Bombings in Peshawar Kill 12;
The Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan took further revenge on Thursday for the military campaign launched against it by the Pakistani military in the Swat Valley, by setting off bombs and ambushing police and security forces in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 12 and wounding 250. These attacks came on the heels of a major bombing in the eastern city of Lahore, a six hour train ride away, on Wednesday.
Rural, tribal Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud told Reuters before the Peshawar bombings, "We plan major attacks against government facilities in coming days and weeks . . . "
Peshawar (pop. 3 million) is the major city in the North-West Frontier Province, and on the way to Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass to its west. It is not a Taliban stronghold, and indeed its population mostly voted for a secular Pushtun-nationalist party in the Feb. 2008 elections. There is a strong divide between the new part of the city and the old. Thursday's attacks were in old centers like the Story Tellers' Bazaar (Qissah-Khwani Bazar).
There was also a Taliban attack elsewhere in the North-West Frontier Province in the small town of Dera Ismail Khan, which has a significant Shiite population, and which killed 2 persons. (Taliban are hyper-Sunni and hate Shiites, and there have been many assassinations and bombings in D.I. Khan in recent years).
Although some commentators are suggesting that Thursday's attacks show a new level of coordination by the Taliban, I disagree. There have been several highly sophisticated attacks on NATO warehouses and convoys in this region that deployed much more firepower and were more sophisticated in design.
The most sophisticated element in the recent violence is that the Taliban who struck Lahore obviously had excellent information about where the offices of the Inter-Services Intelligence were. That intelligence agency is in charge of Pakistani security and so must have been planning and supporting the current campaign against the Taliban. Hence the attack on its HQ on Wednesday morning.
Two other important points. The Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and some parts of the North-West Frontier Province are a small, rural social movement, but a social movement nevertheless. But the bombings in Lahore and Peshawar were mere terrorism. Terrorism is a sign of weakness, not of strength, and is an attempt to level the playing field by a group that is out-gunned and outnumbered. If the Taliban can be demoted to a mere terrorist organization, that is a major political victory for the Pakistani government.
While is is possible that the public will blame the government for stirring up so much trouble with the Swat campaign, it is also possible that the public will turn decisively on the Taliban. There are precedents for such loss of popularity. After the 1997 attack on innocent tourists in Luxor, Egypt, the Egyptian public turned against the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping (al-Gama'a al-Islamiya), the two small terrorist groups that had committed many acts of violence in the 1970s and 1980s and had assassinated President Anwar el Sadat in 1981. EIJ declined into irrelevance in Egypt, and al-Gama'a al-Islamiya's leadership has renounced violence.
Likewise the attack by the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi group on tourist hotels in Amman, Jordan, in fall of 2005, turned the Jordanian public against Muslim radicalism. It turns out Jordanians were proud of their great hotels, and benefit from tourism, and they really dislike terrorism on their soil.
Still, residents of the North-West frontier Province who managed to return to Sultanwas and nearby cities are said to be furious at federal government for damaging their domiciles in the first place. This development is very bad news.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani government continued its campaign against Taliban elements in Swat. One thing that puzzles me is how small the casualty numbers are on a daily basis in the war zone.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/29/2009 12:17:00 AM
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6 Comments:
I do not agree with your assessment that "Terrorism is a sign of weakness" mainly because so many other actors use terrorism: Israel, USA, Russia, UK, NATO, and so forth--basicly most of the Imperialist countries. What is the difference between Taliban bombings and USA B-52 bombings? For civilians on the receiving end, None. Both are acts of terrorism, which we must remember is just a very barbaric doctrine. The USA uses the doctrine of Total War, which amounts to terrorism and is applied to the "outside" of a society/polity/culture, whereas the Taliban's, IRA, Irgun, etc., is applied to the "inside" where it is likely more effective from a targeting standpoint. Terrorism as employed by the USA will never allow it to gain influence over Pipelinestan, as Pepe Escobar terms the region. So, perhaps it "is a sign of weakness," even when one has most of the guns.
None of this was going on prior to America's invasion and occupation of Pakistan's neighbor.
Just to add to the numerous possible consequences, I thought of a few other possibilities.
First, the Taliban must show that they are ready and able to do damage. In other words the people in Swat cannot dismiss them. This is important because, in reality, the contest is not a contest for hearts and minds as it is for who the people fear the most and who delivers the most control. Alliances have always been open to change, and now is no different, so they need to retain the fear element.
Second, many of the families that fled the fighting have members in the Taliban and are loyal to them for that reason. Those families are now dispersed all over the country, and in effect, are infiltrating new communities all over the country.
Unless the Taliban have been extremely unsuccessful in recruiting popular support, the only way to remove their support is to kill most of the people, but we and the Pakistani government will not do that.
Over the long term, much of the contest comes down to the fundamentals of penetrating the local communities and recruiting their loyalty through a combination of joint interests and control. We lost the possibility of control by dispersing them all over the country.
Bob Spencer
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Who moved my cheese ?
Dr. Cole, if you still labor under the misconception that this website is your personal property, to reformat as you see fit, let me straighten you out.
"Informed Comment," and maybe even your public persona, are now national resources. Before you go changing backgrounds you must first publish a notice in the Federal Register and have a 60-day comment period at www.regulations.gov.
an avid student who just picked up your latest book
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Dr. Cole, in this column you referred to the Taliban as a "social movement." Several weeks ago an article in the NYTimes referred to a class struggle-based Taliban strategy in at least part of the Swat. The article described how Taliban forces were redistributing the property of landlords to poor peasants. How broadly have they adopted this approach? Is this a shift in strategy? In the past I've assumed that the Taliban were too dependent on elite funding to engage in class struggle, even though their membership must largely be peasant in origin.
Radio Free Europe : “The ‘Ring Road’ was conceived in the 1960s as a highway that makes a giant circle within Afghanistan to link its major cities. Secondary roads are meant to link provincial capitals and smaller towns to the ‘Ring Road’ — much like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. But despite its name, the ‘Ring Road’ has never been a proper ring: War broke out in the 1970s before the northern section of the ‘Ring Road’ was built; and in the decades of fighting that followed, large stretches of the existing 3,000+ kilometer highway fell into disrepair or were destroyed. A main focus of internationally backed reconstruction since the collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001 has been to repair the existing highway network and finish building the remainder of the ‘Ring Road’.”
U.K.TimesOnline : The ‘Ring Road’ Warriors : ”As part of the first ripple in the U.S. troop 'surge' to Afghanistan, Delta company and its sister units are [attempting to secure] a 67-mile stretch of the Kabul to Kandahar highway, the country’s main north-south road. Sixty per cent of Afghanistan’s population live within 30 miles (50km) of one of the country’s main highways, collectively known as the "Ring Road". “The single biggest measure the Afghan people have in their mind of whether or not there is security is their ability to travel with freedom,” Lieutenant-General Jim Dutton, Nato’s deputy commander in Afghanistan, told The Times. From their deep system of mountain valleys, insurgents have been able to threaten the [Afghan highway network] and impose their own form of governance on local populations — creating a public relations disaster for President Karzai’s [centralized, isolated] Government in Kabul: Reclaiming the ‘Ring Road’ is a key plank of U.S. and Nato's [Afghan 'surge'] strategy,” thus.
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