The two defendants are the former Balochistan MP and government minister, Hyrbyair Marri, and human rights campaigner Faiz Baluch. They stand accused of inciting and preparing acts of terrorism against the regime of the Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, during his period in power, 1999 to 2008. Both men deny all the charges, stating that they are peaceful, lawful human rights campaigners.

The trial had been adjourned for part of November and December, after defence lawyers stunned the prosecution by seeking disclosure of cooperation between the British government and the illegal, unconstitutional dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf – including communications between the two governments concerning the arrest and prosecution of the trial defendants. The adjournment followed submissions by defence barristers Henry Blaxland QC and Dame Helena Kennedy QC.

The defence secured disclosure from the prosecution that the Pakistan High Commissioner to London wrote to the court on behalf of the new democratic government of Pakistan. The High Commissioner’s letter advised that his government wanted reconciliation in Balochistan and opposed the prosecution, effectively calling for the charges to be dropped.

The defence wanted to establish the political motivation of the prosecution by revealing the high level complicity between the Musharraf dictatorship and the British Foreign Office, Home Office, police, security services and the Crown Prosecution Service, which reportedly sent CPS officials to Pakistan to help Musharraf’s men draw up the evidence against the defendants.

The request for disclosure threw the prosecution off balance and created panic in the government. The UK authorities do not want to reveal the relevant documents, as these are likely to demonstrate that they worked hand-in-glove with Musharraf’s agents.

As feared, the government, police and security services used ‘national security’ as an excuse to withhold damning evidence showing connivance between the British authorities and Musharraf’s anti-democratic regime.

During the trial, the defence have shown that British government collaborated with the illegal regime of Pervez Musharraf, which overthrew the democratically-elected government of Pakistan in 1999. This collaboration included illegally arming the illegal Musharraf regime to enable it to prosecute an illegal war in Balochistan.

British military equipment was supplied to Pakistan. It is believed that this equipment was used in Pakistani army operations in Balochistan, where the Pakistani forces have perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The defence argued that the whole trial is an abuse of legal process, on the grounds that Pakistani military forces committed war crimes in Balochistan and that it is therefore inappropriate to prosecute the two defendants who were merely seeking to protect their people against these atrocities. This abuse of process argument was rejected by the judge, Justice Henriques.

The defence also submitted that the defendants acted in self defence to prevent human rights abuses in Balochistan. The judge also rejected this argument.

The judge accepted the Baloch people are an oppressed minority, and that they have been victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity, perpetrated by the Pakistani military, police and intelligence services. These crimes include the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, extra-judicial killings, disappearances, torture, detention without trial and collective punishments – all of which are illegal acts under international law.

The judge insisted, however, that despite this persecution and terrorisation by the Pakistani state, the Baloch people do not have the right to use violence to defend themselves and that anyone who supports or condones armed resistance groups in Balochistan is endorsing terrorism, which is a criminal offence under UK law.

According to this argument, and according to a strict reading of the UK’s anti-terrorism laws, the millions of people who supported the anti-apartheid struggle of the African National Congress of South Africa were criminal supporters of terrorism, and the heroic men and women of the underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe during WW2 were terrorists.

If the anti-Nazi resistance was happening now, under current UK law, the UK’s Special Operations Executive and the Maquis French resistance fighters would be put on trial and jailed as terrorists. This is the madness of the government’s anti-terrorism legislation: good, honourable, courageous people fighting a just cause are branded terrorists, prosecuted and face imprisonment.

Further background

The defendants, Hyrbyair Marri and Faiz Baluch, are accused of preparing acts of terrorism abroad – charges they strenuously deny. Both men have been law-abiding citizens. They fled to Britain to escape persecution by the military coup leader and tyrant, General Pervez Musharraf.

Marri is represented by Henry Blaxland QC and Jim Nichol of TV Edwards Taylor Nichol solicitors and Baluch is represented by Helena Kennedy QC and Gareth Peirce of Birnberg Peirce solicitors.

Marri is a former MP and government minister in the regional assembly of Balochistan – a previously independent state, which was invaded and annexed by Pakistan in 1948, and which has ever since been under Pakistani military occupation.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the Asian Human Rights Commission have documented and condemned severe and widespread human rights abuses by the Pakistani armed forces in Balochistan – abuses that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas and the systemic use of torture. In one of the most gruesome recent abuses, human rights campaigners allege that Pakistani soldiers boiled to death four Baloch prisoners in April this year.

Marri’s father, Nawab Khair Baksh Marri, a renowned Baloch national leader, attended Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, along with other world dignitaries, as a guest of the British government. His uncle is Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the UN Special Representative to Sudan and the former Pakistan Ambassador to the United States, and his wife is the great grand daughter of the first Prime Minister of Iraq (1920-1922), Abdul Rahman al-Gillani.

Marri and Baluch, were arrested by police in London in December 2007. Marri spent four months in Belmarsh high security prison, and Baluch eight months.

In late 2008, tthe acting Interior Minister of the new democratic government of Pakistan, Rehman Malik. In late 2008, announced that terror charges against Marri in Pakistan have been dropped; stating that the case against him had been politically motivated. This discredits the whole basis on which Marri and Baluch have been charged in London.

Marri’s and Baluch’s arrest came just a few months after Musharraf demanded that the British government arrest Baloch activists in London. In exchange, Musharraf offered to hand over Rashid Rauf, implying that action against the Baloch activists was a precondition for surrendering Rauf to the UK. Rauf is wanted in the UK in connection with the 2006 terror plot involving liquid explosives on trans-Atlantic airliners, which resulted in the conviction of three men in London in September 2008. He is also sought in connection with a murder in the UK.

The arrest in London of Marri and Baluch took place two weeks after Pakistani government agents assassinated Marri’s brother, Balach Marri, a prominent Baloch nationalist leader.

Prior to Marri’s arrest, Musharraf’s regime made repeated representations to the UK government that he was wanted on terrorism charges in Pakistan – charges that have now been dropped by the Pakistani authorities. Soon after Musharraf met Gordon Brown at Downing Street in January this year, he held a press conference for Pakistani journalists where he allegedly denounced Marri as a terrorist and praised the British government and police for cooperating with his regime.

Claims of connivance are credible. For nine years, the UK’s Labour government supported Musharraf’s dictatorship politically, economically and militarily, despite him having overthrown Pakistan’s democratically-elected government in 1999. Labour sold him military equipment that his army uses to kill innocent Baloch people. The US supplies the F-16 fighter jets and Cobra attack helicopters that are used to bomb and strafe villages.

