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| Taliban emerge where law, order, justice vanish | | | BL KAK
New Delhi | February 24
The frontier territories of Aghanistan have attracted a good deal of attention of various capitals across the world, including New Delhi. In fact, India's Foreign Office has, in recent times, evinced greater interest in the changing situation in the strife-torn Afghanistan. New Delhi's anxiety is not without a basis. Media as well as intelligence agencies continue to report cases of Taliban infiltration of towns and cities to the point where they even asume law enforcement duties and parade criminals in the streets, supplanting mistrusted and inefficient state authorities.
Pakistan's Daily Times newspaper has quoted a retired police official in the afflicted North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), as saying: "Where law and order and justice vaniss, Taliban emerge and the public response is positive because people want protection, irrespective of who provides". And other police officials claimed that whole areas in the province have been "taken over" by the Taliban. In the armaments-making centre of Darra Adam Khel, located 30 km from the NWFP capital Peshawar, militants reportedly threatened NGOs, terrorized music and video shop owners and staged bomb blasts by girls' schools to deter people from a profane and "un-Islamic" lifestyle.
Not long ago, a cleric in Darra went as far as declaring all multinational companies, monetary institutions, the Red Cross and local NGOs as "agents of the Jews and the West", prompting rights activists to demand government action against him. Although some differentiate between Taliban and other extremists, Pakistan's tribal areas are predominantly ethnic Pashtun, like the Taliban's strongholds in Afghanistan, and many communities share the same customs and values. In some parts of NWFP, the public has actively supported the actions against "corrupting" influences. Around the city of Swat a year ago, locals on more than one occasion burned piles of television sets, VCRs, CDs, cassettes and other electronic equipment to protest obscenity.
Reacting to the reports, Gen. Parvez Musharraf at the time said: "This is a Talibanised mindset. It has spread. It has to be stopped. Now we are in a different ball game". The trend began before the Taliban was ousted in Afghanistan by US-led forces in late 2001. A year earlier, a heavily-armed religious group apparently inspired by the Taliban stormed video shops and burnt thousands of cassettes, televisions and VCRs in the town of Miranshah in North Waziristan in NWFP. The spillover should have come as no big surprise. Apart from its geographical proximity to the Taliban, Pakistan under Gen. Musharraf's predecessor, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban government, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Today, despite pledges of action against the militants, barbers in the NWFP town of Bajaur have reportedly yielded to warnings in circulated leaflets not to shave off beards as this was un-Islamic. "Hair-cutting centres where anti-Islamic activities like shaving and cutting beards are carried out are hereby given a final warning to avoid such practices, otherwise they will be responsible for any harm incurred by them", the pamphlet said. Bomb threats were also reportedly made against businesses that ignored the warning, which had also been made in the past with little effect. While local authorities said they would protect businesses, Bajaur's barbers this time heeded the danger and have stopped cutting facial hair.
Senior representatives of Gen. Musharraf play down the scale of the problem, which they say still does not qualify as full-fledged "Talibanisation". Examples are isolated and are the residue of a militancy that existed before the conclusion last year of government peace deals with pro-Taliban tribes in the area, says NWFP governor Lieutenant General Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai. The general was the author of some of the agreements, which have come under increasing criticism abroad for allegedly creating "safe havens" for militants.
"This impression that everybody is growing beards and video shops and CDs are being destroyed-- there were some incidents but that is just not true", Aurakzai recently told journalists. "All the schools are open and the girls are going to the schools, the banks and bazaars are open and the writ of the government is being reinstated", he said, adding that the plan is to "bring erstwhile militants into the mainstream". "We are trying to stop that tide and trying to reverse it and go back to normal", Aurakzai noted.
Critics also blame the system of Islamic religious schools in Pakistan for propagating extremism and providing recruits to insurgent groups. Last November more than 80 people died in a US air strike on a suspected militant-run madrassa in Bajaur. Fearing a backlash, the Pakistani government said it carried out the attack and that only militants died, although locals claimed the victims included many innocent students. Quashing Taliban influence in his country may be proving even harder than President Musharraf expected when he embarked in recent years on his course of "enlightened moderation"--a course his opponents would say is as un-Islamic as the CDs and DVDs they are ready to burn.
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