PRESERVING PAKISTAN

PRESERVING PAKISTAN

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Owen Bennett-Jones
Producer: Chris Bowlby
Editor: Innes Bowen

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/13_07_09.txt


Taking part in order of appearance:

Mahboob Mahdood
Professor, INSEAD Business School

Khalid Aziz
Former Chief Secretary of North West Frontier Province

Christine Fair
Georgetown University

Malik Naveed Khan
Chief of Police, North West Frontier Province

Farzana Shaikh
Author of ‘Making Sense of Pakistan’

Jugnoo Mohsin
Newspaper Editor, Lahore

BENNETT-JONES: The current fighting in Pakistan is vicious: there have been the
Taliban’s beheadings and child suicide bombers, and the army’s offensive in which few
prisoners have been taken. The battleground - the tribal areas which lie on the border with Afghanistan - has for over a century been ungovernable, wild and remote. But the fighting today is no longer a local affair: it has global implications, and some believe it could lead to a new revolutionary state.

MAHDOOD: What I mean by Jihadistan is a state that is controlled by people who believe
in militant movement both within the country to impose Islam and to export it internationally.

BENNETT-JONES: If there were a Jihadistan, where would it be?

MAHDOOD: I think the likelihood is that it may start in the North West Frontier as well as
in the Northern areas of Baluchistan Province. It could then spread to Southern Punjab
where there is also a strong militant movement, and then over time it could take over the
whole country.

MAHDOOD: Mahboob Mahdood, a Pakistani business professor at the INSEAD
business school, has recently been on a field trip to Pakistan to see what’s going on first-hand, and he wrote a paper which stated that Pakistan is rapidly transforming into the world’s first Sunni militant fascist state - a state he calls Jihadistan. Is he right? Some in Washington are also pessimistic. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, speaking in April.

CLINTON: I think that we cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat
posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances now within hours of Islamabad
that are being made by a loosely confederated group of terrorists and others who are
seeking the overthrow of the Pakistani state - which is, as we all know, a nuclear armed
state.

BENNETT-JONES: For many years, Pakistanis have tended to dismiss Western
concerns about the Jihadis as exaggerated, prejudiced and ill-informed. But that’s changed. Now Pakistanis themselves see the threat as real; and with public opinion behind the army,the state is confronting Jihadis on fronts throughout the North West of the country. In the main city in that part of Pakistan, Peshawar, thousands have been killed and millions have fled their homes nearby. Khalid Aziz is a former chief secretary of the North West Frontier Province, and he is seeing the conflict close up.

AZIZ: Pakistan is at war. I mean we are fighting a war in the tribal areas and now in the
North West Frontier Province. I mean what is war? I mean when about 1.5 million people
become homeless - if that’s not war, what else is?

BENNETT-JONES: It’s a civil war then?

AZIZ: Well I would classify it as such. There is no other classification because if your own people are fighting the government, they are Pakistanis who are doing it, the Pakistan
military is reacting to them and there are casualties, there’s mass destruction, there’s mass displacement of people - so it is a civil war, yes.

BENNETT-JONES: It is a military struggle and an ideological one - a conflict between
two competing visions of Pakistan. It is also a test of political will; and when it comes to that, one side always has the edge. Mahboob Mahdood.

MAHDOOD: Clearly the militants have the greater resolve. The resolve of the government
is principally to maintain the status quo. The bureaucracy wants to maintain its privileges; the people who are in power, the various political parties want to keep things the way they are. So their principal interest is not to change things, but I think the pressure for change is now building up to a very substantial degree.

BENNETT-JONES: To what extent do you think the timescale matters? The militants can
play a much longer game than the politicians. Do you think that’s true?


MAHDOOD: I think the politicians are in it for the long haul as well, but I think the real
question is at what point will the United States say: “OK, we’ve had enough, we’re getting
out”. And if aid gets cut off in a substantial way, things could rapidly start moving in favour of the Jihadi Movement.

BENNETT-JONES: But who are the Taliban? Together with Al-Qaeda, they’re in the
vanguard of the Jihadi Movement. It’s a complicated set-up. There’s the Afghan Taliban
and the Pakistani Taliban. The Pakistani bit includes disgruntled, young tribesmen railing
against the stifling authority of their elders, landless peasants; Kashmiri fighters from
Pakistan’s main province Punjab; Central Asians and so on. There are lots of groups and
each has its own objectives, structures, funding arrangements and leaders. The Taliban
stronghold is the Federally Administered Tribal Areas - known in Pakistan as FATA - and
the most powerful fighter there is Baitullah Mehsud. A former Guantanamo detainee, he has
attracted support in Pakistan and beyond. Christine Fair of Georgetown University
frequently visits Pakistan.

