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20 Brieng Waziristan The Economist January 2nd 2010
2 step was to kill its maliks. Seven of Mr Khajang’s
close relatives were accordingly
hanged by the Uzbeks.
The army often stood by, unsure whether
to ght the militants or negotiate with
them. Meanwhile a tide of militancy
spread from Wana across the frontier. Its
rallying-cry was the presence of foreign
troops in Afghanistan, where a Taliban insurgency
began gathering pace in
mid-2003. But the upheaval was also a response
to the weakness of an outworn administrative
systemwhich the presence
of the army, a powerful alternative command
structure, further undermined.
The Mehsud militants, for example,
have been led by veterans of Afghanistan’s
wars, such as Baitullah Mehsud, supreme
leader of the Pakistani Taliban until he was
killed by an American drone in August. Yet
certainly compared to the Wazirs, the tribe
has little interest in Afghanistan. Among
them, the uprising is an obvious power
grab by a jihad-pumped underclass. The
tribe’s maliks, widely reviled as corrupt
puppets of the British Raj, according to a
high-up Mehsud, were again the rst victims.
Across South Waziristan over 600
have been murdered. In addition, an assistant
PA was kidnapped in North Waziristan
and several lower-level civil servants
killed. All were blamed for a chronic lack
of development. According to a decadeold
census, the literacy rate across the tribal
areas is 17%and just 3% for womencompared
to 44% across Pakistan. The tribal areas
have only one doctor for every 8,000
peopleand no decent hospital for over
half a million Mehsuds.
With the army still grappling for a strategy,
two events in 2007 demonstrated that
the insurgency’s centre had shifted to the
Mehsud. First, egged on by the ISI, the Wazir
tribes were incited to rise up and drive
the Uzbeks from Wana, whence most went
to Mehsud areas. Then, in July 2007, the
A soldier’s lot is not a happy one
army’s stormed an Islamabad mosque, the
Lal Masjid, that had been taken over by
well-armed jihadists, killing over 100. This
sparked an ongoing Pakistan-wide terrorism
campaign, including around 300 suicide
blasts to date, for which the Mehsud
have been largely blamed. Benazir Bhutto,
a two-time former prime minister, assassinated
in a suicide and gunre attack in late
2007, was allegedly among their victims.
For the next 18 months or so, the news
from the frontier was grim. Flush with foreign
cash and through their own extortion
rackets, the Mehsud militants and their allies
seized a broad swathe of territory, from
Waziristan through Orakzai and Khyber to
Bajaur, and including much of NWFP’s
Malakand region. Across the settled areas,
the slogan Meezh dre MaseetI belong
to the Mehsudstruck terror. Wealthy Peshawaris
ed the city, fearing bearded kidnappers.
Last April the Taliban seized Malakand’s
Buner district, just 100km (62
miles) from Islamabad.
This said little for Pakistan’s army. It had
long been accused of tolerating, even harbouring,
the Afghan Taliban. Now it
seemed neglectful of its country’s very security,
as blasts ripped through Pakistan’s
cities. And there was something to both
charges. Many senior army ocers considered
that the Afghan militants were no
concern of Pakistan’s, and reckoned it was
better to come to terms with the Pakistani
Taliban rather than ght them. This was to
some degree understandable: the frontier
campaign was unpopular in Pakistan, the
army was coming o badly against the irregulars,
and making deals with rebels
was, after all, how the frontier had been
contained for 150 years. Unfortunately,
however, that method was no longer
working.
So this year the strategy was changed,
with considerable success. In May the
army swept the Taliban from Malakand, to
national acclaim. And in October and November,
after a three-month blockade of
the Mehsud ef, displacing over 200,000
people, it routed the militants there. On the
road from Tank to Wana, perfect round
shell-holes, punched through the mudwalls
of now-empty houses, show where
the army advanced. In Sarwakai, a former
Taliban logistics hub, army bulldozers
were levelling a bazaar as open-backed
trucks loaded with prisoners, blindfolded
and bare-headed, drove by. Most of their
comrades, including the Pakistani Taliban’s
current leader, Hakimullah Mehsud,
escapedsome to Orakzai, where they are
again under attack. Several thousand more
are believed to be in Miran Shah and Mir
Ali, in North Waziristan, and the army is
currently deciding whether to pursue
them there.
Pakistan will struggle to pacify Waziristan
so long as Afghanistan is ablaze. Yet it
is at last giving itself a fair chance, on the
heels of its advancing troops, by launching
a serious-looking bid to rebuild its shattered
administration. South Waziristan’s
development budget has been increased
15-fold and, with improved security, the PA
should actually be able to spend it. To sideline
the weakened maliks, he will be given
command of a new, 4,000-strong, tribal
police force. The agency may also be divided,
to ensure greater attention is given to
the marginalised and seething Mehsuds.
And political reform is coming, too, with a
law passed last August granting political
parties access to the tribal areas. For more
meaningful democracy, some far-sighted
ocials advocate setting up agency-level
councils, with powers over development
projects.
This would be overdue. Many young
Waziristanis are hungry for the political
freedoms enjoyed, alas tfully, by the rest
of the countryas their enthusiasm for an
abortive eort to introduce local government
in 2005 showed. Even the Wazir maliks
assembled in Wana, prime beneciaries
of the old order, admitted this. Our
youngsters want reform, adult franchise,
no collective punishments, admitted one
of the old men, Bizmillah Khan. But they
also want our culture, our traditions and
our freedom to remain intact.
They will be disappointed. When Waziristan
is merged with Pakistan proper, as
eventually it must be, good things will be
lost. The jirga system, so much more ecient
than Pakistani courts, will be weakened
or erased. Corruption, rife in Pakistan,
will become endemic. And the
furious spirit of independence that has impelled
Wazirs and Mehsuds to resist outsiders
for centuries will recede. For the
most part, that would be a blessing. Yet in
that calmer future, when Pakistan’s current
agonies are largely forgotten, many may
hark back fondly to a world enlivened by
such remarkable people. 7