by Ahmed Rashid
There was no internal inquiry and the reasons for the debacle were never made clear, but the hundreds of casualties created severe demoralization in the ranks. Dozens of FC soldiers deserted their units rather than killing their fellow Pashtuns; others feared retribution from the militants. Several pilots flying helicopter gunships refused to fire upon civilian targets and were disciplined. Six army officers arrested earlier for alleged links to al Qaeda were already undergoing courts-martial.8 The debacle was made worse by Musharraf, who boasted to CNN on March 18 that a “high-value target” had been surrounded, and suggested that the target was Ayman al-Zawahiri. The government said that 46 soldiers lost their lives, while 63 militants were killed and another 166 captured. In fact, army officers privately admitted that nearly 200 soldiers had been killed.
The Wazir militants emerged as heroes. Their leader, Nek Mohammed, twenty-seven, became an icon. Over six feet tall, with long locks flowing out of his turban, he looked more like a Romantic poet than a guerrilla leader. He had fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan and then made his mark by helping al Qaeda leaders escape from Tora Bora. By 2004 he had accumulated a fleet of forty-four pickup trucks, which he used to supply the militants’ training camps. In the Kalosha battle, he had driven Yuldashev to safety by hurling his Toyota pickup through the ranks of terrified FC soldiers. A few weeks later he provided an escort for Mullah Dadullah, who arrived from Quetta to reorganize the Taliban fighters in South Waziristan.
Despite their losses, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their allies emerged as victors, which Pakistan’s army acknowledged when it signed an agreement with the militants at Shakai on April 24, 2004, pardoning their leaders and giving foreign militants a week to register with the authorities. The very idea that al Qaeda would “register” with the political agent was clearly ridiculous, and the agreement quickly broke down. The army went on the offensive again, blockading Wana and stopping all goods from entering South Waziristan. Nek Mohammed was killed by a U.S. missile strike on June 18, after a U.S. surveillance drone locked onto his satellite phone. Thousands of tribesmen turned out for his funeral.
I had traveled in FATA in 2002 and 2003 with my researcher, Abu Bakr Siddique, himself a Pashtun. After 9/11 the tribesmen were well aware that FATA’s political status was redundant, and an intense political debate began about what options to pursue. Many tribesmen demanded that the government give them the choice of either joining the NWFP or creating a separate province out of the FATA agencies. If the military had held a referendum at the time, an overwhelming majority of tribesmen would have opted to become full citizens of Pakistan by choosing one or the other options. If such a political step had been taken and followed up with development funds and road building, it would almost certainly have changed the complexion of FATA and prevented it from becoming terrorism central. Instead, the army continued its old games, manipulating the tribesmen, using them to harass the Kabul regime, refusing to dig out al Qaeda, and allowing Talibanization to take root in the tribes. Failing to adopt a serious counterterrorism strategy, the army swung between using military means one day and signing peace agreements the next, confusing the population, Pakistani public, and the international community.
FATA desperately needed development. Annual per capita income there is just five hundred dollars, or half that of the rest of the country. The literacy rate is 17 percent, with just 3 percent female literacy, compared with a nationwide literacy rate of 56 percent.9 In such a situation, the madrassas are the only means of an education and remain immensely popular. Since 9/11, new and even larger madrassas have been built with donations from al Qaeda and wealthy traders. There are few functioning hospitals and just 524 doctors for the entire population. Before 9/11, FATA received just $16.5 million in development funds from the federal government’s budget. In 2002 the government promised $160 million, but the money was absorbed in military costs.
In 2006 the military regime sent Washington a 187-page FATA Sustainable Development Plan (2006-2015). The Americans, over the next five years, promised to spend $750 million in FATA, which would be matched by similar Pakistani funds.10 It was a patently dishonest document, reminiscent of a British colonial policy paper, as it reasserted the myths about the region and the tribes that had allowed the army to exploit them for so long. The document contained blatant lies, such as “the strife that keeps FATA simmering has . . . its roots in the government’s hands-off policy towards the tribal areas”—which couldn’t be further from the truth. It also stated that the “failure to come up with a clear vision for integrated development in FATA as a sustainable solution to all the troubles in the region has kept the people marginalized and impoverished.”