FAIR: What is very clear is that the Southern Punjabi groups, and specifically the Deobandi groups, they are very much the ally of Baitullah Mehsud; and they are - as one of my British colleagues said - they’re the elevator that takes people from the diaspora particularly in the UK to FATA. You simply don’t show up from Birmingham or wherever and find yourself in the court of Baitullah Mehsud. It requires a tier of intermediaries, and many people believe that that tier of intermediaries is in fact the Punjabi so-called Jihadi groups because they do share ethnic affinities with some of the folks that are coming from abroad.

BENNETT-JONES: So when we hear that some of the Taliban who’ve been killed have
been found with tattoos from British football clubs, probably they went from Birmingham (in that case I think it was) to Southern Punjab, and then on to the North West of Pakistan and the fight?

FAIR: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be Southern Punjab. We’re really looking at that
Punjab itself is home to many of these groups.
BENNETT-JONES: British citizens may be fighting in Pakistan, but some are being
targeted too. Gordon Brown has said that three quarters of all terrorist plots in the UK
originate in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud is not only Pakistan’s most wanted man; the US has
shown its interest in him too with a five million dollar bounty on his head. But in the past, Pakistan has reached agreements with leaders like Baitullah Mehsud, often leaving them to their own devices as long as they stay in their own areas. And in May last year, presumably because he’d done a deal with the government, Baitullah Mehsud felt confident enough to hold a news conference.

FX: CHANTING

BENNETT-JONES: He invited some cameramen to his redoubt of Waziristan on the
Afghan border; and then hiding behind a veil, on the grounds that it’s un-Islamic to be
filmed, he made some statements. Like many Jihadis, his pitch for support is predicated on
unshakeable, defiant anti-Americanism.

MEHSUD: (laughs/native language)

TRANSLATOR: They are unbelievers. By the blessing of Allah, in all conditions we are
resolute against the unbelievers - the Jews and the Christians. If I am martyred, my people will be happy and so will I. So what do the Americans have that would cause us pain?

BENNETT-JONES: But apart from hating America, what do Baitullah Mehsud and the
Taliban really stand for? As a career bureaucrat in the North West Frontier Province,
Khalid Aziz devoted many years of his life to maintaining stability in the area. And for that, he had to understand the radical Islamists: their grievances, their demands, and their ideas.

AZIZ: They think in terms of rituals. They think in terms of a life which is not open to
interpretation. They think in terms of the hardcore messages in the Koran, the literal sense. They do not relate to the modern world - music, TV, photography, unveiled women. These are all exercises or activities which, according to these conservative elements, take you away from God. It changes your mindsetting. Because according to them, you should be thinking twenty-four hours about nothing else but God. You see a lot of anger there because they have been left out and they believe that part of the problem is that because they have been like that, the world is passing them by.

BENNETT-JONES: The Taliban supporters may be a minority, but they can still be
counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. And the Taliban’s appeal relies in part on being seen as the champion of the poor in a society with very big gaps in wealth and power. In addition, in places such as Baitullah Mehsud’s base of Waziristan, the Taliban can get things done - as Christine Fair points out.

FAIR: You’ll hear stories and you talk to people in Waziristan that you’ll go to the political agent to get a very basic service, like for example an identity card, and the implication is if you give me money - i.e. a bribe - it’ll get done. So instead they go to the local Taliban commander who then sends a note ever so politely to the political agent, explaining that if he doesn’t provide this service, he’s going to be in big trouble and, voila, the service is provided. At the same time, of course, the Taliban are totally brutal and they are able to literally behead dissent and the state has largely been unable to protect those people. You had again, as you have in North and South Waziristan, a tremendous hierarchy between the landowners and everyone else. And even if the non-landowners had accumulated a lot of money through remittances or for business, they simply had no prestige, and so the Taliban again were able to go to the money people who had resources but no social cache and was also able to mobilise their grievance.

BENNETT-JONES: Malik Naveed Khan has long experience of the Taliban. He’s the
Chief of Police in the North West Frontier Province and last year 168 of his men were killed by the Taliban, many of them in suicide attacks at police check points. Every day he gets text messages threatening him with violent death. And in his office, behind several layers of walls, barriers, barricades and armed men, he told me that the young men who carry out the attacks are themselves often victims of ruthless Taliban handlers.

