The Taliban in paradise

Or the Swat Valley, a place in Pakistan that some have (or used to) describe as more beautiful than Switzerland.  No any more, according to this AP report:

Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region far from the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive....

"You can't imagine how bad it is," said Muzaffar ul-Mulk, a federal lawmaker whose home in Swat was attacked by bomb-toting assailants in mid-December, weeks after he left. "It's worse day by day."

The Taliban activity in northwest Pakistan also comes as the country shifts forces east to the Indian border because of tensions over last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, potentially giving insurgents more space to maneuver along the Afghan frontier....

Officials estimate that up to a third of Swat's 1.5 million people have left the area. Salah-ud-Din, who oversees relief efforts in Swat for the International Committee of the Red Cross, estimated that 80 percent of the valley is now under Taliban control.

Swat's militants are led by Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric who rose to prominence through radio broadcasts demanding the imposition of a harsh brand of Islamic law. His appeal tapped into widespread frustration with the area's inefficient judicial system.

Most of the insurgents are easy to spot with long hair, beards, rifles, camouflage vests and running shoes. They number at most 2,000, according to people who were interviewed.

In some places, just a handful of insurgents can control a village. They rule by fear: beheading government sympathizers, blowing up bridges and demanding women wear all-encompassing burqas.

They have also set up a parallel administration with courts, taxes, patrols and checkpoints, according to lawmakers and officials. And they are suspected of burning scores of girls' schools.

In mid-December, Taliban fighters killed a young member of a Sufi-influenced Muslim group who had tried to raise a militia against them. The militants later dug up Pir Samiullah's corpse and hung it for two days in a village square - partly to prove to his followers that he was not a superhuman saint, a security official said on condition of anonymity.

A lawmaker and the senior Swat government official said business and landowners had been told to give two-thirds of their income to the militants. Some local media reported last week that the militants have pronounced a ban on female education effective in mid-January....

A Swat militant boasted that "we are doing our activities wherever we want, and the army is confined to their living places."

"They cannot move independently like us," said the man, who was reached over the phone and gave his name as Muzaffarul Haq. He claimed the Swat militants had no al-Qaida or foreign connections, but that they supported all groups that shared the goal of imposing Islamic law.

"With the grace of Allah, there is no dearth of funds, weapons or rations," he said. "Our women are providing cooked food for those who are struggling in Allah's path. Our children are getting prepared for jihad."

And yet most Pakistanis will tell you it is Americans and Indians who are the really bad guys. Go figure that one out.

Taliban's education policy

The BBC reports

A local Taleban commander ordered parents to stop sending their daughters to school by 15 January.

In comments broadcast on an illegal radio station, he threatened to blow up schools which enrolled female students.

This year alone, Taleban militants have destroyed more than 130 schools in the Swat valley. They want to bring in Islamic sharia law in the region.

Militant attacks on schools in the region have deprived more than 17,000 students of education.

...

Although schools for girls have come under attack on numerous occasions in the past, this is the first time Taleban militants have issued a complete ban on girls attending them, the BBC's Ethirajan Anbarasan says.

A Taleban spokesman said the prohibition would remain in place unless and until Islamic sharia law was fully implemented in the region.

...

Those who can afford it have already moved out of the region, but the poor have no other option than keeping their daughters at home, our correspondent says.

No wonder all the Pakistanis in the border region are "pro-Taliban."

A story to cheer everyone up

If you read only one story this holiday season, make it this one.  At least watch the video.

Recession comparisons to keep in mind

Photo courtesy of Sebastian Rich (UNICEF)

Take heart from the joy of this Afghan child.  According to UNICEF, 30 percent of primary school age children in Afghanistan work to support their families. 

Salang pass, Afghanistan

Jawad Jalali, UNAMA

A shoe-hurler connection to Saddam?

Salameh Nematt, former correspondent for Al-Hayat, writes in The Daily Beast:

Reports in the Arab media indicate that the Iraqi shoe thrower, Muntather al-Zaidi may have been planning his assault on President Bush for more than a year, helped by Iraqi Baathists seeking to overthrow the U.S,-backed government. One leading Arab website said the al-Zaidi’s handlers may have been funded by Raghad, the eldest daughter of former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Raghad, who currently lives in self-exile in Jordan, is wanted in Iraq for funding terrorism and for looting billions from state funds on the eve of the 2003 war that toppled her father.

