Faustian pact

AFTER 18 months of an on-again off-again war between the Taliban and the Pakistan Army, the guns fell silent in the once picturesque Swat valley in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) on February 16 when the militants declared a truce in exchange for a controversial agreement, called the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation (NAR) 2009, with the government to set up Sharia courts.

The people of Swat celebrated. They had been battered for too long. On the one hand were the Taliban, who had set up a parallel government in the district, disbursing summary justice in kangaroo courts and instilling in people a fear of committing any act that might be remotely interpreted as anti-Islamic. On the other was the constant fear of being hit in the crossfire between the Taliban and the security forces. When the militants declared the truce, people distributed sweets and markets and schools reopened.

But even as government spokesmen hailed the victory of negotiations over a military solution, many voices in the country and outside it questioned the long-term objectives and wisdom of the government in concluding the agreement, which has seemed more or less an outright surrender to the Taliban.

There is no hiding the fact that the provincial NWFP government, led by the secular Awami National Party (ANP), an ally of the federal government, was forced to make this agreement following the failure of the Pakistan Army to wrest back control of the district. In its defence, the military said an all-out anti-militant operation in Swat would have led to intolerably high collateral damage.

The government says it has not made a deal with the Taliban directly. But even that sounds like an acknowledgement of the reality of Taliban control in the district of 1.7 million people.

The NAR agreement is between the NWFP government and a militant group allied to the Swat Taliban, called the Tehreek-i-Nifasi-i-Sharia-Mohammadi (TNSM). Under it, the government must set up Sharia courts in the Malakand division of the NWFP, which covers seven districts in all, including Swat. What this actually means is clothed in ambiguity.

The government says the courts will administer speedy justice as demanded by the people, using a mixture of laws prevalent in other parts of Pakistan and rewaj, or customary laws a popular form of Sharia that was in force in the pre-1969 princely state of Malakand.

The TNSM chief, Sufi Mohammed, is a septuagenarian admirer of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He even took a thousand militants with him to fight the Americans in 2001. They were so badly equipped that many of them were killed. Sufi Mohammed was arrested on his return and released only last year by the newly elected ANP-led government. His interpretation of the Sharia courts is likely to be different from the governments, and this is evident from his first pronouncement after the deal, denouncing democracy as anti-Islamic.

The Friday Times put it: There is bitter controversy over what is Islamic and what is not, what is vice and what is virtue, what punishments can be legitimately prescribed, the speed at which this justice can be delivered without abandoning the whole notion of due process, and the process of appeal to constitutional higher authorities outside Malakand. Indeed, it is unclear whether the regulation is even constitutional or not.

The first glimpses of the coming battles over interpretation are already surfacing, with Sufi Mohammed demanding that he should vet the appointments of qazis, or judges, to these courts. But the more immediate concern is the nature of the peace the government has bought in Swat through this agreement. Sufi Mohammeds side of the deal was to convince the Swat Taliban, led by his son-in-law, Mullah Fazlullah, to allow the government to re-establish its writ in the district. In response to his appeal, Fazlullah called an indefinite truce.

But he gave the government no other guarantee. While the government has pledged not to initiate military operations, the Taliban has not made any similar pledge. They have said nothing about giving up weapons either. There is no indication that Fazlullah will abandon his daily broadcasts, which challenge the government, from an illegal FM station. He earned his nom de guerre Mullah Radio as a result of these broadcasts, in which he and his cohorts preach Talibanic Islam.

Fazlullah made no commitment about allowing girls education, which has effectively ended in Swat following a Taliban edict. It is obvious that the Taliban, which is responsible for the killing of hundreds of innocent people in Swat, the destruction and looting of property, and the displacement of over 300,000 people in the past few months, will not submit to the Sharia courts.

[The Taliban] have won the freedom to operate freely, enlarge their network and to deal with the population as they wish, short of blood-letting, observed I.A. Rehman, eminent political thinker and the director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a non-governmental organisation, writing in the daily Dawn. The people of Swat may welcome the deal now as it has silenced the guns, he wrote, but they may not understand the full implications of rule by the Taliban.

