Tensions over renamed Pakistan province overshadow government reforms

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By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 17, 2010; A06

HARIPUR, PAKISTAN -- This nation's squabbling lawmakers celebrated a rare moment of unity this week, easily approving constitutional changes to empower Parliament and dump dictator-era rules that stacked control with the president.

But that cohesion was quickly overshadowed by seething protests that laid bare the deep cleavages in a multiethnic country that was cobbled together 60 years ago and has struggled for a common identity ever since.

As politicians hailed the reform package, bloody riots erupted over a provision changing the colonial-era name for the volatile North-West Frontier Province, where this town sits, to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a nod to the nearby mountain pass and to the area's Pashtun majority.

The change delighted Pashtuns, who had pushed for it for decades. But it outraged the Hindko-speaking minority that dominates in this small district, Hazara. What was intended as an official acknowledgment of Pashtun identity is prompting calls for a breakaway Hazara province -- and concern that a wave of dormant demands for minority-run regions is on the way.

"This has actually opened a Pandora's box, because of Pakistan's very tenuous polity," said Arif Nizami, former editor of the Nation newspaper in Lahore. "Now, on one side, there are identity issues and ethnic issues and provincial autonomy issues. The other side is religious issues and terrorism. It's a very explosive situation."

Pakistan's population has soared in recent decades, so new provinces could be helpful, Nizami said. But the angry scenes and ethnic tensions evident this week did not portend that such changes would occur smoothly.

Security forces in the city of Abbottabad opened fire on demonstrators, killing at least seven. In Haripur, south of the city where the demonstrations were largest, protesters burned tires, felled trees to block roads and rolled around in packed pickups shouting, "Down with Pakhtunkhwa! We will get our province!"

Hindko-speaking residents -- many of whom identified themselves as ethnic Pashtuns -- said the province's new name would sideline them, further empowering the Pashto-speakers who make up about 70 percent of the province. "If there are any jobs, they are being given to Pashtun people," said Mohammed Azar Khan, 38, a teacher who was chatting with friends in a Haripur sugar shop. "Why should we be ignored? What will be our fate?"

That sounds ironic to Pashtuns, who are Pakistan's second-largest ethnic group but say the Punjabi majority has long oppressed them. The new name, they argued, would fit a pattern: There are minorities throughout Pakistan, but Punjabis dominate in Punjab province, Sindhis in Sindh province and Baluchis in Baluchistan.

For decades, Pashtun nationalists campaigned for an autonomous state, called Pashtunistan, for the Pashtun region straddling the Afghan border. Analysts say the Punjabi-dominated military establishment, which ruled Pakistan for half its existence, came to view the renaming push as one dangerous steppingstone toward secession.

Calls for Pashtunistan weakened over time as a Pashtun presence in the government and military grew and Pashtun regions in Afghanistan became engulfed by a raging Taliban insurgency. But renaming North-West Frontier Province remained a key platform of the Awami National Party, whose stronghold is in the northwest. "It's a symbolic victory for them," said Imtiaz Gul, a Pashtun who chairs the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. "The dream for Pashtunistan is sort of done. It's not on anymore."

But resentment was palpable this week in the Hazara district, even among those who watched rioters from fields where donkeys grazed or from rusty minibuses stopped by the protesters' roadblocks. The new provincial name should be Hazara-Pakhtunkhwa, some said. Others said the name should not be touched -- colonial or not, people were used to North-West Frontier Province.

Lawmakers had "failed" to gauge public sentiment, said Raja Kamran Khan, a Hazara native and Sindh lawmaker who said he had decided the demonstrators were right. Like others, he pointed out that those in Hazara had powerful cards to play: Their district includes a big dam as well as a large stretch of the Karakoram Highway leading to China.

"This is the right time," he said as tires burned in the distance. "These people have always believed in a strong country and one federal government. But the federal government has neglected them."

Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.

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In Pakistan's Punjab region, mixed opinions over army effort - washingtonpost.com

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By Pamela Constable
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 4:44 PM

Lahore, pakistan -- Police Superintendent Mobashir Ullah was en route to a graduation ceremony Thursday when word reached him that armed men had stormed a training academy under his command. Just seven months before, terrorists had seized the same compound near this provincial capital, taking 800 recruits hostage before being overpowered.

"This time they came straight from the main road, firing and trying to climb the walls. Our police acted fast and kept shooting until they finally killed themselves," Ullah said. "The survival of our country is at stake now, and we have to fight it out. When a man has been trained and mentally prepared to blow himself up, nothing on Earth will stop him."