Dia’ al-Kanani, the judge investigating the shoe-throwing incident, said Thursday he turned down a request to release al-Zaidi on bail for security reasons, including fear for the suspect’s own security. He said there was a real threat he may be attacked.

He continues reporting:

Contrary to reports in the American and Arab media, readers’ comments on Elaph.com showed that eight out of 10 Arabs who responded on that site condemned the shoe attack as a shameful and unprofessional act.

The Arab world’s leading political columnist, Hazem Saghia, writing in the London-based Al-Hayat daily newspaper, said Thursday it was “ironic that after living nearly a third of a century under Saddam Hussein’s boots, an Iraqi decides to throw his shoes at the person who removed Saddam from power.”

Saghia said that after all is said and done, “Bush came to Iraq, signed the security agreement he wanted, and left after casually taking note al-Zaidi’s show size. Thus, we’re even. He got what he wanted, and we’re left with shoes that missed their target. Perhaps we deserve to be ruled by someone like Saddam Hussein.”

The shoe-hurler as Every Arab

Jonah Goldberg comments:

First, the main reason "journalists" in Saddam's Iraq would never have thrown a shoe at a visiting dignitary is that they'd be tortured and executed for it. More importantly, can we just drop this fantasy-land nonsense that America was super-popular in the Mideast before George W. Bush came on the scene? I mean really, who is Reuters trying to kid?

Also, if someone throws a shoe at Barack Obama — at home or abroad — will that be used by the press to define Obama's popularity, never mind his legacy? I mean if some nutter in Holland hucks a clog at Obama, does that mean all of the Netherlands, never mind all of Europe, hates Obama? Somehow I doubt that's how Reuters et al would cover it. In a circumstance like that, we'll be told how this was an act by one lone-shoe-man.

There's a weird double standard buried deep in all of this, and I don't just mean the biases against Bush. When conservatives hold up unsavory Muslims or Arabs as representative of the region's problems, we're told how simplistic and two-dimensional we're being. But when the same sort of unsavory doofus behaves in ways that confirm liberal biases and coform to liberal passions, then suddenly this doofus speaks for millions.

And Michael Totten reminds of a point that should not be forgotten in all this (via  Katherine Lopez at The Corner):

Michael Totten just got back from Iraq. So I asked him about the shoe this morning: "The Bush shoe incident made me laugh slightly. Only because of the U.S. was an Iraqi journalist allowed to throw that shoe. On some level, he knows that. Tellingly, Prime Minister Maliki stepped in the way to protect the president, and many Iraqis in the room apologized for the offense."

Michael continued: "I have briefly met many Iraqi journalists in Baghdad. They seem like decent people, for the most part, and are not as shifty as many other civilians I encounter." He added: "In the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, where journalists are credentialed by the U.S. Army, is a poster showing the faces of all the journalists killed in Iraq last year. There are dozens of faces on that poster, and almost every single one of them is Iraqi. Iraqi journalists are very brave, much braver than I am, and I'd hate to see Americans get the wrong idea about these people from one lousy incident."

Update:  Iraq's permanent representative to the United Nations Feisal al-Istrabadi told a group of academics and journalists that Al-Bagdaddiya, the shoe-hurler's news station is a Baathist station.  Major newspapers are finally reporting that it is based out of Cairo. 

And finally, how did U.S. soldiers react to the news?  Here's one account via Campbell Robertson at the New York Times Baghdad Bureau blog:

“Hey you see George was hit with a shoe?” a soldier had asked Monday morning, laughing and lumping eggs into his plate in the kitchenette of the company’s security outpost.

“George who?”

And that was mostly it for Monday. By the middle of the day most had heard about it, on the Internet, from wives back home, but it was more or less dismissed with “I can’t believe that, that’s some funny stuff” (or so paraphrased, for this is a family blog).