Marri is an unlikely terrorist. He is a former Balochistan MP (1997-2002), and was the Minster for Construction and Works in the provincial assembly in 1997-1998. He fled to Britain in 2000, fearing arrest, torture and possible assassination by Musharraf’s men.

One of his brothers is Mehran Baluch. He is the Baloch Representative to the UN Human Rights Council. He was the subject of an attempted extradition plot last year by Musharraf’s regime, on trumped up charges.

The arrest of Marri – together with the murder of one brother and the attempt to frame another brother – looks like a systematic attempt to target his family and crush three leading voices of Baloch dissent.

A former self-governing British Protectorate, Balochistan secured its independence in 1947, alongside India and Pakistan, but was invaded and forcibly annexed by Pakistan in 1948. The Baloch people did not vote for incorporation. They were never given a choice. Ever since, Balochistan has been under military occupation by Islamabad. Baloch demands for a referendum on self-rule have been rejected. Democratically elected Baloch leaders who have refused to kow-tow to
Pakistan’s subjugation have been arrested, jailed and murdered.

The Asian Human Rights Commission reports that Pakistani army raids have resulted in 3,000 Baloch people dead, 200,000 displaced and 4,000 arrested. Thousands more have simply disappeared.

Human rights abuses

Details of Pakistan’s human rights abuses in Balochistan are well documented by Pakistani and international human rights groups, including:

Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Balochistan mission
and
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Balochistan report

Asian Human Rights Commission

International Crisis Group

Amnesty International

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Human Rights Watch

[Watch this TV interview by Peter Tatchell with Mehran Baluch, the
Baloch representative to the UN Human Rights Council->http://www.veoh.com/videos/v15574249Ka8gKRt6]

Peter Tatchell is the Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford East
www.greenoxford.com/peter and www.petertatchell.net

But this is only one squall rocking the government. There are others. One emanates from the country’s powerful lawyers’ movement, whose self-titled ‘Long March’ concluded on June 13 in a cacophony of rage as thousands rallied outside Parliament in Islamabad. Another is growing discontent over US military actions, not only in Afghanistan, but also, increasingly, inside Pakistan. On June 11, US Special Forces killed 11 Pakistani soldiers at their base on the Afghan border, the most lethal instance of ‘friendly fire’ since the Pakistani military became an unwilling convert to the US war on radical Islam in October 2001.

The lawyers’ demands have been consistent since Pakistan’s parliamentary elections on February 18: reinstatement of the 63 judges Musharraf sacked in 2007 during a bout of martial rule, and impeachment of a president most Pakistanis believe lost his mandate with the drubbing ‘his’ party received in the suffrage. Yet if the Long Marchers’ anger was expressed against Musharraf, their true target — symbolized by the destination of Parliament — was the government, particularly its main component, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the slain ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her widower and political heir Asif Ali Zardari.

For eleven weeks the PPP has dithered over the fate of Musharraf and the judges, creating the spectacle of a government adrift and in crisis. In a sign of the times, the PML-N was the largest contingent on the march, protesting its own coalition partner. PPP lawyers and cadre had slunk away from the capital.

Contradiction is also the source of the US-Pakistani imbroglio. Cajoled and rented by Washington, the Pakistani army since 2003 has engaged in a low-intensity war against its own people in a futile attempt to dislodge Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda fugitives ensconced on the Pakistani-Afghan border. These military operations have swelled the ranks of the Taliban, transforming it from an insurgency in Afghanistan into an indigenous Pakistani movement that now rules not only much of the tribal borderlands but also large parts of the ‘settled’ Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).

Since the elections, the government — led by the army — has tried to wrest back some of this lost territory via peacemaking and negotiation rather than war and incursion. Alarmed at the impact these policies could have on NATO’s counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, US forces have responded by increasing the number of cross-border strikes into Pakistan. For many Pakistanis the killing of the soldiers was thus an ‘accidental’ death foretold. And Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s warning on June 15 that his troops may also be forced to invade Pakistan in ‘self-defense’ — an alarm bell few in Pakistan believe could have been rung without some American tugging — is a harbinger of battles to come.

Interminable judicial crisis

The Long March, actually a ragged motorcade, took six days to reach Islamabad from the capital cities of Pakistan’s four provinces. The crawl was an apt metaphor for the judicial impasse that inspired it. Most Pakistanis believed the crisis had been resolved on March 24, when their new prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, freed from house arrest the ousted judges, including Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. In fact, the crisis only deepened.

The recent career of this stocky jurist with hooded eyes had become a symbol of the change most Pakistanis want for their country. In March 2007 Musharraf tried to fire him, ostensibly for ‘misconduct,’ but actually because he had called to account the army’s illegal use of state power. The lawyers’ movement flowered in Chaudhry’s defense, forcing his reappointment and, eventually, Musharraf’s resignation as army chief of staff.

During martial rule in November, Musharraf sacked Chaudhry again, together with 62 other judges. Five thousand lawyers were interned, including leaders like the head of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan. Musharraf charged all of the attorneys with ‘conspiracy.’ But the real crime was clear: The Supreme Court had been about to rule invalid his presidential ‘election’ in October. The incarceration of the judges cast a pall over the February elections — darker, in fact, than the cloud formed by Bhutto’s murder in December 2007. Although the PPP emerged as the largest force in the new assembly — the only party with a base in all four provinces — it polled no more votes than it had in the 2002 elections.

The PML-N was the real wildcard. It swept aside all comers in Punjab, the richest and most populous province, and did so on the back of one uncompromising demand: full reinstatement of the judges. ‘Sharif made the judges’ issue his own and defeated the blood of Bhutto. That is the power of the chief justice,’ said Ahsan, a PPP leader in Punjab. He is also the major strategist behind the chief justice’s various campaigns for reinstatement, including the Long March.

Since 1999 — when Musharraf deposed Sharif’s second government — the PPP has been allied with the PML-N in opposition to military rule. But in government, in the 1990s, the two parties were adversaries. That they came together in a coalition in 2008 was thus seen as a new dawn, and one that most Pakistanis welcomed. Again, Sharif had only one condition for the alliance: reinstatement of judges. ‘The ouster of Musharraf can wait,’ said Ahsan Iqbal, a PML-N minister.

Reinstatement did not happen, despite negotiations, two missed deadlines and ‘crisis’ meetings between Sharif and Zardari in London and Dubai. On May 12, nine PML-N ministers resigned over the impasse. ‘We will not be part of any conspiracy to strengthen the dictatorship,’ said Sharif.

