Am reading a very interesting and well written book by journalist Ahmed Rashid about the Taliban.
He actually met some of their leaders etc. He has this to say about Pakistan : 'By 1998, Pakistani Taliban were banning TV and videos in towns along the Pashtun belt,imposing Sharia punishments such as stoning and amputation in defiance of legal system,killing Pakistani Shia and forcing people, particularly women to adapt to the Taliban dress code and way of life. Pakistan's support for the Taliban is thus coming back to haunt the country itself, even as Pakistan's leaders seem oblivious of the challenge and continue to support the Taliban.'

Posted by: Morgane at July 13, 2004 3:22 AM

Pakistan's ALWAYS been a backward and violent hell-hole, awash with guns. These are for pursuing vendettas, committing honour-killings, sparking insurrections, conducting sectarian murders, for generally intimidating and coercing everybody not of one's kin and for protection against everyone not in the family.

In 1971, the wild, autonomously-administered Pashtun Tribal Districts of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province were a dirt-poor, primitive area of illiterates, fanatics, smugglers, mercenaries, criminals and outlaws, run on feudal lines by hereditary sheikhs and obscurantist mullahs.

No central Government had dared venture into these tracts since the British left the Subcontinent, in 1947. The Pakistani Army has - temporarily - entered some parts of these zones (such as South Waziristan) for its first time EVER during THIS year, 2004.

In some of the scattered, dusty hamlets in the barren hills there, gold (in ingots and jewellery), fine Swiss watches, grade-A American-, European- and Chinese-brand cigarettes in bulk, cars (all Mercs), customized forged documents, etc, counterfeit money, looted antiquities, electrical appliances, weapons and ammunition, drugs (opium and hashish, but no cocaine and no alcohol - “sharab” - at least, none anywhere on show) and sex (youths and boys, but no women) were for purchase, out of the scabrous shanties, foul “holes-in-the-walls” and rough stalls and shelters which make up the tribesmens’ scorching hot, fly-blown, scratch marketplaces.

Aside from a large and varied selection of pistols (the bulk of them, cheap “Sat’-nite specials”), generally, about half of the arms on offer there then were either British- or Indian-made, of WWI or WWII vintage: mainly SLE.303s, with a couple of Vickers, several Brens and Webley-Smith revolvers, plus one Lewis gun and a Ross sniper-rifle spotted once, together with batches of Sten guns and a few mortars and Mills grenades - not all of the items looked to be in good order.

The other half were locally produced (employing hand-lathes), inferior-quality replicas of most of the types above, made of ordinary steel, re-cast out of stolen track-lengths from the disused railroad (through the mountains up to the Afghan border) which the Raj had built a century ago.

On top, there was a handful of more modern, and lots more expensive, “premiums” on sale - no Uzis, but some NATO-marque FN-30s (ex-Pak Army) and three or four American M-16s, but chiefly Chinese SKSs and Russian AK-47s, available on request by the crateful, even the truck-load, new, in mint-condition, in cosmolene, for cash on the nail (preferably US Dollars).

Through the enormously troubled 33 years since, concrete changes for the better in the Pashtun NWFP of Pakistan (or in the rest of the country), at the barest minimum, have been slight - on a number of vital levels, things are likely to’ve become much worse, across the nation.

The endemic Islamic fundamentalism there has been continually re-warmed over the decades, spewing up into fully blown Jihadism today (as it’s done periodically for over a millennium), meaning any type of constructive development there’s been spurned - effectively excluded, with time, energy and resources flowing into the waste and inanity of “Holy War” instead.

This volatile situation in the NWFP, with the parallel, stubbornly ingrained, arch-reactionary, Islamist afflictions thriving now in “Azad Kashmir”, (western) Punjab, (eastern) Baluchistan and Sind, is what Pakistani President, General Musharaf, is up against - IF he can be trusted, if he’s truly serious about his “Kemalization” plans, if it’s all not another Islamist subterfuge….

Posted by: HGII at July 13, 2004 3:50 AM