The Pakistan military claimed at the beginning of June that it had achieved success in its all-out assault on Taliban insurgents after driving more than two million people from the Swat Valley and other areas of the north west of the country. The assault followed the breakdown of an agreement reached in February between the government and Sufi Mohammad, leader of one of the Islamist groups, for Swat’s legal code to be based on Nizam-e-Adl—an attempt to mix constitutional rules with the local interpretation of sharia law. The agreement was meant to bring an end to fighting between the Pakistan army and the Swat Taliban, led by Sufi Muhammad’s son in law, Maulana Fazullah.
The military onslaught happened after pressure from the US, which worried about the implications an agreement between the Pakistan government and the Taliban would have for its operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere in Pakistan. But the assault found favour with most liberal and “civil society” opinion, and much of the left, even if this was sometimes mixed with horror at the effects on civilians. Articles in the Pakistani press habitually refer to the “barbarity” of “terrorist” rule in Swat. This feeling was given a sharp edge by a mobile phone video supposedly showing a 17 year old woman receiving 30 whippings for “illicit” relations with a man—although other reports claim that the video was fraudulent and that the woman has denied she was whipped. 1 Whatever the truth of the matter, the video played a role in leading much of the left internationally to take a similar approach to the Pakistani liberals, treating the Pakistan Taliban as if it were as much a foreign force in Swat as the Pakistan army or the US army in Afghanistan. Yet there is strong evidence of a class element to the conflict. The New York Times could report in April, “The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants…the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power. To do so, the militants organised peasants into armed gangs that became their shock troops.”
The Karachi newspaper The News has carried a debate which, according to one far left contributor, “has pitted those who claim that the situation in Swat is a reflection of longstanding class inequities against those who refute this notion of ‘class war’; while the former suggest that the ‘Taliban’ has generated support amongst the subordinate classes, the latter argue that the ‘Taliban’ has imposed itself in the area on the basis of brute force”. 2 One of the articles prompting the debate, reprinted in edited form here, came from Sartaj Khan of the International Socialists of Pakistan. Full article.