On the surface, the difference between the two coalition parties is not about whether the judges will be restored but how. The PML-N believes it can be done through an executive order. The PPP believes reinstatement requires an act of Parliament since there are legal issues — like Musharraf’s appointment of 17 new judges — that have to be accommodated.

But there is another reason for the PPP’s tardiness. Reinstatement could rend the delicate understandings stitched together between Musharraf and Bhutto in 2007. She had agreed to back him as a civilian president if he agreed to grant amnesty to her, Zardari and her party on a raft of corruption cases pending from their periods in government. Zardari fears that a reinstated independent judiciary would annul the amnesty. And Musharraf insists he has delivered on his side of the pact: He let Bhutto return from exile, withdrew the government’s cases against her family, resigned as army chief and allowed free elections on February 18 — so free that his own ‘king’s party,’ the PML-Q, was routed. He now expects the PPP to reciprocate. So does Washington.

But Zardari cannot reciprocate — not without tearing his coalition, and perhaps his party, apart. On May 4, Musharraf proffered a ‘historic compromise,’ mediated by the United States. He would give up certain executive powers in return for indemnity for his actions under martial law, especially the sacking of the judges. But he would keep the president’s right to appoint chiefs of the armed forces and preside over the extra-parliamentary National Security Council, two powers that essentially formalize the army’s role in governance.

The PPP wants him to give up all powers save those of a figurehead. Musharraf has refused. The PPP’s latest compromise is a convoluted ‘constitutional amendment’ whereby the president is indemnified, the judges are reinstated and power to appoint the heads of the armed forces is shared with the prime minister, but all other executive powers are surrendered. Musharraf said he would resist all attempts to reduce him to a ‘useless vegetable.’ The PML-N has said it will resist all ruses to indemnify him. So will the lawyers. ‘President Musharraf will not be given safe passage,’ Sharif thundered before the Long Marchers in Islamabad. ‘He will be impeached and held accountable for his deeds.’

The script seems written for confrontation between the three arms of the state. In the past such paralysis was the trigger for military intervention. Will Pakistan’s 600,000-strong army intervene again?

The message from army headquarters is that it will not accept Musharraf’s ‘humiliation,’ and that includes impeachment. Washington has intimated the same. But the army will not bring down an elected government at Musharraf’s bidding, says a source: ‘The army paid its dues to Musharraf in 2007: when he sacked the chief justice, imposed martial law and tarried over stepping down as army chief. Its message now is, ‘You’re on your own.” Under its new head, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army seems serious about disengaging from its historical role as political arbiter. But that does not mean it is removing its hand from politics entirely. On the contrary, it is the army that is taking the lead in the peace process with the Pakistan Taliban.

Peace and America

Preaching peace, the new government inherited war. In February, the army was reconquering cities from the Taliban in Swat in the NWFP and South Waziristan, a tribal agency on the Afghan border. In reprisal, the Taliban and its allies were striking throughout Pakistan. In 2007′s first three months there were 17 suicide attacks leaving 274 civilians, police and soldiers dead, including blasts in major cities like Islamabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi. Pakistan felt like Iraq.

Two actions brought the violence to heel. One was a choking siege in South Waziristan on the tribes belonging to Baitullah Mehsud — leader of the Pakistan Taliban and the man Musharraf (though not the PPP) says killed Bhutto. In collective punishment, the army also evicted 150,000 tribesmen and their families from their homes. The siege and expulsion ‘bankrupted Mehsud and forced him to negotiate,’ says Khalid Aziz, a former first secretary in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and now an analyst.

The other move was the government’s commitment to political rather than just military solutions to the revolt, including the repeal of British-era colonial laws in FATA that permitted abuses like mass expulsion and the razing of villages. The Taliban wanted their replacement with Islamic law, and for the FATA to become a separate province. ‘We did not want to fight the government,’ said Taliban commander Maulvi Faqir Mohammed in March. But, he warned, ‘The country would suffer as long as Pakistan remained an ally of the US.’ Peace talks began in South Waziristan and Swat.

Pakistan’s insurgents are not one group, but at least four, loosely allied. There is the Pakistan Taliban and the Afghan Taliban. There are the ‘Kashmiri mujahideen,’ native jihadist groups once nurtured by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to fight a proxy war with India in the disputed Kashmir province but which have now cut loose from their handlers. And there is al-Qaeda and its affiliates: between 150 and 500 Arab, Uzbek and other foreign fighters who have found refuge in the FATA and use the remote tribal enclave for planning, training, rearmament and recruitment.

There are differences between the factions. The Pakistan and Afghan Taliban are still overwhelmingly ethnic Pashtun movements with a focus on Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda and the jihadists have a more global reach, including targets within Pakistan, such as the bombing on June 2 of the Danish Embassy in Islamabad. But all are united in the war against the US and NATO in Afghanistan. And all are committed to extending the Taliban’s territorial reach beyond the FATA to the NWFP as a whole, including Peshawar, the provincial capital. Such Talibanization ‘gives the Taliban more security, territory, recruits and bargaining power,’ says a source. ‘It allows them to talk peace in Swat while waging war in Waziristan.’

The government’s response to Talibanization has been to temporize. In 2007, before her return, Bhutto spoke of devolving democratic power to the tribes while integrating the FATA into Pakistan proper, in effect doing away with its special ‘tribal’ status. The focus of the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party, which heads the NWFP Provincial Government, is economic: It has drawn up plans for a crash program of schools, colleges, rehabilitation centers and jobs to wean young tribesmen from an emerging Taliban polity that is well ‘on the way to primitive state formation with its own tax system, paid bureaucracy and dispute resolution,’ says Aziz. For him — and many in the NWFP government — the Taliban represents less an Islamist movement than a ‘class revolt expressed in a religious idiom. The closest analogy is the Maoists in Nepal,’ he says. It can only be addressed by the ‘transformation and integration’ of a derelict tribal system.

Such a project ‘will take years,’ says Aziz. It is also understood that no peace will hold in the NWFP without a resolution of the conflict with the Taliban in the FATA, which is under the remit of the federal government. And the PPP and Awami Nationalist Party have passed that buck to the army: an abdication frankly admitted by the government’s decision on June 25 to entrust the use of force in FATA entirely to Kayani. The army’s strategy for now is to secure localized peace deals that will keep the territorial advantage it obtained in February while playing divide-and-rule with the Taliban’s different tribal leaderships. It is ‘the policy of the breathing space,’ says Afghanistan expert Ahmad Rashid.

