Time capsule: Pakistan 1999. Here’s what Ahmed Rashid was writing about Pakistan exactly 10 years ago this month.
The Taliban’s purist ideology and the Pakistani recruits it has nurtured have had immense cross-border repercussions in Pakistan. An already fragile nation in the midst of an identity crisis, economic meltdown, ethnic and sectarian division, and suffering under a rapacious ruling elite unable to provide good governance, Pakistan could easily be submerged by a new Islamist wave led not by established, more mature Islamist parties but by neo-Taliban groups.
By 1998, such neo-Taliban parties had become a major influence in the Pakistani provinces of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province. In those regions, they had begun banning television and videos, imposing sharia punishments such as stoning and amputation, assassinating Pakistani Shiites, and forcing women to adopt the restrictive Taliban dress code. Their influence is now starting to creep outside the Pushtun belt to Punjab and Sind. Of the 6,000-8,000 militants who joined the Taliban for their July 1999 offensive against the Northern Alliance, the majority were, for the first time, not Pushtuns but Punjabis. The Pakistani government’s support for the Taliban is thus coming back to haunt it, even as Pakistan’s leaders remain oblivious of the danger and continue their support.
