Asim Munir wants to be guardian of the Middle East. He's fated to fail at home

The Print

2 days ago

Through the past week, residents of Pakistan's Bajaur, the northernmost and smallest of the seven territories which used to be called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, had been negotiating to end the resurgence of violence in their area. Following the takeover of the region in 2008 by jihadists of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the army stepped in with a savage campaign that claimed the lives of thousands of people and forced some 3,00,000 people into refugee camps.
For months, the killings continued, scholars John Braithwaite and Bina D'Costa have recorded . Afsana, who sang at wedding ceremonies to support her refugee family, was murdered in 2010. Ghazala Javed, another popular 24-year-old Pashto singer, was shot dead in Peshawar in the summer of 2012.
The night was cold, eyewitnesses would later remember, when the men arrived at the home of Pashto folk dancer Shabana in Mingora, a city in Swat district. They hammered on the door until she came out. They ignored her mother's promises that she would never allow Shabana to sing and dance again and dragged her toward the Green Square. There, her body was found the next morning, riddled with bullets and her throat slit from end to end. She had been covered with a shroud of banknotes and her music CDs.
Following days of talks last week, though, the TTP refused to pull back into Afghanistan. And helicopter gunships, artillery, and drones began hitting insurgent strongholds once again. A large number of people are back in refugee camps.
The jihadists who used terror to stamp out the region's unique syncretic culture now hold real power—and have no intention of giving up their sharia-ruled emirate without a fight. The question is: As Field Marshal Asim Munir offers the West the partnership of the Pakistani military to fight distant battles against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, can he still win what's been called Pakistan's own Vietnam?
Emirates of mud
Looking back, the 2008 peace agreements were fated to collapse. The agreements were, journalist Daud Khattak has noted, signed between the Pakistan Army and the jihadists, excluding the traditional tribal leadership. The TTP's ranks were swelled by a new generation of prospectless young people, their guns an instrument to seize lands and extort money from businesses. Each emirate of mud ran on revenues it could seize through terror, and the TTP set itself up as the guardian of a mini-state.
From the outset, the TTP stamped its authority on the region, marginalising the state. Girls' schools, an estimated 27 of them, were dynamited. Another 65 boys' schools were also levelled, as well as two colleges. The tenuous gains Bajaur residents had made were wiped out in less than six months.
The TTP also moved rapidly to cash in on the spoils. Extortion replaced the normal tax structure. Among the key elements of Operation Sherdil, launched in 2008, was to separate the jihadists from their sources of income in the local economy. The plan worked, Braithwaite and D'Costa show—it worked disastrously well.
Egg and poultry farming in Bajaur collapsed, with livestock being left for the stray dogs as owners fled. Thousands of shops in Anayat Kalli were burned down in artillery exchanges, as fighting between the military and the TTP escalated. Fruit orchards, which grew oranges, plums, peaches, apricots, and persimmons, had to be abandoned. The marble business, another important source of livelihood, collapsed.
The TTP retreated into Afghanistan—only to return after the Islamic Emirate took power in Kabul in 2021. This time, Pakistan's ISI hoped, the Islamic Emirate would rein in the TTP. Turned out, it either couldn't or wouldn't. The cycle of violence erupted yet again. Local negotiators, who struggled to persuade both the TTP and the army to leave the area, were ignored by both sides. And the renewal of military operations has sparked off yet another refugee exodus.
Little evidence exists that the strains between the military and the population are being contained. Last month, soldiers opened fire on protestors who had gathered at a military camp to voice anger over the killing of a seven-year-old girl in a mortar strike. Local soldiers responded by killing seven unarmed protestors, a leaked video established.
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Roots of terror
Like so many insurgencies in India and its neighbourhood, the jihadist rise in Bajaur was facilitated by the state. Following the march to war over Kashmir in 1947, tribals from the region were recruited to fight against Maharaja Hari Singh's forces. The military, civilian authorities, and religious scholars, all supported the effort, scholar Husain Haqqani has noted. These groups were also supported by the government of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who saw Islamists as a tool to undermine President Mohammad Daoud Khan's Left-leaning government in Afghanistan.
This process, according to scholar Hussain Asaf, marked the emergence of a 'a dialectical relationship between Islam, Pakistan and the military. Without Islam, Pakistan would not have been able to come into existence; without Pakistan the military would not be able to exist; and without the military, Islam and Pakistan would be threatened. In perpetuating such a state, the military was perpetuating Islam.'
The policy, however, had unintended consequences. A new class of conflict entrepreneur emerged in what was then known as the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province), today Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Equipped with Western arms and funded by Saudi Arabia and the CIA through the ISI, this new class of political leader swept aside traditional tribal hierarchies.
From 1979, as refugees flowed into Bajaur to escape the Soviet intervention, the ISI set to work recruiting fighters from the camps. Later, in 1989, the leaders of seven Islamist parties met at Maidan in Lower Dir and formed the Tahrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi—organisation for the defence of the Prophet's law. Sufi Muhammad of the Jamat-e-Islami was appointed head of the new coalition.
This coalition, scholars Kiramat Ullah, Muhammad Ayaz Khan, and Tariq Anwar Khan have written, marked the end of the traditional chiefdoms of Khar, Nawagai, and Pashat. It also choked the activities of pan-Pakistan political parties. Instead, the jihadist campaign in Afghanistan became the axis of politics in Bajaur. The killings of local residents in air strikes as well as General Pervez Musharraf's turn against the jihadists, later led these jihadists to take on the state.
Faqeer Muhammad, the most prominent of these jihadist leaders, took control of the movement in 2008. A military operation forced him out—if at great cost to civilians—but the TTP was soon back, again staking claim to control of its little emirates.
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An arc of fire
Since 2008, new democratic movements have sprung up across the region, seeking an end to the use of death squads, extrajudicial executions, and massive force by the military. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa saw the rise of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, which sought greater democratic rights and freedoms with the constitution of Pakistan. The military crushed it, though, fearing that the democratic movements might undermine the jihadist proxies through which it ruled the region.
For Pakistan's military commanders, the jihadist allies were still partners—partners who might need to be coerced and disciplined, as the British had done in the colonial period—but allies nonetheless. The first 30 years of British rule in the Northwest, historian Elizabeth Kolsky records, saw more than 40 punitive expeditions in which crops were destroyed, livestock slaughtered, and entire villages burned to the ground.
This is a strategy Pakistan is also pursuing in other violence-torn borderlands. The government has succeeded in having the Majeed Brigade—the most aggressive of the insurgent groups fighting under the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) umbrella—designated a terrorist group, but that hasn't changed reality much. Fierce fighting has been reported against Baloch groups operating from across the border in Iran's Zhob. The Pakistan Army claims 50 BLA personnel were shot dead in the latest operations, while nine of its own personnel fell in combat.
Lacking political legitimacy and a genuine political constituency, Field Marshal Munir is fated to fail, just as his predecessors did. To contain insurgencies in 2009-2010, Zahid Ali Khan estimated that Pakistan committed some 1,40,000 army and Frontier Corps personnel. Those aren't sustainable numbers if Field Marshal Munir also has ambitions to emerge as the guardian of the Middle East.
Finding a way forward needs the Pakistan Army to demonstrate not just tactical skills, but also a political will that ties leaders at the centre into meaningful alliances with representatives of the burning borderlands. There's little in the Pakistan Army's history, though, that suggests it has the imagination for such an enterprise.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)