NAVEED KHAN: These are people who are being exploited and they are exploiting
people. They are totally misdirected, misled. There are some who actually believe, falsely, that what they are doing is right, and there are some like criminals who have joined them like the have-nots class who were doing nothing, jobless. They have joined them just to have a gun in their hand; fifteen, twenty thousand rupees per month, five to six hundred dollars; a vehicle to drive; a Kalashnikov in their hand; grenades tied to their bodies. And they just enjoy that status.

BENNETT-JONES: At the same time, if people are blowing themselves up, killing
themselves, they must genuinely believe that they are on God’s side, that they’re going to
heaven?

NAVEED KHAN: We have done some psychological study on this and unfortunately in
the areas where this thing is mostly happening - the recruitment of the suicide bombers -
these people have not been given proper education. So at the age of fourteen, you have a
mind which is very, very vulnerable. Secondly, these people have developed the art of
indoctrinating people. They totally brainwash them. And there are masters, trainers - and
now they are training the trainers, you see. They have gone into special programmes, so they are multiplying. The trainers are multiplying. And then it is not a kind of religion. It has become a cult.

BENNETT-JONES: A newspaper article in Pakistan recently quoted a Taliban recruiter
who said that when it came to finding suicide bombers, the younger they were, the easier it was to convince them. And as Mahboob Mahdood argues, it’s not just that the Taliban has
worked out how to convince young men of their cause. It’s also that the state has so little to offer.

MAHDOOD: I think one of the attractions of the Taliban was that they gave people of
other militant groups, and in fact of various non-militant Islamic groups as well, that they gave people a sense of identity. They get food to eat, they get clean clothes to wear, they get an education, they get a sense of identity in a society that has aspirations and the like. So there are many positive things that even the militants have to offer. It’s just that their solutions are pretty horrific, and over the long-term could create a very stunted and ghastly society.

BENNETT-JONES: Do you think it’s fair to say that those militant organisations are also
actually more meritocratic than the rest of Pakistani society?

MAHDOOD: Absolutely. I mean, for example, if you look at political parties, the two
major parties - the Peoples Party and the Muslim League - don’t hold elections and they are highly feudalistic parties.

BENNETT-JONES: If you’re a feudal vassel, you look for radical outcomes?

MAHDOOD: Yes, the alternatives don’t look so bad. I mean they look horrific to us, but
if you’ve no other prospects in life, they don’t look so bad.

BENNETT-JONES: And that is the real danger for Pakistan. I was talking with a senior
civil servant in Peshawar recently and asked if the insurgency could spread. “Of course”, he answered. “Give me a reason why it won’t spread? The land issue is here in the North
West, but it’s the same throughout Pakistan.” One of the confusing things about recent
Pakistani history is that the state itself has at times supported various parts of the Taliban. To westerners, it seems incomprehensible, but there were reasons for the policy. For one thing, there’s been no internal consensus about the nature of Pakistan. Was it created as an Islamic country or just a country for Muslims to live in? Secondly, the military have seen the Taliban and their Jihadi forebears as a useful, deniable force to be used in regional conflicts, especially with India. Farzana Shaikh has just written a history of Pakistan which traces the country’s longstanding ideological confusion.

SHAIKH: The Pakistani military establishment has generally tended to regard militant
groups as strategic assets in the conduct of an asymmetric war with India, an asymmetric
power relation with India where India of course is far superior in terms of its conventional military forces. And, therefore, this has encouraged the Pakistani military to use these militant groups as assets in trying to gain some kind of advantage.
BENNETT-JONES: But that was a strategy which would seem to have such obvious
disadvantages that these people could destabilise the state at a later point.

SHAIKH: Well that is much clearer now than it ever has been in the past, and I think the
reason why the military chose to rely on these groups, chose to work with them was
because there was a clear understanding on the part of the military establishment that this relationship would be one that the military could clearly control, that would be heavily biased in favour of the military. Obviously it has not turned out like that and what we’ve seen is these militant groups go on to develop their own agendas - many of them quite independent of the military’s agenda - and that’s what has caused all the difficulty today: many of them acting autonomously of the military.

