[Peace-discuss] Obama's Iraq

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It'll probably be Pakistan.  --CGE]

	As Pakistan's Taliban take control of town, military stays in fort
	Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers
	last updated: July 08, 2008 06:20:58 PM

DARRA ADAM KHEL, Pakistan — The Taliban fighters were sitting in the back of a 
pickup, parked right outside the army fort in Darra Adam Khel, a wild town in 
Pakistan's troubled northwest that's famous for its arms bazaar.

The Islamic militia, linked with al Qaida, has controlled Darra for about six 
months. Wrapped in head scarves, with just their eyes showing, and bristling 
with weaponry, its members patrol the streets and impose their own austere 
rules. They've become such a routine sight in the town that no one pays them any 
attention.

The security forces, when they emerge from their fort, don't challenge the 
hot-blooded young militants. Even their presence outside the Pakistan Frontier 
Corp's White Fort in Darra didn't concern residents.

"What's wrong with that?" said Shah Mahmood, a tribal elder and gun store owner, 
when he was asked about the scene at the fort. "They (the Taliban) don't bother 
us, only those who are doing wrong. They have finished the robbers, the drug 
dealers, the kidnappers. Look, there is peace here now."

In theory, Pakistan's security forces are in opposition to the Taliban, who are 
now firmly entrenched across the country's Federally Administered Tribal Areas 
and encroaching on the adjacent region in the North West Frontier Province, 
known as the "settled" areas. In reality, the government has ceded large swathes 
of territory to the extremists.

Some blame President Pervez Musharraf, who removed colonial-era local government 
structures and replaced them with weak elected local officials in the settled 
areas and the military in the tribal areas, who couldn't maintain law and order.

Late last month, the Frontier Corp, a paramilitary force, launched an operation 
against Islamist warlords not linked to the Taliban who were based on the 
outskirts of Peshawar in the Khyber agency, a part of the Federally Administered 
Tribal Areas.

Darra, just a 40-minute drive from Peshawar, is in the North West Frontier 
Province, which means it shouldn't be as lawless as the tribal areas. Yet the 
Taliban, far more hard-line than the Khyber agency's militants, operate with 
impunity in Darra. The rubble of a paramilitary checkpoint that they bombed 
marks the edge of the town.

The Taliban presence didn't seem to dent business in Darra's market. Bursts of 
gunfire jolted the main street every few minutes, as buyers tested weapons by 
letting off a few rounds into the air. While the gun stores are unique to Darra, 
butchers, candy shops and cafes grilling meat kebabs also were open.

In Mahmood's shop, a Kalashnikov copy made in Darra starts at $92, while a 
smuggled Russian-made model would cost $1,500. Darra produces all components of 
the weapons in tiny workshops, even the bullets.

On display at Mohammad Illyas' store was a new-looking American M-16 rifle, a 
bulky submachine gun that could have been taken from a dead U.S. soldier across 
the border in Afghanistan. Illyas wanted $7,000 for that M-16, and $3,400 for a 
1970s-era model.

"People say that these Taliban here are Tajiks or Chechens or whatever, but 
that's a lie. They are our own people," Illyas said. "When there was government 
rule here, the police took money, the army took money. The Taliban don't. . . . 
We say George Bush is the terrorist, not the Taliban."

It would take a brave person to speak out against the Taliban. Girls and women 
in particular suffer under their rule, often banned from going to school or 
working. But the Taliban seem to be genuinely welcome in Darra and across the 
tribal belt, so exasperated is the population by the anarchy that prevailed 
under the Pakistani government.

"I would say that 70 percent of people support the Taliban," said Abdul Qadir 
Khan, a student in Peshawar from South Waziristan, the epicenter of Pakistan's 
Taliban movement. "That's because people don't have education, they don't have 
jobs. The Taliban say they are fighting a holy war."

While the Taliban can't bring economic development, they've cracked down on the 
criminal gangs that plague the northwest and have set up their own Islamic 
courts, which dispense speedy justice. And development projects weren't taking 
place anyway, locals said.

The Taliban were able to spread rapidly across Pakistan's northwest, experts 
said, because the colonial-era system of local government had broken down or 
been removed.

That administrative system, a legacy of the British empire, gave enormous powers 
to the local chief bureaucrat, known as the political agent in the tribal 
territories and the deputy commissioner in the rest of Pakistan. He controlled 
the security forces and acted as a magistrate, adjudicating on disputes, powers 
that could have been used to quash Taliban cells before they had a chance to 
mushroom. Adding fuel was the anger that the tribes of the area felt about 
Pakistan's alliance with Washington after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

"The perception that we are fighting someone else's war and the destruction of 
the institutional framework that could have dealt with the (security) crisis 
created an administrative vacuum. That was filled by the Taliban," said Rustam 
Shah, a former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan.

Musharraf's regime abolished the deputy commissioner structure six years ago — 
replacing it with elected mayors who had far fewer powers — in an attempt to 
provide democratic legitimacy to his army-led government. The political agent 
was sidelined after the army went into the tribal areas for the first time, 
after 9-11, against Afghan insurgents whom Pakistani tribes had given refuge there.

"The blunder was taking power away from the political administration and giving 
it to the army. The army then indulged in war with the local people," said 
Mohammad Amad, the executive director of IDEA, a nongovernmental organization 
that conducts social surveys in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Bashir Bilour, the senior minister of the provincial government in the North 
West Frontier Province, said that Taliban militants never would have been able 
to move last year into the area of Swat, a valley in the settled area, if a 
deputy commissioner had been in place.

"There was no government to challenge them" in Swat, Bilour said in an 
interview. "We propose bringing the (colonial) administrative system back."

To reinstate the deputy commissioners and wrest control of the tribal 
territories from the army would require strong action from the new federal 
government. However, Islamabad is caught up in a spiraling political crisis, and 
while some members of the coalition government have vowed to reverse Musharraf's 
local government revisions, the complexity of the task means that it's a long 
way down the agenda.

(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.)

McClatchy Newspapers 2008