Ongoing kidnap saga of boys from Bajaur

The ordeal of a group of boys kidnapped from the tribal agency of Bajaur by the Pakistani Taliban and taken to the Afghan province of Kunar across the border continues. It was first believed that the youths had drifted across the border by mistake and had been picked up by the Taliban, who said they acted because the people of Mamond, the area close to the border, had agreed to form pro-government lashkars against the Taliban. It has now come to light that the Taliban took the boys from inside Bajaur Agency and want all their fellow terrorists freed from Pakistani jails in return for their release.

Several points must be noted here. First, although the Taliban are Pakistani, they no longer care that innocent Pakistanis are suffering. They have said that if their detained colleagues are not released as ransom, they (the Taliban) will deal with the captured Mamond youths under Islamic law. This dastardly statement is the fig leaf covering the outlawry of the Taliban of Bajaur possibly mixed with the runaways from Malakand where Sufi Mohammad and his son-in-law, warlord Fazlullah, ruled till they were driven out by the military. The army also went into Bajaur in 2008 but its operation there was perhaps not as conclusive as the one in Malakand.

A word about Bajaur and its tehsil of Mamond. Bajaur is the smallest of the seven administrative units of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and a relatively inaccessible agency. It borders Afghanistan’s Kunar province and Pakistan’s Dir district, a gateway to the Swat Valley in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, making it strategically important to Pakistan and the region. The current population of Bajaur is more than one million. After the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, fleeing militants crossed the border into Bajaur. The Bajauris treated the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda fighters as guests. The agency still functions as a logistics base for the Taliban on both sides of the Durand Line. The agency’s significance in terrorists’ operational planning is illustrated by the fact that plots targeting London and Barcelona were hatched here.

The tehsil of Mamond has been more amenable to Taliban influence than the other tribal identities in Bajaur, which explains how treacherous the terrorists can be. The Bajaur Taliban were led by the most bloodthirsty warlord named Maulvi Faqir who belonged to Mamond and was able to build up a force of 5,000 fighters in 2002 from there. The Mamond boys who went picnicking close to the Durand Line may have presumed that since they were from Mamond they would be spared. This time, local warlord Mullah Dadullah, ruling the area in the name of al Qaeda and Mullah Omar, was more focused on obeying orders than on distinguishing between those who are loyal to them and those who are not.

The tragedy is that the military has not been able to secure Bajaur the same way that it was able to in the case of Malakand and Swat. By not consolidating the area, the army has allowed elements loyal to the terrorists to become more powerful. On the other hand, those not so loyal have been forced to leave the agency. Bajaur is the smallest agency in terms of land but had become relatively prosperous in economic terms because many of its residents had left for work in the Gulf. Its population was larger than most other agencies and was amenable to Pakistani culture before Sufi Mohammad began his Islamic rejectionism and ultimately took his personal lashkar from Bajaur to Afghanistan to fight the Americans.

Pakistan needs to fight its war against terrorism more resolutely and not be distracted by India at the theoretical level, as the only enemy facing Pakistan in Afghanistan. Pakistan harbours Afghan terrorists on its territory and can hardly complain if Pakistani terrorists like Fazlullah are being harboured on the other side of the Durand Line. It is clear that the Taliban are strapped for cash and are indulging in desperate acts to build up their reserves. However, the kind of pressure that Pakistan should be putting on the terrorists is not being put, in large part because of the self-defeating interpretation placed on the conflict by influential decision-making circles in the country.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 9^th,  2011.