Midway through Monday night’s patrol, Lt. Miller, one of the sergeants and the interpreter were standing in a kitchen trying to iron out a misunderstanding with a couple of nervous looking Iraqi men, when a burst of laughter came from the soldiers in the living room. The Shoe Throwing Incident was being shown on the Iraqi evening news, frequently, and in slow motion. The soldiers were guffawing and remarking on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s impressive attempt to block the second shoe. The Iraqis in the room stood in the back, unsmiling, as the throws were replayed, again and again. Then the news moved on to another story and the soldiers moved back out into the cold streets.

A few houses later, the last stop of the night, a little confrontation broke out when the women of the houses assumed the soldiers were robbers — their house had been broken into earlier this year — and began screaming. The owner of the house was angry but Lt. Miller calmed the man’s nerves, and they began the usual chat about the neighborhood.

I stayed out in the street, talking with the soldiers, who were discussing the wars or quiet lives that awaited them on the other side of this deployment. Soon Lt. Miller appeared and we moved on.

The next day, Lt. Miller told me that, out of nowhere, the man in the last house had announced that he wanted to apologize for the Shoe Incident, insisting that it not reflect poorly on all Iraqis.

I asked Lt. Miller what he said in return. He assured the man that it was OK, that they do not consider one Iraqi’s behavior indicative of the country, that this was what democracy can look like, etc.

And, he said, “I told him that a lot of the soldiers thought it was pretty funny."

Be careful what you ask for

KSM, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, 

at the time of his arrest. Courtesy of Abdul Arts.

Here he is depicted in a recent courtroom sketch by Janet Hamlin.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, otherwise known as KSM, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and four co-defendants want the U.S. military tribunal to accept their guilty pleas. They told the judge that since  they don't trust any of their representatives - because they are American, of course - they don't want to waste the courts time and should just be convicted.

Observers say that what they are doing here is trying to challenge the U.S. to turn them into martyrs by putting them to death.

Will this work?  Will people really will be impressed by such martyrdom? If you are somebody who would buy into this program, email me and tell me why.  Or alternatively, just turn yourself into your local law enforcement agency.

"Another invasion"

See this special issue by South Asia Defence & Strategic Review, out of Delhi.

"A calamity has fallen on my house. What shall I do?"

Thus spoke Shameem Khan, an Indian Muslim whose six relatives were shot dead by the Mumbai attackers.  He was quoted by Patrick French in an op-ed in today's New York Times about the Mumbai attacks.  

Mr. French, to give you some context here, is the author of "The World is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul."  The book, described by George Packer as a "portrait of the artist as a monster" is also, he writes, "a magnificent tribute to the painful and unlikely struggle" of Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent who "made himself into the greatest English novelist of the past half century."  In other words, Mr. French is not someone who blurs the hard edges of those he writes about.  

So let's see what he has to say about the attacks. 

AS an open, diverse and at times chaotic democracy, India has long been a target for terrorism. From the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in 1948 to the recent attacks in Mumbai, it has faced attempts to change its national character by force. None has yet succeeded. Despite its manifest social failings, India remains the developing world’s most successful experiment in free, plural, large-scale political collaboration.

Mr. French continues:

When these well-planned attacks unfolded, it was clear to anyone with experience of India that they were not homegrown, and almost certainly originated from Pakistan. Yet the reaction of the world’s news media was to rely on the outmoded idea of Pakistan-India hyphenation — as if a thriving and prosperous democracy of over a billion people must be compared only to an imploded state that is having to be bailed out by the I.M.F. Was Pakistan to blame, asked many pundits, or was India at fault because of its treatment of minority groups?

The terrorists themselves offered little explanation, and made no clear demands. Yet even as the siege continued, commentators were making chilling deductions on their behalf: their actions were because of American foreign policy, or Afghanistan, or the harassment of Indian Muslims. Personal moral responsibility was removed from the players in the atrocity. When officials said that the killers came from the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, it was taken as proof that India’s misdeeds in the Kashmir Valley were the cause.