BENNETT-JONES: The fighting now taking place in Pakistan is important, but it’s only
part of the story. In any straight fight, the army - half a million strong - should win through. But what then? There are so many uncertainties. Will the state support the millions forced from their homes by the fighting or lose them to the Taliban? Will the state itself do deals with the Taliban seeking their help once more in Kashmir or Afghanistan? Khalid Aziz fears the administrative capacity of the Pakistan government is now so weak that there’s no guarantee it will do what’s needed.

AZIZ: The problem with military action is that this issue is not a military issue. Now
militaries, they try to target what they think are areas where the militants are the hostile state. They do not have the wherewithal to command that area. After the firing of the guns or the launching of the air strikes, what happens to the ground after that? And that has to be held by the civilians and that is what we are not doing, the more we delay it. Since 2001, if you look at it, till 2004, we didn’t have any trouble, and once the fighting began from Waziristan it’s been coming into the districts. And if we have not been holding it and it goes to Lahore and the rest of the area, then what’s happening? We are losing the country, so why are we not doing it?

BENNETT-JONES: Farzana Shaikh shares those worries. After all, if the fighting goes on
for years - as many expect - will the public grow weary of the conflict and demand a
negotiated settlement? Who, in short, is going to win?

SHAIKH: It’s still too early to tell. And I think one ought to be cautious and careful about this because the national mood such as it is can be very fickle, and I think the way in which the government and indeed the military respond to and handle the huge humanitarian crisis in Pakistan is going to determine very much how this national mood plays out in favour or against the army and the government.

BENNETT-JONES: Well if that’s right, then the outlook’s not very good, is it, because
the Pakistan state has never shown a capacity to organise and to administer things of that
kind very well?

SHAIKH: That is in fact the great concern. The record of the government in the past,
particularly as we’ve seen in 2005 - the earthquake disaster, the rehabilitation and relief of refugees - its handling has always been very poor. And there is great concern now that with the government not being able to rise to the challenge as it were and with the international community still not coming forth with the kind of assistance that Pakistan has repeatedly called for, many of the military gains can easily evaporate as political discontent intensifies.

BENNETT-JONES: Western governments are rarely shy when it comes to telling
Pakistan that it needs to be more determined and more democratic. But for many Pakistanis,
the key issue is not so much democracy as the rule of law; and on the ground, that depends
in large part on the police. When the army is back in the barracks, it will be Pakistan’s
battered, underpaid policemen and women who will be on the frontline. Christine Fair:

FAIR: The counterinsurgency literature is so clear that armies don’t win
counterinsurgencies, police do. Yet for the last eight years, the international community has pumped money into the army. And I know, speaking for the United States, the money that
we have spent on all activities, including border security as well as police training (because it all gets lumped into one package for international you know counter narcotics and law enforcement activities), it’s been a pittance. So even if the state didn’t realise this and the international community didn’t realise it, the Taliban did realise it because, as you said, they’re at the frontline. They’ve been beheaded, they’ve been driven out. In fact you saw in Swat police officers taking ads out in the paper. ‘Hi, my name is Zahed Hussein. I used to be a police officer. I’m not anymore, so please don’t hunt me and my family down’. And of course if you look at the way in which the police, and of course the Frontier constabulary is you know a similar animal, they don’t have modern munitions - they have bolt action rifles; they don’t have effective ground transport; they don’t have secure communications. So this has really been an enormous opportunity lost, and many police officers have lost their life trying to do the right thing and they have simply been sitting ducks.

FX: TALIBAN CHANTING

BENNETT-JONES: Pakistan has so many challenges. As things stand, the education
system is producing a steady stream of Jihadi recruits - and there’s no quick fix there; and there may be no quick outcome to the conflict. Mahboob Mahdood from INSEAD believes
it may be a mistake to think in terms of a decisive battle after which everything will change. It might be that the increasing religiosity and maybe radicalisation of the Pakistan government happens quite gradually.

MAHDOOD: It could be a slow, gradual revolution as opposed to something that happens
at one time because I don’t think there’s one single force that would take over. But what
may happen is - and is indeed happening - is that sections of the country are going more in one direction or the other. For example, the whole spread of Sharia law and Talibanism and various militant movements and fundamentalist movements in the North West Frontier has
been going on for many, many years now. Now this is spreading to Southern Punjab and the
like, so it’s not as if there will be a revolution in the sense of a communist party taking over the country or that bits and pieces of the country begin to fall towards what I call Jihadistans.

BENNETT-JONES: Let me put this argument to you. You talk of the possibility of a
Jihadistan being established and yet 70% perhaps of Pakistanis are Sufis, they are moderate, they want nothing to do with the kind of violence that the Taliban have. And it is not the Pakistan Army and the American backers who will prevent Jihadistan; it is the people of Pakistan.

