three police personnel by detonating explosives wrapped around his waist in the Swat District. The suicide attack came moments after a military convoy passed through the area. Unconfirmed reports said that there were two suicide bombers.

The social sphere has for long been the focus of radical Islam in Pakistan. The Taliban was a state of mind even before it became a regime in Afghanistan. In a mirrored evolution, moral policing and social edicts are now an accepted reality in Swat: there is a total ban on music, Internet and CD shops. Maulana Fazlullah has altered names of places that he considers un-Islamic. Schools in the District, especially for girls, have been shut down. Radical clerics command men to grow beards and veil their women, cameras are banned, and people are being forced to stop watching television or listening to music. Since the onset of clashes in October, all schools have closed down and a polio vaccination campaign for children has been abandoned

Evoking disturbing memories of the appalling destruction of the centuries-old Buddha statues by the Taliban in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in March 2001, Fazlullah’s militant brigade in Swat twice attempted to demolish a 7th century Buddha statue in the Jihanabad village in September 2007. The militants believe such statues are ‘symbols of evil.’

According to the NWFP Home Secretary Badshah Gul Wazir, Maulana Fazlullah and his 4,500 armed volunteers had set up a ‘parallel government’ in Swat. Wazir also disclosed that foreign militants and members of outlawed groups were being sheltered in the troubled area. The TNSM, one of the five outfits proscribed by Musharraf on January 12, 2002, was formed in 1992 with the objective of a militant enforcement of Sharia. Ideologically, it is committed to transforming Pakistan into a Taliban-style state. In an August 1998-speech in Peshawar, Maulana Sufi Mohammed reportedly declared that those opposing the imposition of Sharia were wajib-ul-qatl (worthy of death).

While most of the violence and subversion in Swat is being orchestrated by the TNSM, sources indicate that at least some of the militants killed in November were from the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) headed by Maulana Masood Azhar. In a speech he made at the Tablighi Jamaat meeting in Raiwind near Lahore on November 12, Masood Azhar had declared: "Whatever Mullah Fazalullah is doing in Swat is just according to Islam. He is teaching the infidels a good lesson – the infidel Pak Army." There are also reports that JeM’s splinter group, the Jamaat-ul-Furqan and al Qaeda-linked militants are also supporting the TNSM. Militants of the Jamaat-ul-Furqan had set up check-posts on the main road in Shakkardarra and had taken positions on hills during the recent clashes with the Army and Paramilitary Forces, according to Safdar Sial and Aqeel Yusafzai.

Despite the recent setbacks, the TNSM militants have considerable support on the ground. Apart from the generic attraction that radical Islam now draws across Pakistan, the TNSM has been able to galvanise large sections of the Swat populace in the immediate past over the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) issue. Since many of the Lal Masjid students were from Swat, the military assault on the mosque in Islamabad generated sympathy for Fazlullah and his band of jihadis. While he had extended wholesome support to the Lal Masjid clerics, Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Maulana Abdul Aziz, a majority of the rallies and anti-Musharraf demonstrations to protest the assault on Lal Masjid were held in Swat. A day after the military assault on Lal Masjid on July 3, 2007, four civilians were killed and two Police personnel were wounded in a bomb blast that targeted a Police vehicle in the Swat District. One Policeman was killed and four others injured during a rocket attack on a Police Station in the Mata area of Swat District on July 4. The blast followed calls on a private Islamist FM radio station in the area for launching a jihad against the Government in retaliation for the confrontation in Lal Masjid in Islamabad. NWFP Police Chief, Sharif Virk, blamed Maulana Fazlullah for both these attacks. Fazlullah, in broadcasts on his FM channel on July 3 and 4, asked his supporters to take up arms against the Government to avenge the action taken against Lal Masjid and carry out suicide attacks.

One of Fazlullah’s core means for his propaganda campaigns is the FM radio. Maulana Fazlullah is also known as Maulana Radio for the ‘illegal’ FM radio stations that he operates to instigate an armed uprising, urging people to "prepare for jihad". In fact, there are at least 25 illegal FM channels operating in Swat District. These are being run by clerics affiliated to the TNSM, Tablighi Jamaat, Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Fazlur Rehman faction). Some of the clerics running these FM stations reportedly are: Maulana Ahmed Ali Shah in Bara Bandai, Maulana Mohammad Alam in Fatehpur, Maulana Ali Mohammad in Kota Barikot, Maulana Khair Mohammad in Shamozo, Maulana Mohammad Rehan in Parlai, Maulana Safiullah in Matta, Maulana Bakht Ali in Qambar, Mohammad Essa in Sharifabad, Maulana Mohammad Alam in Benori Madyan and Maulana Mohammad Fahim in Drushkhela. These radio stations, which can cover an area of up to four to five kilometres, cost a mere PKR 5,000 to set up.

It was on July 13, 2007, that Gen. Musharraf approved a plan for the immediate deployment of paramilitary forces in the Swat Valley to crush the militancy. He also directed armed forces personnel not to wear their uniforms in public in the NWFP for fear of a backlash from the Lal Masjid operation. He had then stated that the Federal security agencies would execute and monitor all military operations in the NWFP and the NWFP Government would only assist them. And a meeting presided over by President Musharraf on July 20 had approved ‘an all-encompassing strategy’ to combat terrorism, extremism and growing militancy in the NWFP. More than five months after the military moved into Swat, there is no indication of any order being restored.

Swat is crucial from the point of view of a larger front that al Qaeda is in the process of creating in Pakistan. Daily Times reported on November 27 that some Punjabi veterans of the Kashmir jihad now fighting on the side of al Qaeda, when interviewed recently, spoke of the fighting in Swat as a part of the grand strategy of "establishing small independent emirates" to be administered by them and their Islamist colleagues in Waziristan, Swat, Bajaur and in Afghanistan. And it is the Swat valley that many in the intelligence agencies of the West have identified as the likely location of al Qaeda's fugitive top leadership.

There are sections within the Pakistan establishment who are currently celebrating the ‘success’ of their helicopter-gunship campaigns and the limited ground engagement that has followed, which have, over the past days, been reportedly inflicting an average of 25-30 daily casualties on the Islamist extremists – though there is little independent verification of how many, among these, are in fact armed militants, and how many non-combatant and ‘collateral’ fatalities. But the ‘gains’ recorded in terms of the withdrawal of the extremists from the various Police Stations and Government establishments they had seized in the towns are only indices of the widening of the theatre of conflict into the larger and more complex terrain of the Hills, where the Army will tend to lose much of the advantage of its superior technologies. The fighting in Swat has, in fact, just begun.

The writer is a Research Fellow at Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi, India.

Courtesy : South Asia Terrorism Portal

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