In reality what has kept the people marginalized has been the lack of political choices or freedoms. Meaningful development could only follow a change in the political status of FATA, more political freedom for its people, and FATA’s entry into the Pakistani mainstream—all of which the army refused to contemplate. Instead, al Qaeda and the Taliban were carrying out political changes by renaming the region the “Islamic Emirate of Waziristan” and implementing their brutal code of behavior.
Yet the U.S. State Department bought the plan with barely a murmur. The State Department drew up its own plan, which echoed what Pakistan had already outlined, and said in March 2007 that the United States would give $750 million, or $150 million a year for five years, to the plan. The Bush administration had no expertise in FATA—no anthropologists, social scientists, or aid workers who spoke Pushtu and knew the tribes—and it did not bother to hire any. With FATA in the throes of an insurgency, any tribal elders and NGOs who could have implemented development were either dead or driven out, and with the army running scared from the Taliban, it was clear that the money would be utterly wasted or used by the military for its forces. “Without civilian implementing partners or elected political representation, the military and mullahs will stand to benefit the most from this plan,” said Christine Fair, an American expert on Pakistan. “The money will only buttress the already Islamist leadership.”11 Yet the State Department viewed political reform in FATA as anathema, fearing that it would undermine its relationship with Musharraf. In addition, the United States declared FATA to be a “reconstruction opportunity zone,” so that goods manufactured there would have duty-free access to the United States—but nothing has ever been manufactured in FATA.
The growth of Taliban sympathies in FATA was also a direct result of gravely misguided policies by Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, which treated FATA as a war zone and never insisted that Musharraf offer real political solutions to its people. At the same time, Rumsfeld forced the U.S. military to become captive to Islamabad’s whims and fancies. There was no U.S. political strategy for dealing with the army’s support to the Taliban or with the real problems of FATA. Pakistan asked for weapons and helicopters, diverting the real issue of its lack of political will to a supposed lack of weapons capability. The United States obliged, providing new weapon systems while knowing full well that the army would divert some to fight the insurgency in Balochistan or to arm troops on the Indian border. Finally, when the United States became frustrated with the lack of Pakistani action, it launched episodic missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in FATA, which infuriated the tribesmen further.
After its 2004 defeat, the army sent eighty thousand troops and FC into South Waziristan. The militants promptly packed their bags and moved to North Waziristan, which was inhabited by the Mahsud tribe. New local leaders emerged, such as Abdullah Mahsud, thirty, a one-legged college graduate who rode a horse into battle to avoid walking on his prosthetic leg. In 2001 he had been captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and was transferred to Guantánamo jail, where he played dumb and convinced his U.S. interrogators that he was a simpleton. Released in 2004, he rejoined the Taliban in North Waziristan. Another leader was Baitullah Mahsud, thirty-two, who had fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan and become close to Mullah Omar.12 These new young leaders led the vario
us groups of Pakistani Taliban who were emerging as key allies of al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban.
In early September 2004, heavy fighting erupted after the army killed some eighty people in an attack on a madrassa. Opposition parties across the country accused the government of carrying out a massacre as thousands of tribesmen and their families now fled North Waziristan. In retaliation, the militants ambushed army convoys, shelled army camps, and kidnapped two Chinese engineers. The army again capitulated, signing a peace deal in November in which it paid the militants over two hundred thousand dollars in compensation—in fact, a bribe.13 By now the army had lost more than six hundred soldiers, and hundreds more were wounded.