These misdeeds are real, as are India’s other social and political failings (I recently met a Kashmiri man whose father and sister had died at the hands of the Indian security forces). But there is no sane reason to think Lashkar-e-Taiba would shut down if the situation in Kashmir improved. Its literature is much concerned with establishing a caliphate in Central Asia, and murdering those who insult the Prophet. Its leader, Hafiz Saeed, who lives on a large estate outside Lahore bought with Saudi Money, goes about his business with minimal interference from the Pakistani government.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is part of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (the Qaeda franchise). Mr. Saeed’s hatreds are catholic — his bugbears include Hindus, Shiites and women who wear bikinis. He regards democracy as “a Jewish and Christian import from Europe,” and considers suicide attacks to be in accordance with Islam. He has a wider strategy: “At this time our contest is Kashmir. Let’s see when the time comes. Our struggle with the Jews is always there.” As he told his followers in Karachi at a rally in 2000: “There can’t be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them — cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy.” In short, he has an explicit political desire to create a state of war between the religious communities in India and beyond, and bring on the endgame.

Like other exponents of Islamist extremism, he has a view of the world that does not tolerate doubt or ambiguity: his opponents are guilty, and must be killed. I have met other radicals like Mr. Saeed, men who live in a dimension of absolute certainty and have contempt for the moral relativism of those who seek to excuse them. To achieve their ends, it is necessary to indoctrinate boys in the hatred of Hindus, Americans and Jews, and dispatch them on suicide missions. It is unlikely that any of the militants who were sent from Karachi to Mumbai — young men from poor rural backgrounds whose families were paid for their sacrifice — had ever met a Jew before they tortured and killed Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who was several months pregnant, at the Mumbai Jewish center.

What to do?  Here's what Mr. French would do:

The prime solution to the present crisis is to force the closing of terrorist training outfits in Pakistan, and apply the law to those who organize and finance operations like the Mumbai massacres. Hafiz Saeed and other suspects should be sent to India to stand trial. The remark by Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari (a man whose history of shady business dealing makes him demonstrably unfit for high, or even low, office), that he did not think the terrorists came from Pakistan would be funny if it were not tragic.

The United States gives around $1 billion a year in military aid to Islamabad; that is leverage. It does the people of Pakistan no favors for Washington to allow their leaders to continue with the strategy of perpetual diversion, asking India to be patient while denying the true nature of the immediate terrorist threat. I received this e-mail message recently from a friend in Karachi: “Nowhere can get more depressing than Pakistan these days — barring some African failed states and Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile in Pakistan there is widespread denial...but in the most unexpected places, a different reaction

The New York Times reports:

From Taliban commanders in the northwest to liberal businessmen in Islamabad, the capital, Pakistanis have this week been rallying around the flag. . .

"We may have a dispute with the Pakistan government, but we would set aside our differences if our homeland was threatened by outside powers," said Maulvi Nazir, head of a powerfulPakistani Taliban splinter group in the tribal area of South Waziristan. "We would raise a force of 15,000 tribal Taliban to fight on the side of Pakistan's armed forces. We would infiltrate 500 suicide bombers into India to cause havoc there."

That promise of assistance has not gone unnoticed in Islamabad.

In a briefing with reporters after the Mumbai attacks, several top officials of Pakistan'sInter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, said they welcomed the offers of support from Nazir and Taliban leaders such as Baitullah Mehsud.

Only a year ago, Mehsud, who reportedly commands thousands of foot soldiers in his native South Waziristan, was Pakistan's most wanted man. Days after the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Mehsud's name surfaced as the possible perpetrator of the Dec. 27 bomb attack that killed her.

The story does not end here (fortunately). As the Times went on to report, there's a story behind this story. Quoting one Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist based out of Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province and the administrative center of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan - a.k.a. Taliban country - the Times continued:

"Right now, these are only statements. They are offering support, but they are also saying that in return for their support the military must stop its operations in the tribal areas, in Swat and other places," Yusufzai said. "They are trying to seize the moment and say, 'Look we're not anti-state, not anti-Pakistan.' But the government has to be careful. It should not respond by pulling out troops."

Many ordinary people in northwestern cities such as Peshawar are wary of expressions of national unity and more inclined to empathize with India's position, Yusufzai said. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and wounded in insurgent attacks this year, and the mounting violence has sensitized the population to the government's failure to rein in terrorists within Pakistan.

"There is a feeling that these jihadi groups need to be cut down to size," Yusufzai said. "People here have seen up close the results of their activities, so they are probably more inclined to believe some of the Indian accusations."

Delhi vigil: Mumbai attacks

Courtesy of the New York Times

Honoring the Mumbai victims in Lucknow

Reuters via the New York Times