In South Waziristan, this means extracting a pledge from the Taliban to end attacks on the army and government-sponsored development projects. In return, the army will release prisoners and ‘reposition’ its units outside the cities. In Swat in the NWFP, the tradeoff is that the Taliban end attacks on government institutions, including girls’ schools, in return for implementation of Islamic law, seen principally as a means to coopt hundreds of jobless seminary students who may otherwise join the militants. ‘It’s an agreement,’ says Aziz, ‘but not in the Western sense. In the FATA an agreement is an arrangement to coexist. It means shutting your eyes to many things.’

The Taliban have closed their eyes to the army camps that now nestle permanently in the mountains above them. And the army is looking away from a steady flow of guerrillas across the border, or at least is not acting overtly to intercept them. Peace in Pakistan, in other words, may translate into intensified warfare in Afghanistan.

Or so the Americans allege. In January, just prior to the elections, US commanders seconded to NATO met with Musharraf in Islamabad. They sought permission to increase overflights of the FATA by pilotless drone aircraft to kill al-Qaeda fugitives. The aim was to ‘shake down’ the al-Qaeda command to get a better steer on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, preferably before the end of Bush’s tenure in January 2009. Musharraf agreed, on the condition that the quarries were al-Qaeda, not Taliban. He feared blowback.

Since then, there have been several drone sorties into Pakistani airspace, leaving more than 50 people dead. According to US and British intelligence, the slain have included ‘high-value’ senior al-Qaeda commanders, like the Libyan Layth al-Libi and Algerian Sulayman al-Jaza’iri, the latter allegedly responsible for planning attacks in Europe. According to locals, the majority of those killed were tribesmen, women and children. But the drones are also being flown to punish the Pakistani government for a policy Washington opposes.

The last deadly attack was on May 15 in Damadola, a village in the Bajaur tribal agency. At least 15 were killed, including perhaps al-Jaza’iri and an 11-year old child. They were reportedly in a house owned by Mullah Obaidallah Akhund, the former Afghan Taliban defense minister captured in 2007 by the Pakistani army at the behest of Washington. There are rumors that Akhund has or will be freed as part of the South Waziristan prisoner exchange. Unusually, the army condemned the strike as ‘completely counterproductive.’ So did Gilani and the NWFP governor.

The killing of the 11 Pakistani soldiers on June 11 comes from this well of distrust. The day before Afghan soldiers, backed by US Special Forces, had tried to set up a post near the Afghan border but inside Pakistani territory. The army ordered them out. As the Afghan and American soldiers retreated, the Taliban ambushed them. Artillery and air-to-surface missiles were fired at or near the army base in Pakistan. US commanders knew the risk of ‘collateral damage’ was high: They fired in any case. That was why the Pakistan army — in a ferocious communiqué — called the US missile strike an ‘act of aggression.’ In the eyes of most of Pakistan, it was.

Subsequent incursions by US helicopters and drones into Pakistani airspace — as well as very public statements by US NATO Commanders that a recent hike in Taliban activity in eastern Afghanistan is ‘directly attributable to the lack of pressure on the [Pakistani] side of the border’ — has convinced many in Pakistan that Washington is about to shift strategy: away from relying on the Pakistani army to ‘do more’ against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in FATA and toward a preemptive policy whereby the US and/or NATO go into Pakistan alone.

Centrism cannot hold

Why has the dawn broken by the February elections dimmed so rapidly? The short answer is that the political aspiration voiced by those elections has been gagged by extra-parliamentary agreements that preceded them.

When Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, she did so as part of a deal underwritten by Washington and the army. If elected prime minister, she promised, her party would ensure continuity, not change, in policy, whether in terms of the army’s mercenary role in the ‘war on terror’ or Musharraf’s continuation as a ‘civilian’ president for another five years. This vow was why Washington prevailed on Musharraf to allow her back, especially as the lawyers’ protest had stripped away the last vestiges of his ‘civilian’ legitimacy.

But, on February 18, the Pakistani electorate voted for change — and against Musharraf, Islamabad’s participation in what most Pakistanis see as an American war and the army’s involvement in governance. Prior to her murder, Bhutto had confected the idea of a ‘moderate middle’ to obscure the contradiction at the heart of her return. With her party in government, the contradiction stands naked. Whether on Afghan borderlands or in the federal capital, the centrism of the PPP’s politics — appealing to the masses while trying to toe the US line — cannot hold. Very simply, there is no center in Pakistani politics, no ‘moderate middle’: There is policy decreed by Washington and an electorate, including now large parts of the army, that rejects it.

Storms lie in wait for Pakistan — aside from the fallout of a judicial crisis that may yet bring the coalition government to an early shipwreck. By the end of June, the government will almost certainly pass a budget that aims to narrow yawning deficits by withdrawing subsidies from basic commodities, including wheat, gas and electricity. This move will deeply hurt the poor: Nearly 50 percent of Pakistanis — 77 million people — are already ‘food insecure,’ according to UN surveys. With Pakistan suffering from the same pressures on food prices that have depressed living standards worldwide, such austerity measures could end in food riots.

And the summer thaw in the Hindu Kush, with the attendant rise in Taliban attacks, could prove the final tripwire for a full-fledged US incursion into the FATA. Aziz is mordant about the consequence of that collision. ‘If there is a peace agreement [with the Taliban] followed by a major NATO attack inside Pakistan, it would stretch the US-Pakistani alliance to the breaking point. It would destroy everything.’

Is there shelter from the gathering storms? The government could return to its election pledges. It could reinstate the judges and, concurrent with dialogue with the Taliban, commit to a mass investment for ‘empowerment, education, employment’ for the poor in all of the smaller provinces, but especially the FATA and the NWFP. But for all this to transpire, Musharraf would need to stand down, the army would need to stand back and Washington would need to exhibit a ‘strategic patience’ unseen since September 11, 2001. None of these eventualities is likely.

For her followers Bhutto offered the hope of deliverance from military rule, religious bigotry and pauperisation. On her return to Pakistan on 18 October – met with the slaughter of 137 people in dual suicide attacks – she said ‘education, employment and empowerment’ were the arms to defeat Pakistan’s evil axis of military dictatorship and Islamic militancy.

To the Bush administration and Britain she was a saviour of a different kind. They had engineered her return to deliver President Pervez’s Musharraf’s military regime the civilian legitimacy it so palpably lacked. In the caustic description of Pakistan historian Ahmed Rashid a ‘loveless marriage’ had been arranged so that ‘the General can combat terrorists and the Lady play democracy’.

