As the death toll nears 100 in the Pakistan volleyball tournament massacre, here’s some analysis and background to put the event in its proper context from the Long War Journal:
The town of Shah Hassan Khel was recently a stronghold of the Taliban until tribal leaders raised lashkars, or militias, and drove them them out. Tribal leaders said they recruited more than 400 fighters to join the local lashkar in August 2009. The tribal leaders decided to form the lashkar to keep out the Taliban after their homes were looted during a military operation against the Taliban. Tribal leaders blamed the police for looting their homes.
The Taliban have responded aggressively to efforts by tribal leaders to oppose the spread of extremism in the tribal areas. Tribal opposition has been violently attacked and defeated in Peshawar, Dir, Arakzai, Khyber, and Swat. Suicide bombers have struck at tribal meetings held at mosques, schools, hotels, and homes (see LWJ report, “Anti-Taliban tribal militia leader assassinated in Pakistan’s northwest“, for more information on the difficulties of raising tribal lashkars in Pakistan’s northwest).
The Taliban perfected this strategy in North and South Waziristan. Tribal leaders who opposed the Taliban were brutally liquidated. The Taliban would execute the leaders and dump their bodies on the roadside with notes pinned to their chests branding them as “US spies” and traitors. The bodies were often mutilated and beheaded.
This strategy is being duplicated in the tribal areas and throughout the northwest. Tribal leaders are currently being liquidated in Bajaur and Arakzai.
cbarwa 1:28 pm on January 2, 2010 Permalink |
That is an interesting article, I disagree with some of the points there though. I find it hard to believe that if selected tribes line up against the Pakistan, they can be defeated or intimidated in their own specific region where they dominate or that it is “manpower, training, geography, coordination between the tribes” that impedes their ability to fight the Taliban. You don’t need to be better organised, better armed or better trained than your opponent, if you are fighting on your own territory and have the support of the local population – this is after all why ISAF and the US are having so much difficulty in defeating the Afghan taliban. More to the point is the fact that as the report mentions the Taliban outnumber the tribes resisting them by something like “20 to 1″ this says a lot about the respective support the sides can mobilise respectively.
The fact that the tribes aren’t eager to accept military help directly from the Pakistani govt seems to imply that they are reluctant to get drawn into conflict between the state and the Pakistani Taliban. Their lack of desire, expressed as a fustration in the LWJ by its authors, indicates that they have rather more limited aims relating to maintaining their own security and preseving their autonomy. They clearly want to maintain some degree of distance from both the Taliban and the govt.
Re the elimination of Tribal leaders, this is a disturbing development but I speculate that the Taliban would not be able to engage in the wholesale liquidation of all tribal leaders, unless the majority of the tribes either remained quiscent or were to whatever degree supportive of their agenda. I imagine it would be difficult for them to operate, if they didn’t have this support and started to kill such leaders as this would lead to a significant backlash against them, which they wouldn’t have the numbers to deal with (this is speculation obviously).
johnpi 3:24 pm on January 2, 2010 Permalink |
In response, I would draw an analogy to an urban gang that is located in one neighborhood. The great majority of the residents of that neighborhood may revile the gang, and yet the gang ‘rules’ the public spaces. If all the residents of the neighborhood picked up weapons and went after the gang, it would be quickly vanquished, but the majority are never going to do that because they fear the group and because it is entirely outside the nature of those people to engage in violence. That would explain the ‘20 to 1′ figure.
Look at what happened when the Pakistani army took on H. Mehsud in South Waziristan. The number of Mehsud tribe refugees leaving the area was much larger (over a million) than the number of actual fighters left behind, who were pretty quickly put on the run.