Pakistan’s security crisis

Is the government losing its grip?
In the past seven months, the government of Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the late Benazir Bhutto, has practically lost control of much of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) – a fifth of the country – to Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, a loose grouping of Islamists and militant Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. The speed of collapse has amazed everyone. Across much of the NWFP women are now forced to wear the burqa, music is silenced, barbers forbidden to shave beards. In Peshawar, the provincial capital, a significant portion of the city's elite, along with its musicians and dancers, have decamped to the more tolerant environs of Lahore and Karachi. And in the Swat Valley, where Taliban militants have been staging public executions and burning down girls' schools, the government, in exchange for a ceasefire, has bowed to the militants' demand for the imposition of Sharia law in the area.

But did Pakistan ever control its northwest frontier?
The tribal areas to the west of the NWFP - Bajur, North and South Waziristan and other territories, collectively known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) - have always been a law unto themselves, which is why they've proved ideal shelter for Osama bin Laden and his followers. "No patchwork scheme," wrote viceroy Lord Curzon at the end of the 19th century, "will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country end to end will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine."

And did anyone ever start that machine?
Many believed the Pakistani army was trying to do just that when, in 2002, on the hunt for al-Qaeda fighters, it massively increased its presence in the area (in return for a pledge of more central funding). In no time, Waziris came to see this as an attempt at subjugation: in 2003, a Waziri tried to assassinate the then PM, Pervez Musharraf; in 2004, war broke out between the army on the one hand, and local tribesmen, foreign militants and the local Taliban on the other. Twice as many Pakistani soldiers have been killed in the conflict, which still rages, as US soldiers have been killed in neighbouring Afghanistan.

And are the rebels united?
Far from it. True, Taliban recruits are almost exclusively Pashtun – the ethnic group to which most tribes in western Pakistan and south Afghanistan belong. But a key aim of their Islamist programme is to destroy the power of the local tribal elders. So this September, the elders mustered a private army (or lashkar) of 30,000 men to fight the Taliban. Last week, with support from tribal leaders, the army wrested control of Bajur from the Taliban, a move designed to stem the flow of militants from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Yet the Taliban still control 70 per cent of the border area, and indiscriminate strikes by the army and US drones on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets have caused extensive civilian casualties and added a steady stream of recruits to the insurgency.

Did this destabilise the NWFP?
Yes. Tens of thousands of civilians from FATA have fled to camps around Peshawar, which lies on the main supply route for US and Nato forces between Pakistan and Afghanistan. There have been attacks on US convoys (one led to the burning of two hundred trucks) and numerous kidnaps and suicide attacks.

Do locals support the Taliban?
Last February voters decisively rejected the Islamic parties in the general election and even returned a secular party, the Awami National Party, to run the NWFP, breaking the power of the Islamic parties that had ruled there for five years. But the jihadis don't care about public opinion. Last October a suicide attacker almost killed the NWFP governor, Asfandyar Wali Khan, and hopes that he would lead an anti-Islamist backlash have been dashed by the apparently unstoppable advance of the Pakistani Taliban out of FATA.

And what about the rest of Pakistan?
Much of the country is unsafe. In 2006, there were just six suicide bombings across the country; in 2007, there were 56 (killing 640 people). The terrorists have struck the Rawalpindi headquarters of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service; and in December 2007 assassinated Benazir Bhutto; in September last year a truck-bomb drove into the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing more than 50; entire sectors of Karachi are out of government control – the militants hide amid the vast population of impoverished Pashtuns who have migrated to Karachi looking for work.

Why can't the Pakistani security forces stop them?
Partly because the army and the ISI have for years sponsored Islamist groups as a means of dominating Afghanistan and bogging down the Indian army in Kashmir. In the 1970s General Zia ul-Haq, under US patronage, recruited volunteers for a jihad to oust Soviet forces from Afghanistan. In Kashmir, groups such as Lashkar e-Taiba, responsible for the recent Mumbai massacre, were trained and funded as a proxy force to attack India. In the 1990s, when the Mujahideen victory in Afghanistan gave way to civil war, America and Pakistan backed the Taliban to restore order and open up oil pipelines, and the Taliban ruled most of the country from 1996 to 2001. Pakistan's top brass always thought they could control it. “We have the jihadis by their tooti [privates],” claimed chief of staff Muhammad Aziz Khan in a taped conversation with General Pervez Musharraf. He was wrong.

Do the jihadis still get backing?
Nominally the government backs the war on terror, but that war is deeply unpopular (even educated Pakistanis believe the 9/11 attacks were a CIA/Israeli plot), and, until now at any rate, the government/security forces seem to have hedged their bets by courting both the US and the jihadis. The Afghan Taliban leadership live in Pakistan; Lashkar e-Taiba madrasahs remain open; and the US has filmed Pakistani army trucks taking Taliban fighters to the Afghan border. ·