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| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistani forces lie low in Darra Adam Khel |
| 2008-07-05 |
| The Taliban fighters were in a pickup truck, brazenly parked right outside the army fort in Darra Adam Khel, militants and the state in an uneasy co-existence. For months, Darra, a Pakistani town infamous for its arms bazaar in the troubled North West, has been under the control of the country's fierce Taliban movement, whose cadres patrol the streets and enforce their own austere rules. The security forces, when they do emerge from their fort, do not challenge the hot-blooded young militants. Wrapped in head scarves, with only their eyes showing, and bristling with weaponry, the Taliban are now such a normal sight in the town that no one pays them any attention. Even the Taliban's presence outside the Frontier Corps' White Fort in Darra did not excite the interest of the locals. "What's wrong with that?" said tribal elder and gun store owner Shah Mahmood, when the scene at the fort was pointed out. "They [the Taliban] don't bother us, only those who are doing wrong. They have finished the robbers, the drug dealers, the kidnappers. Look, there is peace here now." In theory, Pakistan's security forces are in opposition to the Taliban, who are linked to al-Qaeda and now firmly entrenched across the country's tribal belt and encroaching on "settled" areas of the northwest. In reality, large swathes of territory have simply been ceded to them. Many in Darra and across the tribal territory, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), appear to believe that life under the Taliban may be harsh but at least the militants have brought law and order, something the state could not deliver. Last week, the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force, launched an operation against Islamist warlords based on the outskirts of Peshawar in the Khyber Agency, a part of FATA. Darra, just a 40-minute drive from Peshawar, is a Frontier Region, which means it should not be as wild as FATA. Yet the Taliban, far more extreme than Khyber Agency's militants, operate there with impunity. The rubble of a paramilitary checkpost they bombed marks the edge of town. Business in the Darra market did not seem to be dented by the Taliban presence. But the burst of gunfire every few minutes is still jarring, as buyers test weapons by letting off a few rounds into the air. In Mr. Mahmood's shop, a Kalashnikov copy made in Darra costs just 6,000 to 12,000 rupees ($141 to $282), while a smuggled Russian-made model is about 100,000 rupees ($2,353). Darra produces all components of the weapon in tiny workshops, with artisans using basic machinery and doing some of the work by hand. Even the bullets are manufactured there. Over in the gun store of Mohammad Illyas, a much rarer weapon is on sale. A new-looking M16 rifle, a bulky American machine gun that was likely to have been taken from a dead U.S. soldier who had been fighting across the border in Afghanistan. Also for sale was a 70s-era M16, which was much lighter and had seen service, Mr. Illyas said, in the Vietnam war. He wanted the equivalent of $10,589 for the current M16, and $5,177 for the older model. "People say that these Taliban here are Tajiks or Chechens or whatever, but that is a lie. They are our own people," Mr. Illyas said. "When there was government rule here, the police took money, the army took money. The Taliban don't. ... We say George Bush is the terrorist, not the Taliban." Of course, it would be a brave person to speak out against the Taliban. Girls and women in particular suffer under their rule. But locals, not only in Darra but across the tribal belt, voiced support for them. While not popular, the Taliban get credit from locals for their emphasis on strict law and order, so exasperated were residents with the anarchy that prevailed under the Pakistani state. "I would say that 70 per cent of people support the Taliban," said Abdul Qadir Khan, a student in Peshawar from South Waziristan, the epicentre of Pakistan's Taliban. "That's because people don't have education, they don't have jobs. The Taliban say they are fighting a holy war." While the Taliban cannot bring economic development to an area, they have cracked down on the criminal gangs that plague the northwest and provide their own Islamic courts that dispense speedy justice. And development projects were not taking place anyway, locals complain. Rustam Shah, an expert on the tribal area, who was formerly Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan, said that in recent years the colonial-era system of administration had broken down or been removed from FATA and the settled areas of Pakistan. That system gave enormous powers to the local representative of the government, the political agent in the tribal territory and to the deputy commissioner in the rest of Pakistan, to maintain order. "The perception that we are fighting someone else's war and the destruction of the institutional framework that could have dealt with the [security] crisis created an administrative vacuum. That was filled by the Taliban," Mr. Shah said. |
| Posted by:Fred |