Washington also assumed that Bhutto would endorse augmented US military operations in Pakistan, especially on the border areas with Afghanistan where the Taliban and, according to US intelligence, Al Qaeda are entrenched.
Which will be her legacy? The American surrogate who, in return for office, was prepared to rent Pakistan as a forward Nato base for the war in Afghanistan? Or the martyr who was killed because she alone could mobilise the nation’s poor against the military’s stranglehold on the state?

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) her father established and she led embodies the contradiction. For it is a mass party, aspiring to modernity, whose leadership are feudal landlords – Pakistan’s most reactionary social class.

Done deal

Washington and London orchestrated her return but she owed it to a man – Pakistan’s chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. On 9 March 2007, Musharraf sacked him, ostensibly for ‘misconduct’.
The real reason was judicial rulings that thwarted the army’s illegal acquisition of state power. These concerned dodgy privatisation deals that sold off state assets cheap to cohorts in Pakistan’s capitalist class; the illegal ‘disappearance’ of hundreds of regime dissidents, especially from the subject provinces of the Frontier, Sindh and Balochistan; and, perhaps most importantly, Chaudhry’s ‘legal opinion’ that it would be unconstitutional for Musharraf to be president for another term.

The sacking turned out to be the biggest blunder of the general’s political life.

Lawyers took to the streets in protest, buoyed by a resurgent civil society, assertive judiciary and committed media. Following a snowballing campaign, on 20 July the supreme court restored Chaudhry to his post. For younger generations his cause was their first taste of political activism. For the older it was the first time a strategy of collective action had taken on the regime and won.

‘The lawyers’ movement was a remarkable event,’ says political scientist Rasul Baksh Rais. ‘It was nonviolent, it was popular and it echoed the sentiments of the middle classes and other new classes forged by modernisation: that we need the rule of law.’

Bhutto viewed the lawyers’ campaign through the prism of her own redemption. She had been in self-exile since 1999, fleeing a raft of corruption cases from her two periods as prime minister. She understood the protests had exposed how small was the civilian base of the Musharraf regime, including among Pakistan’s westernised elite, once the general’s core constituency. But she was fearful mass agitation would trigger martial law, destroying all prospects for her return.

She told cadres in the PPP – the largest party in Pakistan and the strongest amongst the lawyers – to tail the protests, not lead them. She also shunned PPP leader Aitzaz Ahsan, Chaudhry’s defence counsel and the brain behind the mass, nonviolent campaign that saw him restored. She viewed him as a threat, and not only for his profile in leading the lawyers’ movement. He was from the Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, and the leader of the PPP’s urban, middle class and modernist wing. Bhutto was from Sindh, drawing strength from the rural masses, but a scion of the landed aristocracy.

She offered Washington a deal. In return for an amnesty on the corruption cases and a third stab at the premiership, she would withdraw the PPP from a cross-party alliance predicated on ending the army’s role in governance. She also pledged her party to back a civilian Musharraf presidency. She was to deliver on both counts.

Washington had other reasons to give her time. CIA intelligence reported that the Taliban and Al Qaeda had regrouped in North Waziristan, a remote tribal area on the Afghan border. From this redoubt the Taliban was powering the Afghanistan insurgency and, said the Americans, Al Qaeda was training cadre to launch attacks in America, Europe and North Africa.

The resurgence was the spawn of a peace deal struck between the army and the ‘Pakistan’ Taliban in September 2006. Musharraf had sold it as a ‘holistic’ solution to the menace of ‘extremism’. In fact it was a treaty of surrender, brought on by US-driven campaigns in the tribal areas that served to demoralise the army and strengthen the militants. Ten months after it was signed, Bush wanted Musharraf to scrap the deal and go back to military might.

The advice wasn’t only verbal. In June and July US/Nato special forces launched several raids into Pakistan’s borderlands that left dozens dead and one clear message: if the Pakistan army did not go after the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the US army would. Bush signed a law predicating $1 billion in annual US military aid on the army acting against the Taliban. And Democrat presidential hopeful Barak Obama said he would send in the marines if he had ‘actionable intelligence’ that Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan.

Weakened at home, Musharraf buckled. After six months of dithering he authorised a commando assault on Islamabad’s Red Mosque, long a sanctuary for pro-Taliban clerics and jihadist militia. More than one hundred were killed, mostly seminary students. He sent two divisions to north Waziristan, inflaming a Taliban-led insurgency that so far has cost 1,600 lives, including 345 soldiers.

Bush lionised both moves. So did Bhutto, the only Pakistani politician to do so.

In July the Americans invited her to Dubai, where she met Musharraf. They agreed the logistics of her return and a post-election power sharing deal. The tryst confirmed the experience she learned as prime minister: that the road to even partial power in Pakistan lies less through the people than Washington and the army. Both said they would not forget the risks she had taken for the ‘war on terror’. Neither would her enemies.

Deal undone?

Did her return change her fealty to the deal? Like so much with Bhutto it depends who you ask. Tanvir Ahmad Khan was foreign secretary in her first government. He says the tumultuous reception in Karachi – as well as the savagery of the attempt to kill her – ‘re-radicalised’ her.

‘She knew under the American plan she was to play second fiddle – that as far as Washington was concerned it was Musharraf and the army who were indispensable to Pakistan, not she and the PPP,’ he says. ‘But she believed the dynamics set off by her return would enlarge the political space available to her and her policies. This is when the barrier between her and Musharraf came up. He and the army had suspicions she would go beyond her allotted role.’

Bhutto’s rhetoric certainly became shriller on home turf. Following the regime’s imposition of martial law on 3 November – ostensibly to tame the Taliban, actually to purge the judiciary, including, again, the chief justice – she declared famously, ‘It’s over with Musharraf!’

She also threatened to pull the PPP’s ranks onto streets of Lahore and Rawalpindi, both heartlands of Musharraf’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q). It took a phone call from US assistant secretary of state John Negroponte to douse the ire.

But on the crucial issues of Musharraf’s presidency, the centrality of the army in political life and a restoration of the pre-emergency judiciary, she kept to the script set by Washington. She called for none of them.

A PML-Q leader explains: ‘Prior to her return she promised the Americans that Musharraf would keep control of the national security issues, especially the war on terror and Pakistan’s nuclear arms. Benazir wanted to be prime minister and travel to Davos as the democratic face of Pakistan.’