The brazen daylight assault, quickly followed by two other terrorist attacks on security facilities that killed 39 people in Lahore that day, sent a fresh wave of panic through the city known for its willow-lined canals, kite festivals and sandstone monuments to 19th-century British rule. Elementary schools have been shut down; parks and shopping centers are empty.

Yet public and official reaction here has been very different from the gung-ho support Pakistanis are giving to their national army as it embarks on a crucial campaign to oust Taliban forces from South Waziristan, the embattled tribal region near the Afghan border that has served as the extremist group's sanctuary for years.

Here in Punjab province, political reality is more complex. The region is home to the main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, and an influential religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami. It is also the base for several militant Islamist groups, such as Lashkar-i-Taiba, that are now officially banned but were once sponsored by the state to fight India and other foes.

As a result, officials here tend to shy away from harsh condemnations. Instead, their explanations for the growing wave of terrorism are a mix of anti-government rhetoric and insinuations that outside forces, especially India and the United States, are conspiring to weaken Muslim-ruled Pakistan, in part by forcing it into armed conflict with local militants.

"Pakistan continues to fall into the U.S.-laid trap of using the military option alone," warned a lead editorial this week in the Nation, a newspaper based in Lahore. By jumping onto the U.S. bandwagon in a "misdirected war on terror," it said, the government only generated more violence. American pressure to use military force against militants in Punjab, the editors added, points to "a larger hidden anti-Pakistan agenda" and is a "recipe for civil war."

Nationally, public opinion has turned decisively against the tribe-Pakistani Taliban forces in the northwest. After a series of negotiations failed to rein in the Taliban, the army won praise for driving the group from the Swat Valley in the summer. Military officials hope to repeat that success in the larger, more intimidating Waziristan region, where they have been fighting for the past week.

After the spurt of terrorism across Pakistan this month, experts called it a clear indication of the growing alliance between northwestern Taliban forces and various banned jihadi groups in the heartland. Yet Punjab officials rejected that, insisting that police could handle the situation and saying that the attackers were serving unnamed "foreign masters."

Not surprisingly, public opinion here is just as confused and contradictory. Residents of Lahore, unnerved by the unaccustomed violence, frustrated by ubiquitous police roadblocks and fearful for their children's safety, are looking to old wars, new allies and long-dead causes for explanations.

Some people blame the Reagan years, when the United States built up local Islamist groups to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and later abandoned the region. Others blame the Obama administration and Congress, conflating concerns about the ongoing war in next-door Afghanistan with current U.S. plans to shower $7.5 billion in economic -- not military -- aid on Pakistan.

"These are all militants that America left us," Mohammed Ahmad, 43, a travel agent, said bitterly. "Islam is a peaceful and respectable religion. These Taliban have no religion, no education. They just brainwash young boys to fight. Maybe they fought jihad against the Russians, but what they are doing now is not jihad at all. It isn't even Islamic."

Opinions are also mixed among religious groups in the Lahore area, largely depending on their sect or leadership. Some express sympathy for the Taliban-style campaign to impose strict Islamic law but stop short of publicly condoning the group's violent methods. Others have been victimized by the extremists and regard them with suspicion.

"The terrorists are enjoying making people nervous," said Raghib Naeemi, the director of a moderate Islamic seminary whose father, its founder, was assassinated in June. "The war we are fighting now is between terror and Islam," he said. "These groups were banned, and now they are joining together against the state. We can try and negotiate with them, but in the end they must be punished or killed."

The peculiar political situation in Punjab has further muddied the waters. It is the stronghold of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N and a bitter rival of President Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan People's Party. The tougher Zardari sounds on Islamist extremism these days, the more Sharif's party deems him an American puppet, hoping eventually to force him from power.

Analysts said that despite Zardari's growing public focus on the terrorist threat, and the army's latest thrust into Taliban territory, many Pakistanis remain hesitant to criticize anything Islamic, ready to blame outsiders for their problems and bewildered by the official shift from patronizing to persecuting domestic Islamist militias.

"At the top levels, I think everyone gets it now, but below that there is a whole range of attitudes towards the militants within Pakistani society," said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a political analyst in Lahore. "Nobody likes the Taliban, but they don't much like the Americans or their government either, and they aren't convinced that using force is the right thing to do. What prevails is mass confusion."

In Pakistan, a Deadly Resurgence - washingtonpost.com

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Spate of Attacks Shows Taliban Waging 'a Real Kind of War'

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 12 -- At summer's end, there were hints of optimism in the battle against Pakistan's Islamist insurgents. The military said it had routed the Taliban from the verdant Swat Valley. A CIA missile had killed the Pakistani Taliban's chief -- so shaking the group, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials said, that his likely successor was killed in a duel for the top spot. Bombings slowed.

