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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Jessica, thanks for your post on the Taliban’s latest
critique of the U.S.
military. It would be hard to overstate the seriousness of the Taliban’s
advances in Pakistan
these last few days, yet I think the significance is lost on most of us. In
fact, the Taliban’s conquest of Swat and (briefly) Buner is possibly the worst
news to come out of the region since we began paying serious attention to it on
Sept. 11, 2001.
Imagine there’s some bloodthirsty Christian fundamentalist
sect from Canada,
whose mission is to force the entire world to join a doomsday cult—and if you
refuse, you get your throat cut. This sect is based in Canada, and Americans generally don’t know or
care much about what goes on in Canada,
and besides, those people are Christians like most of us, so we ignore it and
go about our coupon-clipping, job-searching lives. But the baddies are slowly
moving south, first into the small towns of northern Maine
and New York, and then into the Buffalo
suburbs. More local police are getting killed as they try to fight the
invaders, but the news is relegated to the Nation Briefs section of the Times, and to many decision-makers in
urban America,
these places are the boonies. They’re probably already full of fundamentalists
with dubious ideas, so this newest enthusiasm causes little alarm. Slowly,
quietly, the sect gains strength. People in small towns and suburbs of New York
and Boston start to worry, but the police are busy with other crimes and
everyone is distracted by the heart-pounding daily drama of the Dow Jones until
one day we wake up and realize that these people are not just on the borders
anymore. They’re in Queens, they’re on the outskirts of Boston and millions of
people who never wanted to join them have been forced to go along. The police
aren’t strong enough to stop them, and when the president calls in the National
Guard, they fade into the landscape. They look just like the rest of us when
they’re not preaching or cutting throats.
That’s a version of what’s happened in Pakistan over
the last year or two, but instead of simply being distracted, the situation for
Pakistanis is much worse. Many have lost track of what their country stands for
and why it’s worth defending. Is Pakistan
the country established at the time of the British Partition as a refuge for
the subcontinent’s Muslims, many of whom have managed to live just as well or
better in democratic India? Is it the place where politicians get endlessly richer and more corrupt while ordinary people cope with day-long power outages and soaring food prices? A
place where a young man with a college degree feels lucky to get a job as a
waiter, serving sandwiches and tea to rich Pakistanis and foreigners? Where
children are kidnapped and bombs go off and people are found hanging from
lampposts, and no one really thinks that the government or the army can or will
do much to stop it?
Buner has a story. It has been told in part, but the whole bitter thing should be required
reading for anyone frustrated by the hesitation among Afghans and Pakistanis to
stand up to the Taliban. In Buner last summer, the Taliban executed a handful
of police. The men of the village of Shalbandi raised a
local defense force to avenge the slaying. This was seen as a model strategy
for Pakistan—local people fighting the militants with their own hands on their own
terrain, far more effectively than the police or the army could. The men of
Shalbandi fought hard, and they killed six Taliban. But it didn’t end there. In
revenge, the Taliban kidnapped two young sons of the defense force leaders, and
in December, a car packed with explosives exploded outside a local polling place,
killing more than 30 people who were lining up to vote. After that, the Taliban
promised to wipe out everyone in Shalbandi. The police, who are vastly
under-resourced, and the government, which is monumentally distracted, did
little to resolve the situation in Buner before the Taliban took it over last
week. Instead, when the Taliban rolled in, the people of Shalbandi were left
alone with their tormentors. On Sunday, the Times revisited the story, reporting that one of the posse’s organizers had tried
yet again to fight the Taliban, only to have his businesses, his house and
those of his relatives taken over by the militants while he fled to Karachi.
This is the point at which people usually bring up the fact
that Pakistan has a nuclear weapon, and how horrible would it be if the Taliban got a hold of
it. But I’m not sure we can afford to wait until they do. Is Pakistan’s
nuclear technology all that much safer in the hands of a government that can’t
control its territory or protect its people?