MAHDOOD: You’re right. I do believe that most Pakistanis are moderate and many of
them are either implicitly or explicitly of a mystical orientation. But mystical Islam, Sufism made its compromise with the state over a thousand years ago and became Quietest, so that means that they haven’t really had the intellectual organisational capacity to intervene in state affairs or in the direction of the state.

BENNETT-JONES: I see. So you’re saying that if the state were taken over, those
people would actually just follow the state?

MAHDOOD: I think so, unless there’s a revolution. And I think there needs to be a much
more activist now mystical or tolerant Islam that needs to develop, but this isn’t going to happen overnight.

BENNETT-JONES: So you’re saying that if there was some central collapse, the
moderate majority would go along with what happened because they’re not active?

MAHDOOD: You see in some ways the majority have seen the Islamicisation of Pakistan
occur over a long period of time. During Bhutto’s regime, he banned alcohol; during Zia’s
regime, a whole series of religious ordinances were passed and the country became much
more Islamicised. And it’s been developing since then. So this is not something coming out
of the sky. The growth of militant Islam has been about thirty or forty years in the making.

BENNETT-JONES: That’s one view. Others think the moderate majority in Pakistan will
be more resilient and that it’s already showing its resolve. At the start of this year, I was thinking Pakistan is in denial - the threat is so obvious and yet people just don’t see it - and then the mood changed. Last time I went a few weeks ago, the papers were full of vociferous denunciations of the beheadings and the suicide attacks. It’s now possible to think the state may prevail. So what happened? What changed? Jugnoo Mohsin is a
newspaper editor in Lahore whose articles have long been very critical of the Taliban, which in turn has repeatedly threatened to kill her. The government offensive began in earnest in April this year and Jugnoo Mohsin, like many others, believes a two minute clip of video broadcast shortly before that time made a big difference.

FX: TALIBAN OFFICIAL FLOGGING WOMAN

BENNETT-JONES: It shows a Taliban official in the Swat Valley flogging a young
woman who was accused of adultery. And it shocked Pakistan.

MOHSIN: For years, it was a very, very lonely struggle. We have felt very vulnerable, we
have felt very threatened because ours was a voice in the wilderness for many years. We
were the only ones who were saying that this is the enemy within. We have to tackle the
enemy within. This is our war. These people are as much the enemies of civilisation in
Pakistan - of prosperity, of economic growth, of liberal values - as they are enemies of any foreign power. But we feel far less alone now than we did before because there are many
more people who are beginning to think like us and who are beginning, more importantly, to
talk like us.

BENNETT-JONES: Some people say that these pictures have a woman being flogged in
the Swat Valley and the move into Buner, taking the Taliban quite close to Islamabad, that
those were the turning points. What do you think?

MOHSIN: I think absolutely right. You had the flogging of that girl and you had some
brave TV channels, one in particular called Dunya Television, that played that over and over again. And that became widely disseminated and that caused a sort of wave of revulsion throughout Pakistan because Swat is only a hundred miles from Islamabad. It’s not some North Waziristan or some tribal agency. And they came out in their true colours. And in urban Pakistan, in civilised Pakistan, in the Pakistan that identifies with the world that wants to educate its children, that wants to increase its social mobility, that wants to travel, that wants to be like any other civilised nation in the world, it caused such a revulsion. Here we are casting our vote in 60% turnouts of the electorate. Here we are casting our vote for all the secular middle running moderate political parties, never casting our votes for religious fundamentalists or extremists, and we suddenly turn round in urban Pakistan and say, “Oh my god, is this the future that awaits us?” And suddenly the penny began to drop. That is when people realised, saw the real face of the Taliban, of religious extremism, and what these people are all about, and also caused people to question how they had become so powerful.

BENNETT-JONES: The risks are real, but it is still the case that most Pakistanis vote
against religious parties and believe in a type of Islam that is non-confrontational, peaceful and relaxed. And that may be the state’s best defense. There is a lot at stake: Pakistan is home to many Jihadis, the central state is weak, and it has the bomb. For all these reasons, Pakistan matters. The last few months have been highly significant. Mainstream Pakistanis - not urban liberals and their western friends - have for the first time expressed real concern about the Taliban. And the fight is on. It is a military and ideological struggle, it will last for years, and the outcome is uncertain.