Just days after the truce was declared, the Taliban kidnapped a government official who was on his way to Swat to take up his assignment, thus mocking at government notions of re-establishing the writ of the state in the district. Point proved, the Taliban released their hostage after a few hours in exchange for the release of two imprisoned militants.

Earlier, a Geo Television journalist, Musa Khankhel, was killed when he was covering Sufi Mohammeds peace caravan through Swat in an effort to convince Fazlullah to accept the offer. Since then, the Swat Taliban have also kidnapped paramilitary personnel.

Even more disquieting, the senior-most government official in Malakand, the Divisional Commissioner, has signed a 17-point agreement with the TNSM, which is to come into force once the NAR is implemented. It includes a ban on music centres and vulgar CDs, a campaign against obscenity and vulgarity, the closure of markets at prayer times, and the creation of awareness about social evils.

Supporters of the deal say the peace it has brought to Swat cannot be underestimated. The popular wisdom is that given the choice between having a son or husband killed in crossfire and wearing a burqa, a woman would not mind wearing two burqas.

They also say that as a political strategy, an agreement to provide quick justice is the best way to marginalise Fazlullah and his radical Islam, as it may wean away the less doctrinaire of his followers to Sufi Mohammeds side and make them as manageable as the TNSM leader. Or, it could even wean Fazlullah away from his super-boss, Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban warlord in South Waziristan. The Swat Taliban owes allegiance to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which Mehsud heads.

The thinking is that if Fazlullah breaks the truce or acts against the government or continues with his parallel system of justice and governance, the people of Swat, who voted for a secular party and rejected religious forces in the February 2008 elections, will no more oppose an all-out military action against the Taliban even if the collateral costs are high. Hence, if the agreement was surrender, it was only a tactical move.

But critics of the deal point out that if the Army was not able to deal with the Taliban in the first instance, there is no guarantee that it would be able to take on a force that would be rested and rejuvenated after the ceasefire. In Pakistan, there is real concern that the Taliban will use its victory in Swat to spread its wings further into the settled districts of the NWFP.

The provincial capital, Peshawar, is already awash with militants. The blowing up of the shrine of Rahman Baba, a Sufi saint revered by Pashtuns and across Pakistan, is seen as a wake-up call. Militants blew up the shrine because women visited it in large numbers.

In Islamabad, which is located only a 100 kilometres from Swat, drawing room conversation has for days centred on fears that the Taliban will soon be knocking at the door of the capital. There is also concern that the agreement will embolden militants in other parts of the province, and the country, to resort to a similar strategy in order to have their way with the government.

If the [governments] idea is to use the period of this truce to improve security, strengthen, provide equipment and train security personnel, to prepare for the eventuality of taking on the Taliban, then its acceptable, said Rehman. But if that is not the idea, then we are done for.

International worries about the deal have centred on the safe haven that Swat could become for the Taliban and allied militant groups, preparatory to a spring offensive in Afghanistan. Swat is not a tribal area in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and, as such, is not yet in the line of drone operations by U.S. forces. The district is also said to be awash with cadres of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a militant group based in Punjab and led by Maulana Masood Azhar.

Although the Pakistani establishment goes to great lengths to draw distinctions between the Taliban and the Punjab-based militants, who have traditionally targeted Kashmir and India, evidence suggests that the JeM has deep links with Baitullah Mehsud.

With more questions than answers about the Swat deal, the only thing is to hope, quite perversely, that this most flawed of pacts that the Pakistan government has made with militancy, fails. Already there are signs that it may.

Sufi Mohammed has set March 15 as the deadline for the government to set up the Sharia courts. The NWFP government has said it will do so as soon as President Asif Ali Zardari signs into existence an enabling law. Despite his declared support for it, Zardari has puzzlingly not put his stamp on this yet, perhaps under diplomatic pressure.