The war against the militants went into a stalemate. The army cordoned off the whole of FATA, refusing to allow aid agencies or journalists to enter the region. Two local journalists were killed by unknown attackers in 2005, after which many journalists left the region out of fear of being targeted either by the military or the militants. In December 2005 a prominent local journalist, Hayatullah Khan, was kidnapped in North Waziristan and later killed. His family accused the ISI of carrying out his murder. When his body was discovered six months later, it was learned he had been restrained with military handcuffs, his body had torture marks, and he had been shot in the head. The government refused to initiate any inquiry into the deaths of the journalists. Meanwhile, Musharraf undermined the political agents, replacing them with army officers who did not know the tribes or their culture. Political agents were usually from the region and had spent years building up trust and faith among the tribesmen. The shift destroyed the entire management structure of FATA while forcing upon tribesmen new bosses whom they did not trust. In one fell swoop, Musharraf had cut off the only vehicle for a dialogue with the tribes. Bereft of any political strategy in FATA and with no ability to win over the people, the military was tasked with silencing local critics and ensuring that no negative news about the army got out of the region.
In both South and North Waziristan, the Pakistani Taliban tightened their grip on the population through intimidation and assassination. They imposed their own laws, banning television, music, and the Internet and making prayers and beards mandatory for all males, as they attempted to re-create the Taliban regime that existed in Afghanistan before 9 /11. Sixty tribal and religious leaders were killed in 2005, accused of being American spies. Their beheaded bodies were hung up on lampposts and shown on Taliban-made DVDs, which circulated widely. In November 2005 Malik Khandan, an important Mahsud chief, was killed along with his son. Three months later the Taliban killed two more of his sons and a daughter, along with two nephews—thereby wiping out the entire family. The Taliban ritualized the killing of tribal elders to terrorize the population. To a tribal elder marked to be killed they sent a needle with a long thread and one thousand rupees ($16). The money was for him to buy his shroud and the needle to sew it with.
As Pakistani forces now rarely moved beyond their garrisons or checkpoints, increasingly U.S. forces carried out missile strikes in FATA, often without Pakistan’s permission. On January 13, 2006, U.S. missiles targeted Ayman al-Zawahiri in the village of Damadola in Bajaur agency. Al-Zawahiri was reputed to have a Mohmand wife whom he visited on occasion. The missile attack killed five senior al Qaeda figures but generated enormous public anger as politicians accused Musharraf of allowing Washington to undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty. Musharraf was forced to issue a sharp rejoinder to the United States that such strikes “must not be repeated.”14
President Bush’s visit to Islamabad in March 2006 prompted another short offensive by the army in North Waziristan. In retaliation, some 1,500 Taliban tried to overwhelm the military garrison in Miram Shah and capture the town. Bloody fighting lasted for three days and the army had to use heavy artillery to drive off the Taliban, destroying the town and killing more than 150 people. The crisis in FATA dominated the talks between Musharraf and Bush, who urged Pakistan’s leader to do more. Further U.S. missile strikes against al Qaeda targets in FATA led to the first suicide attacks on the Pakistan army—a trend that had already escalated in Afghanistan. On November 8, after a U.S. missile strike against a madrassa in Bajaur agency that killed eighty people, a suicide bomber blew himself up at an army training camp in Dargai, in the NWFP, killing thirty-five soldiers and wounding forty. It was the single most devastating attack against the army and it shook public and military morale.15
Starting in South Waziristan in 2002, the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda had progressively occupied one agency after another, moving to North Waziristan, Bajaur, and Mohmand. Each army attack led them to find new territory to occupy and to spread their message. In each agency they introduced their harsh code, killing or driving out tribesmen who opposed them. In May 2006, Musharraf had appointed the now-retired lieutenant-general Orakzai as the new governor of the NWFP and tasked him with striking peace deals in FATA that would stop the militants from attacking the army. The government enlisted the help of Maulana Fazlur Rehman and other leaders of the JUI Party and covertly asked Afghan Taliban leaders Mullah Dadullah and Jalaluddin Haqqani to help persuade the Pakistani Taliban to agree.