Where she differed with the regime was on the contours of the post-election share. Musharraf and the PML-Q wanted her to be a junior coalition partner and were rigging the polls to make it happen. But Bhutto was reinvigorating the PPP as the most powerful party political machine in the land.

In any halfway straight contest it was clear who would win, says a former PPP man who is now an ally of Musharraf: ‘She harried the PPP to so enlarge its base that by the elections she would be able to form the largest political bloc. She was convinced that would have been the moment the political centre of gravity would return to her. She may have been right. When it came to pure political skills she could outmatch Musharraf and ten other generals. In that regard she was a giant.’

The choice

If there is to be a halfway straight contest in the elections on February 18, the PPP will be the largest political party. It will then face the choice Bhutto evaded ever since she returned.

It could form a national government with Pakistan’s other parties based on Musharraf’s resignation, the removal of the army from governance and a political consensus on policies to do with democracy, provincial autonomy and Pakistan’s stance towards the US/Nato war in Afghanistan. Such a government would command the support of the larger part of the Pakistani people. ‘It could seal an alliance with those parts of civil society mobilised by the lawyers’ movement and resolve tensions within the PPP,’ says the lawyer and analyst, Babar Sattar. It may even help re-found the PPP as modern, social democratic movement that could address – as well as air – promises of education, employment and empowerment.

Alternatively the PPP could keep to the deal brokered in Dubai. This would win it the blessings of Bush, Brown, Musharraf and the army. It would grant it access to state resources, vital to rent the loyalty of its core and impoverished constituencies in Sindh.

But ‘it would cause the break-up of the PPP’, says Sattar. It is unimaginable that cadres like Ahsan could remain in a party that not only shored up Musharraf but did nothing to restore Chaudhry to his position. Sooner or later the PPP would become what many in the military establishment have long wanted it to be: a rump provincial party that represents Sindh, but no more.

The auguries are not good. Many had hoped Bhutto’s death would mean elections throughout the PPP to determine a new national organisation, a new leadership, policies and ethos. In fact policy, resources and power were passed to Bhutto’s widower, courtesy of her will, a feudal rite of passage that belonged more to the 16th century than the 21st.

As for the inheritor, Asif Zardari, the least that can be said of him is that he too is a feudal scion. ‘And a basic feature of feudalism is that power is important. Principles are not,’ says Rais.

Already there are some in Pakistan’s ruling circles who see him as a more pliable interlocutor than his wife, ‘who could be difficult’, says one.

They are living a fool’s vision. The PPP’s national base and espousal of democracy are potentially threats to the army’s hegemony of the state. They are not threats to the existence of Pakistan, except for those, like Musharraf and Washington, who equate the nation with the state and the state with the army.

The real subversives are rather Pakistan’s sub-nationalist movements, which are themselves responses to a failed state and years of military rule. And these will be bolstered by the PPP’s collapse. That can be seen Bhutto’s native Sindh province, where violent protestors blamed Pakistan’s ‘Punjabi’ army for Bhutto’s murder. It is well developed in Balochistan, where for the last three years a separatist insurgency has been in armed struggle with the state. And it is there in the Talibanisation of the tribal areas and Frontier province, for the Taliban is a Pashtun nationalist movement almost as much as it is an Islamist one.

Sindhi and Baloch nationalists view the Pakistani army as a colonial power. The Taliban sees it as mercenary force acting on US orders. Both views have popular resonance. And all three movements in different ways are challenging the decrepit, feudal orders of their societies. But none can redress the immense problems of poverty, illiteracy, deprivation, backwardness and de-institutionalisation that are the real blights of their people. What they actually prefigure is Pakistan’s dismemberment and a regional implosion that would make Afghanistan seem a summer squall.

For, unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan has 160 million people, 600,000 soldiers and 50 nuclear warheads. It cannot implode.

* The Islamist and pro-American dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq hanged Bhutto’s father, prime minister Zulfiker Ali Bhutto, in 1979. Her brother, Shahnawaz, was posioned in France in 1985, probably by Pakistan’s intelligence services. Her other brother, Muntazer, was shot dead in a police ambush in Karachi in 1996.

Baluchistan is split across western Pakistan, eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. Much like the Kurds, the Baluchis are victims of empire, with their resource-rich territory conquered and divided by successive regional powers, from the Persians to the British. It was British colonial rule that determined the modern political geography of Baluchistan, in the 1947 agreement with India that created Pakistan.

The Baluchis resisted their forced assimilation into Pakistan and by the time Bangladesh had gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, they too were demanding greater autonomy from the political elite in Punjab. President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s refusal to grant any meaningful powers to Baluchistan’s first elected body in 1972 resulted in a bloody five-year war in which 3,000 Pakistani soldiers, 5,000 Baluchi fighters and many more civilians were killed.

The Pakistan air force carried out strikes throughout rural Baluchistan and napalm was used as part of a ‘scorched earth’ policy. Iran, concerned about the future aspirations of its own Baluchi minority, also joined the military action. The war ended in 1978 when General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had ousted Bhutto in a military coup, offered an amnesty to Baluchi fighters.

Almost 30 years on, despite producing more than one third of Pakistan’s natural gas and accounting for only six per cent of the population, Baluchistan remains the country’s most impoverished region. In recent years, acts of violence against the continued presence of Pakistan’s military have increased. These include attacks by the BLA on power facilities, railway lines and military checkpoints. Alleged financial assistance to Baluchi fighters from India and countries in the west, renewed designs on the exploitation of Baluchistan’s natural resources and the presence of Taliban fighters have all fuelled tension in the region.

Following the alleged rape of a Sihndi doctor by a soldier at a hospital in Sui, in January 2005, Baluchi guerrillas launched a crippling attack on the Sui natural gas production facility, Pakistan’s largest. President Pervez Musharraf’s retaliation was swift and merciless. Warning that ‘this is not the 1970s’ and promising that ‘they will not know what’s hit them’, he dispatched Pakistan’s F- 16s and helicopter gunships (newly supplied by the US) into the mountains and deserts of Baluchistan to deliver the kind of collective punishment now all too familiar in occupied lands.

In the past year six Pakistani army brigades and a 25,000- strong paramilitary force have been deployed. Local groups claim that 450 Baluchi politicians and activists have been ‘disappeared’ and that more than 4,000 Baluchis are in detention, many in secret locations without charge or trial. As winter approached, Unicef called for immediate UN food and medical aid to 84,000 Baluchis displaced by the troubles, including 33,000 children, but the federal Pakistani government repeatedly blocked or ignored requests from aid agencies for permission to operate in Baluchistan.