But that successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, is alive, a military spokesman said Monday. And as a spate of mass-casualty attacks during the past week has proven, so is the Taliban.

"They have been able to regroup, and they now feel confident to take on the Pakistani state in the cities," said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a professor and security analyst in Lahore. "They want to demonstrate that they have the initiative in their hands, rather than Pakistani authorities. So it's a real kind of war."

As if to punctuate that point, the edge of the Swat Valley became the setting Monday for the fourth major attack in eight days. In a Shangla district market, an adolescent strapped with explosives detonated himself near an army convoy, killing 41 people and wounding dozens, military officials said.

The blast came two days after a stunning attack by militants on the armed forces' headquarters in Rawalpindi, which killed 23. A day before that, about 50 people died in a car bombing in Peshawar. Last Monday, a suicide bomber killed five people at an office of the United Nations.

The surge in attacks comes at a delicate time for Pakistan's civilian government, which is struggling to contain a public relations fiasco over conditions placed by Congress on a massive U.S. aid package. The legislation granting the aid exhorts Pakistan to do more to control its armed forces and to fight Islamist extremists -- stipulations that critics, including the military, view as micromanagement by the United States.

In a statement given to the Associated Press on Monday, a Taliban spokesman called the attack on the military headquarters a "first small effort, and a present to the Pakistani and American governments." He said it was vengeance for the killing of the group's leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in August.

As the Taliban has regrouped in recent months, the military became the obvious target, analysts said. The Swat Valley operation buoyed the military's image, and it has been vocal about a planned ground offensive in South Waziristan, a Taliban and al-Qaeda haven along the Afghan border. Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said that "more than 80 percent" of recent attacks in Pakistan have been planned there.

The assault on the military headquarters also was planned there, he said. But he said the fighters who carried it out were from a Taliban-allied sect based in Pakistan's Punjabi heartland.

Punjabi militant groups have long existed, but in the past they were nurtured by intelligence agencies to focus their attacks on Pakistan's archrival, India. Their alliance with the Pashtun-dominated Taliban indicates they are now "up for hire," and represent yet another foe, military analyst Shuja Nawaz said.

"Their involvement means that their break with the military and the [intelligence services] is now complete," said Nawaz, head of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. "The question is: Will the military have the capacity to take operations against them?"

Previous military offensives in South Waziristan have failed, and the attack on the army headquarters -- which security forces had warned about, Pakistani newspapers reported -- raised doubts about the army's readiness.

But Abbas argued that the assault highlighted the capability of security forces, who prevented militants from venturing far into the compound and rescued 39 of 42 hostages. Military officials were "still judging the situation" in South Waziristan and waiting for the "right time," he said.

The United States has encouraged the offensive into the region, which it views as a hornet's nest of insurgents who focus their violent campaign both within Pakistan and beyond. U.S. officials may think Pakistan is not sufficiently concerned about extremism, one opposition politician said Monday, but the attacks of the past week should leave little doubt that the state knows it is vulnerable.

"If the power of bullets becomes the order in politics, we are all out of business," said Ahsan Iqbal, a spokesman for the Pakistan Muslim League-N. "We only have to make sure we fight this war in the right way, and we don't make it look like an American war. It has to have local ownership."

Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.

Spasm of Religious Violence Leaves a Pakistani Minority in Mourning, Frustration

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 3, 2009

GOJRA, Pakistan, Aug. 2 -- They do not want to bury the Christians. They want the nation to see them.

By nightfall Sunday, hundreds of residents of the Christian enclave here stood in defiant vigil around seven particleboard coffins neatly aligned on the train tracks that run through town. They had demands: Until the government investigates the killings and finds those responsible, they will not remove the bodies.

Police waited warily in the street. A man on a loudspeaker bellowed the villagers' sentiments, which included anger at provincial authorities for not stopping the killings.

"Death to the Punjab government!"

A spasm of religious violence came to this rural town in the shape of an angry Muslim mob Saturday morning. The Muslims marched to avenge what they believed was the desecration of a Koran one week earlier. When it was over, dozens of houses were torched and Faith Bible Pentecostal Church lay in ruins. Two villagers were shot dead, residents said. Five others, including two children, burned alive.

Killing has become commonplace in Pakistan. But this attack startled the country both for its ferocity and for its stark message to religious minorities. Many saw the violence as further evidence of the growing power of the Taliban and allied Islamist militant groups in Punjab province, home to about half of Pakistan's population.

