The day after Pakistan’s government signed a peace deal with the Taliban allowing them to implement their own version of sharia in the Swat Valley, there was a traffic jam at a square in downtown Mingora, the main town in the region. The square, Green Chowk, has acquired the nickname Khooni Chowk, or Bloody Square, because the Taliban used to string up their victims there. “Look at this.” A shopkeeper pointed to the hubbub. “This is what people wanted, to get out and do business. Take the security forces away, take the Taliban away, and we can get on with our lives.” He, like many Pakistanis, believed that the deal with the Taliban was the only way to stop bullet-riddled bodies from turning up at Khooni Chowk.
Mingora is not a backwater, not part of the Wild West that foreign journalists invoke whenever they talk about the Taliban.
It’s bursting with aspiration; it has law schools, a medical college, a nurses’ training institute. There is even a heritage museum.
Yet when peace arrived on February 16, all the women vanished. They were not in the streets or in the offices, not even in the bazaar, which sells nothing but fabric, bags, shoes and fashion accessories.
The music market vanished, too. All 400 shops. The owner of one had converted it into a kebab joint. Across from his stand, a barber had hung the obligatory ‘No un- Islamic haircuts, no shaves’ sign and was taking an early morning nap, his face covered with a newspaper.
This, I was told, was the price of peace.
As Taliban insurgency gains strength in Pakistan, my country seems to be preparing to surrender. In areas where the Taliban formally hold sway people have bowed to their guns. And in the heartland, in Punjab and other regions, there is a disquieting acceptance of the inevitability of the Taliban’s rise to power.
I hear vague comparisons with the days before the Iranian revolution; the only problem is that we don’t seem to have a Khomeini, at least not yet. And we do have nuclear bombs.
In my hometown in Punjab, a businessman friend was inspired by the news from Swat. “If two hundred Taliban take over our town, then we can all start making our own decisions. Who needs this corrupt system anyway?” My friend is a typical middle- class conservative Pakistani, and people in cities across the country share his excitement. I tried to reason with him: “You drop your daughters off at school every morning, you always have music on in your car. That would be unthinkable if they take over.” He hesitated and then rolled out the explanation that most urban Pakistanis offer. “What they are doing in Swat is their Pashtun culture,” he said, speaking of the ethnic group that dominates western Pakistan. “Islam says education is compulsory for every man and woman. And we Punjabis don’t have their culture.” I have confronted the same naive assertion on TV talk shows and in Urdu newspapers: The Taliban ideology is sound; it’s their methods that need to be modified.
Somehow people hope that when the Islamists march into Lahore or Islamabad, they’ll suddenly realise that Islam is a religion of peace, that music is good and that girls should be allowed to go to school.
People who have experienced Taliban rule have no such illusions. When the Taliban took over Swat, they held a ‘peace’ march. Thousands of men in black turbans and regulation beards stomped through the city. “There wasn’t a single local among them,” a schoolteacher in Mingora recalled. “I sat at home with my family and quivered with fear.” Then he hesitated and made sure that my recorder was switched off. “I felt like a non-Muslim citizen of Mecca the day it was conquered by prophet Muhammad’s army. And I am a practising Muslim.” Among the women of Swat, the fear and resignation is even stronger. The Taliban have blown up girls’ schools and dumped bodies of professional dancers in Bloody Square. Women told me their stories behind closed doors, from under their newly purchased burqas, and always after extracting solemn promises of anonymity.
“We have become prisoners in our own houses. We can’t even go out to buy groceries.
It’s all over for us,” one told me.
While Taliban cheerleaders monopolise the airwaves, their advance parties are in the cities. Schools in Lahore and Islamabad are routinely shut down after receiving anonymous threats. The education ministry circulated a notice in Karachi recently warning co-ed schools to beef up security. The same is true in the industrial hub of Sialkot.
Sure, thousands have turned up at anti- Taliban rallies; there are Facebook groups galore protesting. But people know that raising a banner in a city square or clicking on an e-petition is not going to convince the Taliban to give up their arms.
There were hopes that Pakistan’s security services would fight the Taliban, but the army and the intelligence agencies seem so obsessed with the supposed menace from India that they are ignoring the menace at home. If they are not colluding with the Taliban, as many observers believe they are, they are staying neutral. In fact, they are so neutral that they rent their bases to the United States for launching missile-laden unmanned aircraft while simultaneously supporting the very people those missiles are aimed at.
Recently, the Taliban took over Buner, a strategically important district just 70 miles from Islamabad and less than 20 miles from the Tarbela hydropower plant, which provides one-third of Pakistan’s electricity. The military’s response was anaemic — it deployed a small, lightly armed constabulary force.
In Swat, I heard the same story again and again: Before the peace deal, soldiers would stop people at checkpoints and say, “Don’t go that way, the Taliban are slitting someone’s throat.” But they wouldn’t intercede to stop the throat slitting. The problem, as many see it, is that there’s no alternative.
When we look overseas for support, we are confronted by the Americans demanding that we oppose the Taliban even as US drones continue to kill impoverished civilians in the remote-controlled hunt for Taliban officials. There is not a single Pakistani who supports these attacks or the way they are being conducted.
What are people to do? I got a glimpse of what they are already doing in Lahore. At a hotel that is so safe, I was told, that Americans often use it, I saw security guards posted at multiple entrances. You see private security guards everywhere in Pakistan, but one I spoke with had his pistol drawn. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said that those were his orders. But how he will guard against a truckload of explosives, a band of men armed with rocket launchers or an ideology that wants us to dress and behave like people in Mecca circa AD 570 remains unclear.
© The Washington Post
About the author:
Mohammed Hanif is a special correspondent for the BBC’s Urdu service and is the author of ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’