Last August, 79-year-old Nawab Akbar Bugti, a tribal chief, former governor of Baluchistan and leader of its largest political party (the JLP), was assassinated in targeted Pakistani air-strikes. In December, two more prominent nationalist leaders were arrested.

Iran has also stepped up its repression of Baluchi activists, arresting hundreds and sentencing many to death; public executions are commonplace. Last week it emerged that the extradition of Rashif Rauf, he of the alleged plot to bring down airliners using liquid explosives fame, could be dependent on Britain returning several prominent Baluchi activists to Pakistan.

The Home Office website provides the following explanation for designating the BLA as ‘terrorist’: ‘BLA are comprised of tribal groups based in the Baluchistan area of Eastern Pakistan [sic], which aims to establish an idependant [sic] nation encompassing the Baluch dominated areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.’

The failure even to describe the geography of Baluchistan correctly reflects an ignorant quid pro quo with General Musharaf: we need his help with our ‘war on terrorism’, so we support his.

This position is at best counterproductive, and at worst reckless. Pakistan’s crackdown on moderate and anti-Taliban Baluch and Pashtun nationalists is strengthening the Islamist forces that coalition forces are fighting in Afghanistan, while the ISI (Pakistan’s internal security agency) is widely believed to provide extensive support to the Taliban. With crude geopolitics like this, who needs enemies?

The delegates were launching the ‘referendum campaign’. Over the next 12 months the APNA hopes to ask Pakistan Kashmir’s 3. 2 million residents one simple question: do they want freedom from or accession to Pakistan? ‘I believe there will be a thumping majority in favour of freedom,’ says Arif Shahid, APNA chairperson and brain behind the campaign. ‘The time for a real referendum on Kashmir has come.’

There is nothing unusual about the aspiration. Kashmiri nationalists have been fighting for the reunification of their state ever since it was partitioned between India and Pakistan in 1948. What is unusual is the brazenness. Nationalist parties are banned in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Neelum View is the glitziest hotel in Muzaffarabad, hosting Pakistani politicians and army generals alike. From where did the APNA get its temerity? The answer is as simple as it is tragic, says Shahid: the earthquake that last year destroyed large swathes of his country.

‘We lost thousands of our people and scores of our villages. But there’s no doubt the earthquake helped our cause. There is now an international presence and media in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. They see the political realities. And they are favourable to us.’

The call for an independent Kashmir has long been muffled by India and Pakistan’s rival claims on the territory, which have caused two of their three wars. Pakistan’s argument is that as a Muslim majority state Kashmir should be ‘free’ to accede to the Islamic Republic. India says Kashmir is an ‘integral’ part of its secular nation and will remain so in war or peace. Both sides are ready to fight ‘to the very last Kashmiri’, says Shahid.

The latest fight – an insurgency against army rule in India-controlled Kashmir – has been the bloodiest. Although it began as a nationalist uprising in 1989, it rapidly degenerated into a proxy war between Pakistan and India, scarred by sectarian killings, brutal army oppression and, so far, the death of at least 45,000 people, many of them civilians. Pakistani (or ‘Azad’) Kashmir has supplied the hinterland to the conflict, hosting 30,000 refugees and bases to a dozen or so pro-accession jihadist groups fighting the war on Islamabad’s behalf.

It was the presence of these ‘banned’ groups that explained Pakistan’s reluctance to open its side of Kashmir following the earthquake, says Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW). ‘For 48 hours the Pakistan army dithered,’ he says. ‘In the end the scale of the disaster overwhelmed them and the army was forced to open up Azad Kashmir to international relief organisations. But there were real misgivings. First, the army knew it would expose to public view militant jihadist camps whose existence had officially been denied. And second, it understood that with such a massive international operation in place the military would lose its grip on one of the most closed areas in Pakistan.’

That is what happened. Prior to the earthquake, all land and mobile telephone links were controlled by the army, proving a major obstruction to postearthquake rescue efforts. The government was thus compelled to open lines to private mobile companies and, through them, greater telecommunications and internet access. Similarly there are now for the first time nonstate radio stations, as well as several international media networks, operating out of Muzaffarabad.

This freeing up of Kashmiri society has redounded to nationalists’ benefit more than to the jihadists or the army, says Mohammed Khaleeque, APNA spokesperson. The reason, he says, is the Islamists’ sectarian role in the anti-Indian insurgency and the army’s failure to meet people’s expectations in the aftermath of the earthquake.

‘There is a lot of anger and it has translated into political protest,’ says Khaleeque. ‘In the last 12 months we’ve seen meetings, demonstrations and showdowns with the Pakistan authorities. Sometimes the protests are over government inefficiency and corruption. But increasingly there are demands that the army withdraw from Kashmir and that our sham “autonomous” local government stand down. People want real control of their lives. All of this has strengthened the nationalists.’ Brad Adams agrees.

‘Everyone we spoke to in Indian Kashmir – activist, official and neutral – said that the growing sentiment was for independence rather than accession to India or Pakistan. I’d be amazed if that wasn’t also the case in Azad Kashmir. Kashmiris on both sides of the divide know Pakistan is not the Muslim paradise it was made out to be. My hunch is that were Kashmiris free to choose they would prefer to go their own way.’

But the fear is there will be reversion to the old ways once the emergency caused by the earthquake is over and the international agencies start to pack up and leave. Diplomats and donors say that Pakistan is already quietly urging that the aid agencies quit Kashmir sooner rather than later. It is a request the world must resist, says Adams.

‘With the earthquake, the international community has a golden opportunity to open up Azad Kashmir permanently,’ he says. ‘And $6. 5 billion in aid is a lot of leverage. I am not saying emergency humanitarian relief should be made conditional.

But development aid can be. There are a lot of demands on the world’s resources. If they are to be spent on Kashmir’s reconstruction, then it should be on condition that Pakistan respects the basic civil and political rights of the Kashmiri people.’

As the body count started to mount, so did the outrage, and not only in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Over the next week mass funerals evolved into mass protests, with demonstrators denouncing President-General Pervez Musharraf, his military regime and, above all, their ‘strategic alliance’ in the US-led ‘war on terror’ – a war that translates easily here as a western crusade against Islam.

Addressing a mass rally in Peshawar on 3 November, the Islamist opposition leader, Fazlur Rahman, gave voice to the aspiration of thousands. ‘American and Nato forces cannot prolong the occupation and will leave Afghanistan soon,’ he said. He was also clear about who was behind the carnage at the madrassa.