General Orakzai was a slippery character for Musharraf to embrace so closely. As corps commander in Peshawar from 2001 to 2004, he had allowed al Qaeda and the Taliban to settle down in FATA undisturbed and was now advocating peace deals with them.16 A tribesman from FATA who boasted of his inside knowledge of the tribal mind, in fact Orakzai appeared totally insensitive to tribal needs. Posing as an enlightened general, he was opposed to any democratic reforms in FATA and disliked the Americans and NATO intensely, while demonstrating a grudging sympathy, if not admiration, for the Taliban. He enlarged on the myth, advocated frequently by Musharraf and the ISI, that the Taliban were just Pashtun nationalists opposed to foreign occupying armies but with no connections to al Qaeda.
On September 5, 2006, Orakzai signed an agreement with seven Pakistani Taliban leaders in North Waziristan—although the government insisted that the agreement was signed with tribal elders and not the Taliban. The agreement, which was to become immensely controversial in Kabul and Washington, stipulated that all Taliban attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan army would cease. In return the army would pull out its garrisons and checkpoints, release all prisoners, return captured equipment and vehicles, and compensate those tribesmen who had suffered losses. The army quickly fulfilled its side of the bargain, thereby legitimizing Taliban control of North Waziristan. The agreement turned into a capitulation by the army because there was no mechanism for its enforcement. The Pakistanis had no means to challenge or punish the Taliban if they continued their attacks across the border—which they did. Thus, while the Taliban stopped attacking Pakistani troops, they stepped up their attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which immediately aroused suspicions in Kabul that this was Islamabad’s intention all along.
Two days later Orakzai accompanied Musharraf to the White House to convince Bush about the workability of the agreement. Bush naïvely supported the deal, saying it would not create safe havens for the Taliban and could even offer “alternatives to violence and terror.” He reiterated his implacable trust in Musharraf, adding only one cautionary note: “You know we are watching this very carefully, obviously,” he said.17 Buoyed by Bush’s approval of what was a dubious agreement, Musharraf now urged NATO forces in Afghanistan to strike similar deals with the Taliban.
Musharraf’s most vocal critic was Karzai. In the United States for the UN General Assembly, both men fought a bruising battle, each heaping abuse on the other in media interviews. When Bush attempted to heal the rift between the two men by hosting a dinner for both of them at the White House, they refused to shake each other’s hand. The dinner failed as Karzai again insisted that Musharraf arrest Taliban leaders living in Pakistan and stop striking deals with terrorists, while Bush refused to take sides.
By November, Lieutenant-General Eikenberry, the head of U.S.
forces in Afghanistan, was telling me that the number of Taliban attacks emanating out of North Waziristan had gone up three times since the September agreement was signed. Eikenberry was clear that Pakistan’s aim was to stop attacks on its own soldiers while doing little to stop the Taliban from attacking U.S. forces.18 By the end of December the State Department agreed with his analysis, saying the deal had failed. “The Taliban have been able to use these areas [FATA] for sanctuary and for command and control and for regrouping and supply,” said the U.S. assistant secretary of state, Richard Boucher, on December 26.19 With the population terrorized and under the influence of the Taliban, FATA was now out of the army’s control. More than 120 tribal elders who opposed the Taliban were executed by them in 2006. Since 2004 the army had signed three agreements with the militants in FATA, and all three had failed.20 Now Taliban influence was spreading to the settled areas of the NWFP, as all entertainment in small towns was shut down, and men were forced to grow beards and pray five times a day.21
FATA had become terrorism central, providing training and manpower for the insurgency in Afghanistan and pushing forward the Talibanization of the NWFP, while guarding the sanctuaries of al Qaeda where international terrorists were trained. Al Qaeda was so well protected that it set up a media production arm called As Sahab (The Clouds), which produced fifty-eight audio and videotapes in 2006, triple the number in 2005. Ayman al-Zawahiri described his concept of a post-9/11 base area in a letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq: “Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate over as much territory as you can to spread its power such as in Iraq.”22