Two months ago, Bashir Hussein was hoping that a peace deal between the Taliban and the provincial government in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) would finally bring an end to the violence that has plagued the Swat Valley for the past two years. The 75-year-old principal at the al-Mannar public high school in Mingora, Swat's main city, says he's seen so much violence in that time that the preceding decades of peace feel like a distant memory. After the accord was signed, some measure of normalcy returned to the school, one of the few co-ed institutions that remained open throughout the Taliban takeover of Pakistan's mountainous north. But not without changes: Hussein renovated the school building to comply with the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law that bars any interaction between males and females, religious studies were given more attention, and the female staff were ordered to wear burkas, the all-encompassing shroud commonly worn by women in the ethnic Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Hussein says he did what was necessary to keep his boys and girls learning. "There was a time, before the deal came into place," he recalls, "when I told my staff that if they wanted, they could go back to their villages and I would close the school. But one of the teachers stood up and said, "No. If you are going to die here, we will die with you.' " The accord signed in February, giving the Taliban de facto control over a large swath of territory northwest of the Pakistani capital Islamabad, was a kind of blessing. Hussein and his staff could go on with the task of educating Swat's youth, as long as they followed the Taliban's anachronistic code of conduct.
That was the theory. But last week's collapse of the accord exposes a much more sobering fact: the Swat Taliban never intended to accept the terms of the deal. Sharia, their key demand, which many Pakistanis accepted as either a localized desire for justice or an expression of the Islamic faith that is at the heart of the Pakistani identity, was only the first stage of a far-reaching agenda by the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies. When the Taliban violated the terms of the accord three weeks ago, pushing into the Buner district, a mere 100 km from Islamabad, Pakistanis began to understand what that agenda might be. This was not an isolated fundamentalist Islamic revivalist movement, limited to the ethnic Pashtun north and west of their country, but a much broader and more sinister drive, powered by al-Qaeda's radical hatred of the West, to turn Pakistan into the world's epicentre of ultra-orthodoxy.
As Pakistanis have woken up to that reality, taking to the streets to protest the Taliban's self-proclaimed Islamic revolution, shells are raining down on the towns and villages of Swat. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are on the move in what human rights organizations are warning could quickly become the worst internal displacement crisis in the world. Organizers at refugee camps scattered around Swat and Peshawar, the capital of the NWFP, already overwhelmed by the victims of the Pakistan military's new offensive against Islamic militancy, are bracing for another massive influx. Meanwhile, the blame game has begun, with Pakistan's militant preachers blaming the government for the crisis and the government blaming the militants.
Pakistanis find themselves at a crossroads. Do they demand an end to the offensive for the sake of safeguarding civilians, at the cost of giving the Taliban, now indistinguishable from their al-Qaeda allies in terms of their ideological scope, another opportunity to regroup and entrench themselves even more deeply into their nation's social fabric"”well beyond what even they accepted as radical Islam's home turf in the north and west? Or will Pakistanis back their leaders and prepare for a fight to the finish? Both the Taliban and the Pakistani authorities realize just how crucial it is to win over the local population in what is, ultimately, a battle of ideas. For months, the Taliban had taken advantage of civilian casualties caused by the Pakistani military's ongoing offensives against militants, which they blamed on U.S. pressure and influence. In Swat, they had embarked on a rare public relations campaign, inviting in journalists, holding press conferences, and framing their demands in the context of peace and justice for the people. It seemed the Taliban had wised up to the power of spin.
But some Pakistani leaders were not about to let the extremists gain the PR upper hand. According to Maj.-Gen. Athar Abbas, Pakistan's military spokesman, the controversial Swat deal was part of the military's own counter-spin strategy. It worked on two levels. First and perhaps foremost, it showed the Pakistani people that the government was not being dictated to by the U.S. administration, which was deeply skeptical of the accord; secondly, it proved the government was willing to negotiate, something Pakistanis had been demanding for years. "But we are always ready to defend Pakistan against terrorists,"� Abbas told Maclean's three weeks before the deal collapsed. "If this deal fails, it will be because the Taliban did not keep their word."� Indeed, even then Abbas was cynical of the Swat Taliban's willingness to limit their activities in exchange for a truce, accusing their leader Sufi Muhammad of having his own agenda. If the Taliban reneged on the deal, as he expected, they would reveal their true face to the Pakistani people.
In the end Abbas, and other observers from around the world, were proven right, and the pendulum has now swung back in favour of the Pakistani authorities. The Taliban pushed beyond the parameters of the Swat deal, giving Pakistan's government and military leaders justification to engage them in an all-out offensive. But the Taliban and other al-Qaeda-linked militant groups in Pakistan can still point to the fact that the military operation began only after intense criticism from the White House, and during a visit by Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari to Washington. That reinforces the militants' argument that the Pakistani government and military are mere pawns of the U.S. It's part of a narrative that is relatively straightforward and common, whether you're talking to a villager in the mountains of Swat or a day labourer in the semi-arid deserts of southern Punjab: the West, and the U.S. in particular, is out to destroy Islam. Period. And the Pakistani government is complicit. A new U.S. administration that has tried to prove it is on a new path means little to these people"”they either do not understand the way Western democracy operates, or have absorbed the spin of the "evil West,"� clinging to it regardless of changes in leadership and policy.
This, perhaps, is al-Qaeda's greatest victory in Pakistan, and not the rising power of their Taliban proxies or any single attack, regardless of how spectacular it might be. Their triumph is in how thoroughly they have spread the message and convinced the poor and uneducated in places far beyond Pakistan's militant heartland that the West is a disease, and global jihad its cure. Whether al-Qaeda survives is irrelevant now; the ideology has a life of its own, and is infinitely more difficult to kill.
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