‘Both the United States and the Musharraf government are responsible for what happened at Bajaur. Even if the operation had been carried out by the local (Pakistani) forces, the order would have been given by the US. That is why both are culprits in the case.’

But the culprits were unapologetic. The White House praised Musharraf’s ‘determination’ in fighting ‘terrorism’. And Pakistan’s supreme leader averred that all the slain were Taliban militants. ‘They were doing military training. Anyone who says these were innocent religious students is telling lies,’ he told a security seminar on 31 October.

To give weight to his words security men invited journalists in Islamabad to view a grainy, infrared video of ‘militants training in the planting of explosives or suicide bombings’, allegedly at the very madrassa. One official said the seminary had been frequented by Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command to Osama bin Laden. The statement was amplified loudly on US media.

To Pakistanis it was so much wind and piss, and not only because sightings of al Zawahiri are ‘a dime a dozen’ in tribal areas, admit American military analysts. Rather the conviction here is that the attack on the madrassa was either directly executed by unmanned US Predator drones that monitor the Pakistan-Afghan border or indirectly by Pakistani helicopters at Washington’s command. There is also near consensus over US motives: to prevent a peace agreement being signed between the Pakistan army and pro-Taliban tribesmen in Bajaur.

Talibanisation

Bajaur is one of many thorns in Pakistan-Nato relations. Adjacent to Afghanistan’s restive Kunar province, it is an entry point and haven for Taliban and al-Qaeda guerrillas fighting Nato forces. The head of the madrassa was a young cleric, Maulana Liaquat Ali, who, in October 2001, raised 10,000 volunteers to fight alongside Taliban resisting the USled invasion of Afghanistan. Liaquat Ali was killed in the missile strike.

But he was also increasingly marginal to Bajaur politics, and had been ever since the disastrous expedition into Afghanistan in 2001, say locals. In fact, at the time of the missile attack he was negotiating his amnesty with the Pakistan army in exchange for pledges not to give succour or sanctuary to foreign fighters, including the Taliban.

‘The evening before the attack Liaquat had been preparing a jirga (tribal council) for the signing ceremony with the government,’ says Pakistan analyst Rahimullah Yousefzai. ‘Why would the Pakistan army authorise an operation that destroys the Pakistan government’s main political strategy in the tribal areas?’ The answer, he suggests, is because the US had called time on the strategy.

The Bajaur agreement was modelled on one signed on 5 September between the government and pro-Taliban tribesmen in North Waziristan, another tribal agency on the Pakistan-Afghan border. During his recent trips to the US and London, Musharraf had sold this deal as a ‘holistic solution’ to the threat posed to his regime and Afghanistan by a resurgent Taliban and Talibanisation. These could only be defeated by ‘dialogue and development’ in addition to military force, he said.

George Bush and Tony Blair lauded the ‘courage’ of the Pakistani leader. Wiser diplomats kept their counsel. They knew ‘holism’ was not born of new political thinking but of defeat.

In 2002, US and Nato forces in Afghanistan presented the Pakistan leader with irrefutable proof that Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were finding refuge in the tribal areas. With extreme reluctance – and for the first time in Pakistan’s history – Musharraf sent 80,000 soldiers into ‘autonomous’ agencies such as Bajaur and Waziristan. Four years on, 700 soldiers had been killed, many had deserted and at least six senior officers had been court martialled for refusing to wage war on their own tribesmen. The numbers of civilians killed and displaced in the conflict was even greater.

And the tribes had become radicalised. Power and leadership shifted from the traditional, progovernment elders or maliks to younger clerics or mullahs forged by successive jihads in Afghanistan, bonded in ethnic solidarity with the Taliban and inspired by the debased ‘Islamist’ visions of al-Qaeda.

These clerics and the madrassa students that follow them became the defenders of the tribal areas against the army incursions and acquired the political legitimacy born of resistance. They called themselves the Pakistan Taliban because that is precisely who they are, says Rahimullah Yousefzai.

‘They are Taliban in the sense that they share the same ideology as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and see them as their allies. If you ask them “Who is your leader?” they would say the Afghan Taliban emir Mullah Mohammed Omar. They also fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan’. Nor are their political visions different from their Afghan cousins, he adds. ‘They are Islamist, anti-western and want an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. They believe the system of government and justice that operated under the Taliban in Afghanistan is the purest form of Islamic rule’.

The 5 September agreement reflects their political power, Yousefzai says. In return for verbal pledges by the Pakistan Taliban to end attacks on pro-government tribesmen and prevent infiltration into Afghanistan, the government agreed to free Taliban prisoners, remove checkpoints and return confiscated weaponry. And while the army has fulfilled every one of its commitments, the Pakistan Taliban has observed theirs mostly in the breach. Since the agreement was initialled, at least four tribesmen have been killed by the Taliban, supposedly as ‘American spies’. And Nato monitors have registered a 300 per cent hike in cross-border infiltration into Afghanistan. There is only one area where the agreement appears to be holding, says Pakistani analyst Ismail Khan. ‘It’s the clause which says you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Since 5 September, there have been no (Taliban) attacks on government installations and the security forces have not carried out any ground and air offensives [against the militants].’

Always today, never tomorrow

It was that détente the attack in Bajaur was intended to destroy, say observers, regardless of whether it was undertaken first hand by Nato forces or second hand by its Pakistani proxies. For if there is one sure consequence of the strike, it is that there will be no more peace agreements signed between the government and pro-Taliban tribesmen. A second consequence – one that Nato and its allies seem unable to grasp – is that it will certainly rally more tribesmen behind the Taliban, and especially the poor, the young and the disenfranchised. The third consequence is that there will be revenge, against Nato in Afghanistan and the army in Pakistan.

There is another way to deal with Talibanisation, say civil NGOs and Pakistan’s main secular parties. This calls for education, re-construction and massive investment in areas where over 60 per cent of families live in poverty, 75 per cent have no access to clean drinking water and just 17 per cent of men and one per cent of women are literate. Pakistan’s military regime, like its British precursor, has preferred historically to keep the tribal areas ‘separate’ from rather than integrated into the rest of the country. As for Nato and other western powers that have the resources for such a transformation, ‘they lack the patience,’ says Khan. ‘They want results immediately – always today, never tomorrow’.

The legacy of that approach can be seen in the tribal areas and, beyond their porous borders, in Afghanistan. Its fruit includes the ruins of Bajaur on the one side and the retrograde emirates of the Taliban on the other.