"They have made up their minds to crush Christianity. They always call us dogs of America, agents of America," said Romar Sardar, an English teacher from the area. "There has been no protection by the police. Nothing."

The conflict apparently began with a wedding. On the evening of July 25, a wedding procession for a Christian couple passed through the nearby village of Korian, according to a police report. Revelers danced and threw money in the air, as is local custom. In the morning, a resident told police he had picked up scraps of paper on the ground and found Arabic writing. "We examined them, and it was the pages from the holy Koran," the man said in the report.

Four days later, the accused, a member of the wedding party named Talib Masih, faced a meeting of local elders, who demanded that he be punished. Instead of repenting, the report said, he denied the desecration, and as a result, "the whole Muslim population was enraged." The house burning began that night and then quieted down until Saturday morning.

That day, Riaz Masih, 68, a retired teacher, grew increasingly worried as a crowd gathered, chanting anti-Christian slogans and cursing Americans. He locked his house and rushed with his wife and children to the home of a Muslim friend nearby. The crowd, some wearing black veils and carrying guns, turned down Masih's narrow brick alley near the train tracks and into the Christian Colony, according to several witnesses. Residents and marchers threw rocks at each other, and gunfire broke out. Using what residents described as gasoline and other flammable chemicals, the mob torched Masih's house.

"We have nothing left," he said, standing in the charred remains of his living room, his daughter's empty jewelry box at his feet. "We are trying to face this in the name of Jesus Christ. The Bible says you cannot take revenge."

On Sunday, the scenes of wreckage and dismay played out in house after house. Residents tossed burned blankets and clothing, broken televisions, and charred beds into heaps on the street. Fruit seller Iqbal Masih, 49, stepped over his mangled carts on his patio and tried to assess what was left of his daughter's dowry. The armoire, a refrigerator, the bedding were burned; the $675 for furniture had disappeared.

"I am out of my mind. I can't look," he said. "They have subjected us to severe cruelties. May God show them the right path."

At least four of the dead came from a single house. As the mob approached, a bullet struck Hamid Masih, a builder, in the head as he stood in his doorway, said his son, Min Has. Has heaved his father onto a motorcycle and drove him to a hospital, while the rest of the family members crowded in a back bedroom. The house began burning, and smoked billowed into the rooms. At least three other relatives, including 5- and 8-year-old siblings, died in the flames, according to residents. "There was fire everywhere, and it was impossible for them to get out," Has said.

"I know one thing. They want to destroy Christians," said Atiq Masih, 22, a janitor who was shot in the right knee. "They were attacking everything."

Christians, who make up about 2 percent of the Punjab population, have been targeted in other recent cases. In June, a mob attacked Christian homes in the Kasur district of Punjab for allegedly dishonoring the prophet Mohammed. In Pakistan, which has strict laws against blasphemy, people can be imprisoned for life or put to death for insulting Islam.

Residents in Gojra said that this was the first incident of its kind in the town and that Christians and Muslims have long lived alongside one another without serious problems. They blamed Muslim clerics for inciting anger over the Koran incident in mosque sermons and accused the Taliban and the militant group Sipah-e-Sahaba of involvement in the attack.

"The provincial government is not accepting that a large part of Punjab is suffering from religious intolerance due to the Taliban and religious outfits," said Peter Jacob, executive secretary of the National Commission for Justice and Peace, which issues an annual report on religious minorities in Pakistan. "They have been very negligent. This conflict was brewing for three days, and they were not receptive. They were not taking it seriously."

Pakistan's president and prime minister have called for investigations into the violence. By Sunday, police and paramilitary troops had taken up positions in the town. Provincial authorities said they have already made arrests and registered cases against 800 people. Federal Minister for Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti denied that any Koran had been desecrated.

Police in Gojra said the violence Saturday was beyond their control.

"It happened all of a sudden. The police that were here were too few in number to stop it," said policeman Kashif Sadiq. "It's not fair to assume they let this happen intentionally."

Special correspondents Shaiq Hussain and Aoun Sahi contributed to this report.

Landowners Still in Exile From Unstable Pakistan Area

By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Even as hundreds of thousands of people stream back to the Swat Valley after months of fighting, one important group is conspicuously absent: the wealthy landowners who fled the Taliban in fear and are the economic pillar of the rural society.

The reluctance of the landowners to return is a significant blow to the Pakistani military’s campaign to restore Swat as a stable, prosperous part of Pakistan, and it presents a continuing opportunity for the Taliban to reshape the valley to their advantage.

About four dozen landlords were singled out over the past two years by the militants in a strategy intended to foment a class struggle. In some areas, the Taliban rewarded the landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords. Some resentful peasants even signed up as the Taliban’s shock troops.

How many of those peasants stayed with the militants during the army offensive of the last several months, and how many moved to the refugee camps, was difficult to assess, Pakistani analysts said.

But reports emerging from Swat show that the Taliban still have the strength to terrorize important areas. The army continues to fight the Taliban in their strongholds, particularly in the Matta and Kabal regions of Swat, not far from the main city, Mingora, where many refugees have reclaimed their homes.

In those regions, the Taliban have razed houses, killed a civilian working for the police in Matta and kidnapped another, worrying counterinsurgency experts, who fear that the refugees may have been encouraged by the Pakistani authorities to go back too soon.

The rebuilding of Swat, a fertile area of orchards and forests, is a critical test for the government and the military as they face Taliban insurgencies across the tribal belt, particularly in Waziristan on the Afghanistan border.

In a sign of the lack of confidence that Mingora was secure, the Pakistani military declined a request by the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, to visit the town last week.

There was nervousness, an American counterinsurgency expert said, that the plans by the Pakistani authorities to build new community police forces in Swat would not materialize quickly enough to protect the returning civilians, who are also starved of basic services like banks and sufficient medical care.

“There is no apparatus in place to replace the army,” said an American counterinsurgency official. “The army will be the backstop.”

About two million people have fled Swat and surrounding areas since the military opened its campaign to push back the Taliban at the end of April. The United Nations said Monday that 478,000 people had returned to Swat so far, but it cautioned that it was unable to verify the figure, which was provided by the government.

Assessment trips by United Nations workers to Swat scheduled for Monday and Tuesday were canceled for security reasons, and the United Nations office in Peshawar that serves as the base for Swat operations was closed Monday because of a high threat of kidnapping, a spokesman said.

The landlords, many of whom raised sizable militias to fight the Taliban themselves last year, say the army is again failing to provide enough protection if they return.

Another deterrent to returning, they say, is that the top Taliban leadership, responsible for taking aim at the landlords and spreading the spoils among the landless, remains unscathed.

If it continues, the landlords’ absence will have lasting ramifications not only for Swat, but also for Pakistan’s most populated province, Punjab, where the landholdings are vast, and the militants are gaining power, said Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to Mr. Holbrooke, the American envoy.

“If the large landowners are kept out by the Taliban, the result will in effect be property redistribution,” Mr. Nasr said. “That will create a vested community of support for the Taliban that will see benefit in the absence of landlords.”

At two major meetings with the landlords, the Pakistani military and civilian authorities requested that they return in the vanguard of the refugees. None have agreed to do so, according to several of the landowners and a senior army officer.

“We have sacrificed so much; what has the government and the military done for us?” asked Sher Shah Khan, a landholder in the Kuz Bandai area of Swat. He is now living with 50 family members in a rented house about 60 miles from Swat. Four family members and eight servants were killed trying to fight off the Taliban, he said.

At one of the meetings, Mr. Khan said he had asked the army commanders to provide weapons so the landlords could protect themselves, as the landowners had in the past.

The military refused the request, he said, saying it would fight the Taliban. Yet Pakistani soldiers had failed to protect his lands, he said. Twenty of his houses were blown up by the Taliban after the army ordered him and his family to leave their lands on two hours’ notice last September, he said.

A letter he sent last month to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistani military, asking for compensation has gone unanswered, he said. In the meantime, one of his tenants called asking if he could plant crops on Mr. Khan’s property. He refused but had little idea what was happening back home, Mr. Khan said.

Other landlords are equally frustrated. The mayor of Swat, Jamal Nasir, fled after his father, Shujaat Ali Khan, regarded as the biggest landlord in Swat, narrowly avoided being killed by the Taliban. Mr. Nasir, a major landowner himself, now stays in his house in Islamabad.

The top guns of the Taliban are still in Swat, or perhaps in neighboring Dir, Mr. Nasir said. “These people should be arrested,” he said. “If they are not arrested, they are going to come back.”

Another landlord, Sher Mohammad, said he was still bitter that the army refused to help as he, his brother and his nephew fought off the Taliban last year for 13 hours, even though soldiers were stationed less than a mile away. Mr. Mohammad was hit in the groin by a bullet and lost a finger in the fight.

At one of the meetings with the military in Peshawar, Mr. Mohammad, a prominent politician with the Pakistan Peoples Party, said he told the officers that he was not impressed with their performance.

“They said, ‘We will protect you,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘We don’t trust you.’ ”